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Comment by p00ki3 | Hacker News Reader

Marriage/long term coupling is not "natural" but normal in society

With the decline in religious attendance has come a decline in marriage; from 70%+ to 50%ish over the last couple generations

But divorce rate has declined so those that do marry seem to really want it; in the before times though it was how women survived

Coupling fits with biological imperative to have partners but longterm/for life is obviously not necessary since divorce is common too, partners die, etc

That and recent research shows long term married couples are 50% more likely to develop dementia; an imbalance in effort develops where one becomes codependent and forgets how to live and the partner in charge loses grip of themselves and taking care of their partner consumes them.

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It is natural and normal

Being married reduces dementia risk. e.g. [0]

Being primary caregiver to a spouse who has dementia does substantially increase the caregiver's risk of cognitive decline due to caregiver burnout. [1]

I'm not sure if this is what you were trying to express.

[0] https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/89/3/231

[1] https://www.ovid.com/jnls/neurotodayonline/fulltext/10.1097/...

Dude I got my banjo too...

18 year study found unmarried more likely to not have dementia:

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz...

If you read that paper, they posit that a likely "cause" is that unmarried people tend to have cognitive impairments diagnosed later relative to when someone (i.e. a spouse) is living with them.

But unmarried are less likely to have Alzheimer's or Lewy Body Dementia; specifically like I wrote initially

So either way, like how if ya live long enough some kind of cancer would get ya, so will mental illness

No beating physics

Not less likely to _have_. Less likely to be _diagnosed_. It is unsurprisingly difficult to be diagnosed with progressive cognitive decline in most places regardless of source even if you have been referred once for MCI.

I think the easier way of looking at it is this: there is a Lancet commission that produces robust characterizations of the modifiable risk factors that lead to dementia. If you're in a marriage that promotes reducing those risk factors, you'll likely have a lower risk of dementia. Isolating one variate like this raises interesting questions, but isn't a "smoking gun'-- especially in this case since the authors themselves indicate this is a surprising result given other studies.

https://www.thelancet.com/infographics-do/dementia-risk

I think the easiest way is like I wrote "No beating physics."

Seems just as reasonable but less verbose; we appear to get cancer and mental illness with old age regardless of social conditions around us. Physics and entropy win again regardless of the care we put into our semantics.

Regardless my original point was about "long term".

"Marriage staves of mental health" and "a single, long term marriage improves mental health outcomes" are two different things.

Could just be a tight knit quasi-nuclear family social circle is sufficient too but social desirability biases lead is to lean into marriage tradition.

> long term coupling is not "natural"

Source: dude trust me

Tell that to all the animals that exhibit long-term, often life-long coupling.

Look at all the animals and humans that don't

Lots of animals engages in non consensual rape; humans need to get on a level?

We should kill on sight like a lot of animals do to each other; it's natural to behave like an animal.

Don't anthropomorphize ducks.

Codependency to survive altogether is different than "2 people stuck together by social pressure even if its not working for them" which happens a lot; marriage often becomes unnatural abuse.

Unlike ferrets we engineered around raw need to hunt rabbits; we have grocery stores to serve the codependency.

It came from the past so it's natural is a terrible argument. Just a "dude trust me; its how grandpa did it"

I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make. I am saying ”X is [not] natural“ is not a good argument either way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

Reading back my own comment above, I did a poor job of getting that point across. It reads rather snarky.

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