>>12854688Part of me thinks you're probably right, but I'm not in a culture where I can easily pick up knowledge on appropriate relationship balancing. I don't think reading RoK message boards is gonna do it. I'm glad that you come from an unbroken line of good family values. But for me, hearing that someone else can do it isn't enough. My youthful optimism that thinks, "I'm different/better, I can do it where everyone I see fails" is now gone.
Another part of me hears what you're saying and doesn't find it particularly attractive anyway. Great, I can manage an emotional child and keep things stable. At best I get a lifelong semi-dependent roommate creature out of that. It worked for our ancestors, but is it really that great?
I sort of think that the root of the problem is biological. We evolved to have deliriously great attraction in the early phases of a relationship. Ideally, both parties care about each other so much that they're both attempting to actually make the other happy, and therefore neither party has to do especially much to mold the other. But this rapidly fades, because evolution was just trying to get us to make some babies and kinda sorta stick around long enough to keep them fed. We were just hunter gatherers while most of our genetics were getting sorted out.
Maybe one day we can discover some kind of oxytocin based therapy that maintains the good times. They've already discovered a gene which is associated with increased divorce rates in women. Maybe we can improve what biology just left as "good enough".
