50 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 6 Apr \ on: Rant: Young People are Getting Terrible Advice and it's Destroying Our Culture culture
Wasn't expecting this one:
I don't have anything really useful to say, but here's a perspective. In my small-ish town, a ton of people made decisions on where to go to college based on being in a couple. Sometimes this was a pretty big sacrifice, where the individual choices would have been different from the group choices. But they did it in service of the relationship.
To my knowledge, none of those couples endured. And my own perspective then, which has strengthened substantially in the intervening years, is that this was a dumb choice for them. When faced with a wider array of opportunities, people tend to grow in very different directions from their high-school selves, and imo this should be encouraged. It would be hard to overstate what a dipshit I was in highschool. I'm glad I was able to become someone else, relatively unencumbered. Although opinions vary whether I have transcended dipshit-ness.
Anyway, my point is that a cultural expectation that your high-school romantic relationship will not be a permanent one, overwhelmingly resembles the actual state of modern (e.g., post 1950s) reality, and an expectation that accords with reality is a useful one. If someone has found an epic love that ought to endure for all time, then fighting through the thin normative veneer around this issue shouldn't be too difficult.
I don't think people should expect that their earliest relationships will endure either, but I think people should treat whatever relationship they're in as though it might. Yes, kids should absolutely receive the information that most HS relationships will not survive college. If they choose to break up, that gets to a point @cryotosensei made about those couples not really being in love.
If I had written this as more of a thesis than a rant, I would have emphasized that we're systematically devaluing the most valuable parts of life and our culture is struggling in exactly these places.
The messaging that I really don't like is of the form "You should break up before going to college so that you're free to experiment." I would prefer if people tried to make it work, even if ex post that looks like a mistake. It's a better habit for life, imo, to see if you can persevere through temporary hard times.
Of course, every case is special, so this isn't one-size-fits-all. It's more like, if we're going to have our thumbs on the scales, it seems like they're currently on the wrong side.
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Yes. Because the messaging should be, “Most high school couples break up, but you know what? here are the things you can do to survive a LDR,”
I should know. I not only survived a LDR, but also went through a long-distance marriage. Seriously, being married n having freedom at the same time? Win-win!
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I'm a fellow LDR survivor, but not LDM. I've had a few friends and colleagues whose wives were still in Asia while they were in grad school or starting their careers. I have a ton of respect for anyone who pulled that off.
I should have mentioned in my first response that I discouraged my (now) wife from transferring to my college. It didn't have the same opportunities for her to follow her interests. It's still a minor point of contention between us and I'm not sure if I was on the right side of it.
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