The percentage of genuinely loving marriages is astonishingly low

toasterchild · 2025-11-11T11:56:09+00:00

Sharing you life with other people is hard and often takes a lot of work from both people to make it work well. Most people stuck at putting much effort into anything and it shows all over their lives.

Pretty much everyone I know in marriages and long relationships have genuine love and happiness, the fakers are the exception in my circles. I don't tend to hang out with overly religious people though, they seem to be much more accepting of bullshit behavior and unhappiness. Where I'm from people leave bad relationships and that seems to work better for most.

Only_Excitement6594 · 2025-11-11T12:35:05+00:00

No wonder. People mostly engage due to urges, peek pressure and fear of missing out. Miserable souls driven by the lowest impulses bring miserable relationships

EdFitz1975 · 2025-11-11T11:31:44+00:00

Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Gravel_Roads · 2025-11-11T11:48:56+00:00

Your argument is “I have no data to support it, but I assume most long-term couples don’t love each other!”

I could give you my own data:

I’ve known my partner for almost 30 years; I fall more in love every day. I feel like we’re still learning new things about each other.

My best friend of over 25 years has been with her partner for over 20 years and they are a bonded pair, go everywhere together.

One of my coworkers has married her husband 3 times now because she just enjoys having ceremonies where they give themselves to each other.

Posts like these show very clearly that the people who write them don’t know how relationships work.

When you spend every waking day living with someone, it’s excruciating if you don’t like them. Every noise and action they make gets on your nerves.

People don’t stay together if there’s nothing to like about each other.

Those are the couples that break up and divorce

Salty-Brilliant-830 · 2025-11-11T11:37:36+00:00

i only saw one happy marriage, they live together on a boat. married for 38 years. the husband is very soft and sensitive, and the wife adores him and respects him always

Excellent_Badger123 · 2025-11-11T12:40:55+00:00

My anecdotal but 3x married & divorced therefore well informed opinion: You can genuinely love someone and have a successful marriage for many years but it changes as the couple changes and growth takes place. Sometimes it gets too far out of whack to fix. So you try and try and eventually part. Or stay together for convenience.

Either way if you have 10 good years before it all goes to hell, I don’t consider that a failure. I had that a couple of times in life & I’m grateful for that time. Nobody cheated. Our divorces weren’t contentious and I’m still on good terms with both of them

SwimmingTheme3736 · 2025-11-11T11:51:11+00:00

I’m sorry you don’t know many happy couples. I know a lot.

Jonesdm5 · 2025-11-11T13:13:38+00:00

No data to back it up. Just “vibes”. I love this sub.

Business_Barber_3611 · 2025-11-11T16:04:57+00:00

I don't have any hard data

You've lost all validity saying this 😂

Outside_Memory5703 · 2025-11-11T13:31:13+00:00

“The percent of genuinely loving marriages is astonishingly low”

“I don’t have any hard data”

Pick one

Dayv1d · 2025-11-11T14:53:32+00:00

I am in one but its work every single day. You have to become a better person out of love and have some hard limits (never cheat, never hit etc). Especially you need to communicate as good as you can and are ready to do more then your fair share countless times again and again... out of love.

Sweet_Discount4485 · 2025-11-11T15:56:44+00:00

The percentage of people who accept what realistic human love actually looks like is astonishingly low.

Mission-Jicama-8747 · 2025-11-11T16:06:53+00:00

Why do you think love should be the driving force of marriage?

Marriage is about accomplishing shared life goals and a commitment on the part of both parties towards this. As soon as it moved away from duty it was bound to collapse.

i-like-words · 2025-11-11T12:04:01+00:00

I know plenty of long term happy monogamous couples. Including my parents. I think they also tend to attract each other. So if you know 1 of them, you’re likely to find another nearby.

Yes they still have sex and I hate that I know that.

There’s definitely a lot of common patterns between these couples and I try to emulate these in my own relationship. My partner has thankfully been on the exact same page from day 1.

The_WankingBuddha · 2025-11-11T13:01:11+00:00

Love and marriage never go together in my understanding.

Love is a fleeting experience. Very real, but still non permanent.

Marriage is an ARRANGEMENT invented by society to create permanent family units to make stable environments to raise children in.

It's dumb to expect your partner to love you forever. And it's dumber to marry with this expectation. Genuine love is rare to come by and I think most of the humanity never actually experiences it. They experience infatuation, attraction, attachment, familiarity etc. But love? Idts.

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ChicagoFaucet · 2025-11-11T16:03:10+00:00

I have to disagree. I don't think this is true when you zoom out, and on the average. The examples here are all located within the higher education and higher career sphere. There are multiple examples of people like in your example who have a bit of a complex. If you ever read Freakonomics, there are a couple examples of this, including a guy who sold bagels on the honor system, and found that most of the bagels that were taken but not paid for were from the more "successful" people.

Meanwhile, I work a gray-collar job in a blue-collar field, and I think that is called "pink-collar" or "yellow-collar"? I forget. Anyway. I am divorced twice, had several girlfriends over the years, and I never cheated. I'm scanning through the men in my life, relatives and friends, and none of them cheated, except for two, that I know of. If they cheated, I think I would know. That kind of gossip doesn't stay hidden forever.

That's on the men's side here. On the women's side, these are examples of women who are shallow, vain, and needed to marry a Finance Bro, or keep up appearances by marrying some dashing young man with excellent prospects. This is the end result.

I question marriage as a whole now, and wonder why women push for it so heavily - if they are the main ones who ultimately file for divorce most often. No, it's not because of their husbands. Marriages between gay men have a 25 percent divorce rate. Marriages between heteros have a 50 percent divorce rate. Marriages between lesbians have a 75 percent divorce rate. So, you can't really blame that on the men.

In reality, the early 20s are usually a shock for young people to get used to. Instead of family, classes, and friends. You have work, bills, and loneliness now. It's common to reach out and hold onto whatever is there, if only for safety. Once that need for safety dissipates, so does the main reason for that couple to remain married and faithful.

Tylikcat · 2025-11-11T19:24:04+00:00

I don't know if anyone in my social circles is married but not in a loving relationship? I mean, sure, it has happened - and they got divorced.

The bit about menopause seems particularly weird to me - I'm in my fifties, and while not yet menopausal, the trend in my social circle is to be less interested in dating at all. And certainly less interested in living with one's male partners.

Whiskeymyers75 · 2025-11-12T02:28:04+00:00

Anecdotes are fun. This sounds more like a cope.

habbo311 · 2025-11-12T04:02:48+00:00

We live in a culture that values individuality and self expression above all else. Compromise and sacrifice are seen as losing the self but that's what real love is. Selflessness. It's no surprise that selfish people fail at it, miserably

Intelligent-Insight · 2025-11-13T19:58:17+00:00

You are immediately wrong. Your entire post is based on an assumption that a man can't want to sleep with other women if he loves his wife. That is false.

Ragazzocolbass8 · 2025-11-11T11:31:28+00:00

Because modern marriage is a business decision.

chobolicious88 · 2025-11-11T11:56:21+00:00

I dont get the problem with convenience.

Doing serial monogamy over and over again just to get temporary chemical highs that last up to 2 years doesnt seem like the way to go? Its just instability

No-Rough-7390 · 2025-11-11T13:04:55+00:00

The major issue I’ve found with marriages is that it becomes clear it’s a decision based on necessity rather than actual desire.

50/50 is all well and good but marrying someone who is the same as you is a pretty negligible decision. Desire is based on polarity and that rarely happens if either person is scoreboard keeping. No quicker way to kill a relationship than that.

But, what have found with younger marriages happening is that women are getting with guys who are not their “type” at all right around the time FOMO is setting in (lates 20s, early 30s), fast track marriage and kids, and then boom they break up. Mind you, these are the most reliable, safe, and “involved father” types you’ll find. It seems clear that women are choosing to marry men they aren’t all that keen on fucking, but when it’s new and fresh they can deal with it whether it’s subconscious or due to hormonal birth control. Then they have the kids and it’s post nut clarity for her. No matter how great the dude is, she can’t be with a guy who wants to be intimate who she no longer has interest in. There’s your dead bedroom dynamic right there.

And unfortunately OP, the number 4 you described is sad because a lot of women would rather endure the ups and downs than be bored. Doesn’t make it right, but sometimes human nature is ugly.

Charming_Coffee_2166 · 2025-11-11T12:00:29+00:00

Humans are not monogamous. We are serial monogamous. Love? Lasts only a couple of years. It’s time to accept it and move on

Swordfromthecement · 2025-11-11T12:48:18+00:00

Sounds like we should make divorce easier then 🙂

People probably go into marriage seeking some sort of fulfillment that can only come internally, once that starts to wear off it goes to hell. OP I believe something similar, marriage is primarily a vehicle for raising children, social status, and economic advancement alongside simplifying legal arrangements and inheritances.

You’re supposed to go into because it makes things easier for the person you love, not cause you got pressured into it, you want a big wedding, you’re the last person in your friend group to get married, you’re getting old, they’ll stop fucking you if you don’t do it, etc.

James_M_Croft · 2025-11-11T15:36:27+00:00

You are correct in that it is less than 10% but I like to think it is a cultural issue we have in the urban environments in the west, its not something natural for marriages really. And the happy marriages are way more common overall, just not in this specific environment alone.

You can see that many of the happy marriages are between foreigners or come from a more conservative culture, if anything it's the other way around, they start marriage by convenience or religion or whatever drives them to marry not particularly loving each other, but eventually, through a lot of experience, they grow to love each other dearly and deeply as family and work together to create a loving family. Making at least 50% of the total in those minority populations.

It shows that the issue is the culture, not really the marriage on itself.The current "modern" culture is having an uncooperative/ungrateful woman and an unambitious/lazy man, where both refuse to sacrifice anything for their family and want everything handed to them. No wonder these families go nowhere.

mumblebumblegrumble · 2025-11-11T16:04:14+00:00

This is why when people on this sub say women can get a relationship so easily I laugh my ass off. Usually when you can get something easily, it ain't worth much. These are the easily gotten relationships women are supposed to be happy to get.

reddit_is_geh · 2025-11-11T16:38:31+00:00

Kind of a side note, but I personally know many older men who cheat on their wives with escorts. It's incredibly common. They LOVE their wife, but still have that primal sexual drive to fuck hot young women, and feel like that sexual nature is non-existent for obvious reasons, with their now old wife, so they cheat literally just for the sex.

ViolentShallot · 2025-11-11T12:18:34+00:00

I'll take your number. Ten percent.

Now, marrying has no requirements. You don't need to take a class. You don't need to pass an exam. You don't need to be mature or wise.

You don't even need to be particularly committed to learning or developing or wising up.

Out of a hundred couples, you say only ten are loving and stable and happy.

But how many of them have a psicoemotional development that's sufficient? Let's be kind and say half.

Out of those, how many reach the necessary conclusion that love -and desire, by the way- is work? That the initial hormonal cocktail that constitutes the honeymoon period is meant to give a couple time to buy a foundation? Let's say those that notice and are willing to put that effort are 60% of those aware. 30% of total.

Now, of that 30%, what percentage has got to the point of being able to properly communicate despite their demons and egos, in a productive way?

Again very optimistically, half. For a total of 15%

Out of every hundred, 15 fit those requirements, and ten have a happy marriage.

The prospects stop being unrealistic and go to a fairly good 2/3rds.

And the thing is... none of what I described is innate. You can learn it. You can work on it, and you can actively limit your energies to those that also do.

If I was to make an analogy to your post, you could say that borrowing money and not being fucking screwed is unrealistic because only 10% of those who ask for a loan come out unscathed.

Mostly because people are financially inept and don't even fucking read the contract they are signing.

jay10033 · 2025-11-11T12:19:40+00:00

Define love first so we can understand what you're claiming is low.

Title	The percentage of genuinely loving marriages is astonishingly low
Author	Novel-Tip-7570
Upvotes	54
Comments	98
Date	November 11, 2025 11:27 AM UTC (8 months ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/1ou71dx/the_percentage_of_genuinely_loving_marriages_is/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/the-percentage-of-genuinely-loving-marriages-is.1566264 https://theredarchive.com/post/1566264

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