Even a religion without any "supernatural" or "unseen" value would still very likely have these effects.

This is absurd. It's constructed of a series of suppositions, only a few of which I'll address.

First is that people are static. This simply isn't true. We all know that we all change - not just in age, wisdom, and so on, but in tastes, politics, religious dedication, and the lines we draw between wrong and right, just to name a few.

In just these ways, people can grow apart. The distance between these changes can, in fact, cause "irreconcilable differences."

Sometimes these changes are brought about by dramatic stress events, from the death of a child to major swings in financial stability. The way in which these events change the unwilling participants can again lead to incompatibility where once there was compatibility.

But worst is the idea that if people just "work on it" they can overcome anything. Sometimes overcoming growing apart - be it over time or rather quickly - is best done by removing yourself from a situation that is no longer positive, and has little ability to become positive again.

This is where I find religion quite often inserts itself negatively. While I agree with a poster above that regular attendance at religious gatherings does often help a couple share a support network, share common beliefs and similar circles of friends, etc., religion often tells you only divorce or failed marriage is an abomination, and a personal failure requiring lifetime penance. It then follows by labeling that person as an outcast, no longer worthy of the community they had once belonged to.

These are just a few reasons (not to mention physical/substance abuse, and so on) that marriages can fail without it being personal failure. Your assertion does nothing but pile on further stigma to those who have gone through divorce. No one wants their marriage to fail, but when it does, it isn't always personal failure that requires additional shaming from outsiders.

I don't know of anyone who believes people are static. You even say yourself in the next sentence "We all know that we all change". No one (at least that I'm aware of) goes into marriage expecting the person they marry to stay the same over time. Another HN poster (can't remember who) put it beautifully once: marriage is an agreement to learn to love the person that each of you become over time.

A marriage is a promise, a vow, to commit to this. Now, I could certainly see a situation where two people tell each other at the altar "I promise to love and support you always, well... unless we change too much". However, both people should be aware of these terms! You can't make an agreement that you will always, unconditionally support the other person, and then back out of it later because you changed your mind. If both people are in agreement that they might change and get divorced later before the marriage begins, then fine with me. It's not that different than dating with some legal benefits. But if one person thinks they're going into something permanent, and the other person has doubts about it, then that is really not fair to the first person, and I would argue it's essentially evil to be that dishonest to someone.

> further stigma to those who have gone through divorce

There is a stigma, but it's not on divorce; it's on someone who goes back on their word. What are my terms for divorce? If there is abuse or cheating. Those are my only conditions. And before I marry anyone, I will make it very clear that these are the only conditions in which I will abandon them, and if they don't like those terms they can marry someone else. The stigma associated with the vast majority of divorces is that one (or two) people were unable to keep a promise. I don't want to be associated with these kinds of people. My life is simpler and happier if I associate with people who will keep their word at any cost. Maybe your experience is different.

The supposition that it is always possible to learn to love the other person is as ridiculous as the supposition that people are static.

> If both people are in agreement that they might change and get divorced later before the marriage begins, then fine with me.

Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail. How does making these details explicit as opposed to implicit help anyone?

> There is a stigma, but it's not on divorce; it's on someone who goes back on their word.

I would wager that very few people are as hot-to-trot as you are on the notion of honor in contract literalism.

> My life is simpler, more enjoyable, and happier if I associate with people who will keep their word at any cost. Maybe your experience is different.

It is. Honesty is valuable, but by my way of reckoning there is little honesty in the practice of enshrining outdated guesses about the future. A promise made without implicit limits is a lie.

No it's not. What do you support that statement with?

> Everyone who gets married knows that the possibility of divorce exists and roughly what divorce proceedings entail.

> I would wager that very few people are as hot-to-trot as you are on the notion of honor in contract literalism

I've found that people's life experiences significantly shape their views on things. Friends of mine that come from family backgrounds with a lot of divorce have the same view that you do. I call it the "realist" view. The idea of a permanent happy relationship is viewed with pessimism, as an "unrealistic fairy tale", because they've either never seen such a thing or experienced it themselves.

On the other hand, I come from a family background with multiple, near-perfect half-century or longer marriages. Out of my entire extended family, only one person has been divorced. And I wonder -- the divorce rate is so much lower in my family (30 or so people) than the rest of society -- why is this? And I think it's the "hot-to-trot notion of contract literalism" that you so summarily dismiss.

There's something fascinating that I've begun to realize in the last few years, and it's that people assume everyone else is more similar to them (or people they grew up with) than is actually the case. Cheaters assume everyone else would secretly cheat, just like them, given a good enough opportunity or motive. Liars assume everyone else does the same. They find it hard to believe that people actually do exist that don't view the world through the same negative lens that they do, including people who will honor their word above all else. And there's more of them than you might think.

(Btw, I didn't downvote you. I wish people wouldn't use the downvote button to express differing opinions; that's what comments are for.)

I come from a family with a history of long, strong marriages. My parents are another success story. They have learned to tolerate each other, and we (my parents, my sister, myself) are all better for it.

What do I base my opinion on?

1. My parents fought on occasion. Screaming matches, passive aggression, shit-talking behind each others backs. It was rare and not nearly enough to threaten the marriage, but it gave me a point of comparison.

2. I had friends whose parents did this constantly. Rather than fighting 5% of the time, they fought 95% of the time. I saw some of it first hand.

3. I had friends whose parents were divorced. It wasn't ideal and it created more than a few miscommunications, but the kids got the attention they needed, they didn't complain about their parents trying to take their anger out on them, and things generally seemed to work out OK.

By "filling in the blanks" in my friend's description of #2 with my own experiences of parental fighting (#1), I believe #2 is a considerably worse state of affairs for all involved than #3.

> projection

Right back at you.

> cheaters, liars project

We are in complete agreement on this point :P

I think we would both agree that there is a "you get out what you put in" effect in marriage. More tolerance and more commitment from either partner greatly increase the strength of the marriage and are generally a good thing. My contentions are that there's a turning point where this stops being true and that contract verbiage is poor at determining this turning point and providing appropriate guidance.

In general, I think this is asymmetrical. People who have never had to deal with complexity in their lives, tend to assume that people can live by simple rules. Until they discover that the world doesn't work that way. Usually by getting their naive ass bitten.

They don't call them realists for no reason. (Yes, I know, spoken like a realist :-)). I don't place much value on the opinions of people who tell me how perfect they or their family is -- usually they avoid digging too far into the fascade because their self-worth is tied to how well they and their group (family) perform whatever role they are holding up as ideal.

On the contrary, I had absolutely no idea how difficult divorce proceedings were when I got married. Maybe I was just naive and living in a bubble, but it was a very real shock to me that, since our divorce was amiable, my wife and I couldn't just go in to the courthouse and tell them we didn't want to be married any more. Instead the legal system forces an adversarial process on you.

Maybe this was just because my religious ideals caused me to not even consider divorce as an option. But even then, it's a very real thing and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person to have been in that boat.

It IS a personal failure, but go ahead, rationalize all you want.

Not everyone views marriage as a contract or as something that cannot be broken ever. The legal status of marriage in a jurisdiction != how people feel about and treat marriage.

> Divorce means your word is worthless, and that your own wants are more important than your word.

Giving your word on something isn't a clause that requires you to give up your own wants and needs. For example, if you married someone and one day they become abusive, you are not obligated to stay and take said abuse.

> It IS a personal failure, but go ahead, rationalize all you want.

This attitude is so unhelpful and smacks of a superiority complex.

Not all marriages are presumed to be "for as long as you shall live". Though they don't usually have a set term, civil marriages (at least around here) are not that tied to Christian values anymore.

Uh, there are totally such things as a bad marriage. If, say, your spouse became abusive over time from the perspective of the abused spouse it most certainly a bad marriage.

Marriage isn't a one time negotiation and you are stuck with whatever happens after that. Relationships require constant work and growth over time. If two people find themselves in a place where that relationship isn't working for them and even is outright harmful to their well being, they have all rights to end that relationship.

Exactly. See, I never worry about myself being selfish, but my biggest fear is that I will get married to someone who just quits caring about me or who "gets bored" (I can't stand that phrase) and leaves me.

"People don't change" is kind of a funny phrase too - there's some truth in it, but I'm certainly not the same person I was when I married over twenty-seven years ago.

My wife has changed too - we're not young anymore and yet our love (and devotion) to each other is more multi-faceted because we love who we were together as well as who we are now together.

One piece of advice for the nerds out there ... don't stop doing the things you did when you were wooing him/her. It's easy to say "I've caught him/her" and figure that's the end of the project. Just like in software development, at least 80% of the work is maintenance after release/marriage.

And people fail, sometimes avoidably, sometimes not. We are rarely tested to our breaking point, and it's easy to be smug when we see others fail, thinking we could have succeeded where they did not. The tendency to believe that anyone who has failed is "making excuses" is understandable, but one of the great things about maker culture is the way it embraces failure: it recognizes that we all can stretch ourselves too far and that there are circumstances where no physically conceivable amount of effort could have created success.

Under such circumstances it's important to fail gracefully, not to deny the possibility of or responsibility for failure. I think this happens a lot in divorce: people blame their partner because they aren't willing to say, "I have failed", and that creates a huge amount of pain and divisiveness, and even worse, it makes lawyers rich.

Failure is always an option. We know this as makers, hackers and engineers. It isn't simply a matter of "trying harder". Some problems cannot be solved under the constraints we are given, and when that happens we have failed, as surely as a girder that has buckled under an excessive load. This conundrum is sometimes known as "the human condition": http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm

That being said, I've never met you and have no idea who you are, so don't take this too seriously, just some random advice

I think this is a pretty bold statement. Is it not possible that two people might just never be able to get along with each other, no matter how hard they try?

And I'm going to stand by it - I actually believe the statistics presented in the parent post and, would those two people (who "just might never be able to get along with each other") have discovered their incompatibility if they'd dated for more than a couple years?

Of course they would. But we were discussing arranged and religiously motivated marriages, where that opportunity might not be afforded. Is there still "no such thing as a bad marriage" even when you "marry strangers"?

In any case, I think that social pressure can be a pretty strong force and that it tends to counteract the sort of selfishness that leads to a "bad marriage". Of course bad marriages will statistically happen but I don't think you can claim the huge number of divorces we're seeing are all "bad marriages" - my premise is that many could be cured if both participants cared to work a bit.

How do we measure whether the amount of caring done was enough or not? Considering it varies based on personalities and other convincing capabilities of a partner, how do we know for sure apart from just getting information from the partners themselves who say that they tried a lot to make it work.

Its important to remember that there is lot of suffering involved when one of the partner keeps working due to societal pressure while the other continues to mistreat them. This is more prevalent in developing countries like India and China. There is only so much a person can try on their own(they cant stand shaming so dont share oppression with other family)

The other somewhat related topic is abuse victims. Even without societal pressure, they'll often convince themselves they deserve it and stay with their abuser.