Let me first state, that this is quite inspiring!
Your application to probability is fascinating, and the vows in themselves are inspiring.
I will also like to share that I think about marriage quite a lot, due to my want to have a big family and a healthy family structure - but I cannot help but constantly return to this one statistical fact:
70% of the couples that marry these days (meaning, Millenials and Generation X) are subject to get a divorce within a decade. Moreover, if the couple are in their twenties, the time for the divorce is then reduced to 5 years instead of 10.
*I wanted to inquire, without judgement, how do you reconcile with this fact?
I find myself often talking to potential partners and other men whom are married, and most of the time, if they are 3 years in the marriage they report having struggles like any other couple yet I believe 3 years is just not long enough to reach any conclusion.
*(The art of love is indeed a subtle subject during the technological era, where our primal needs are stimulated constantly from the use of technologies. And I firmly believe that restricting all such technological stimuli can be beneficial to any relationship. Previous generations did not have WhatsApp, and so they missed each other truly. They did not have Instagram, and so they did not lust after things they do not have nor did they constantly focused on what is 'missing' in their life. They did not have facebook or Linkedin, and so they did not spend the time running the rat-race, chasing passions to prove to others a point.)
(Obviously, I generalize here, please bare with me.)
Let me first state, that this is quite inspiring!
Thank you!
70% of the couples that marry these days (meaning, Millenials and Generation X) are subject to get a divorce within a decade...
I wanted to inquire, without judgement, how do you reconcile with this fact?
I am divorced myself, and my previous marriage lasted about a decade. Still, I don't know if there's much to reconcile. Obviously there is always risk that the marriage will fail. Equally obviously, staying without a primary lover forever is a worse alternative (for me).
Previous generati... (read more)
I'm getting married. We decided to take marriage vows very seriously, and write vows that we will be fully committed to uphold. These vows are going to be a commitment no weaker than any promise I ever made or any contract I ever signed. Therefore, it is very important to avoid serious errors in their content.
I'm interested to hear feedback of the form "making these vows might turn out to be a big mistake for you, and here is why"[1] or of the form "here is how the spirit of these vows can be implemented better". Given that this is a community which nurtures security mindset, I have great expectations :) More precisely, I am less interested in extreme nitpicking / rule-lawyering, since that should be neutralized by the Vow of Good Faith anyway (but tell me if you think I'm wrong about this!) and more in serious problems that can arise in at least semi-realistic situations. (Of course, since many of us here expect a Singularity in a few decades, semi-realistic is not a very high bar ;)
Without further ado, the vows:
[EDIT 2022-07-15: The following text has been edited to match the final version of the Vows (that we took on 2021-08-29)]
Conditional on the assumption that my decision to marry is about as well-grounded as one can expect. I am not soliciting criticism of my choice of spouse! ↩︎
Meaning that it's a grave or persistent violation rather than a minor lapse. ↩︎
Consent is mentioned to allow us to e.g. play tabletop games where you're supposed to deceive each other. ↩︎
That is, information X such that if the spouse knew X, they would believe it's good that they found out about it. This excludes information which is not important (knowing X is practically useless) and infohazards (knowing X is actively harmful). ↩︎
If I enter an agreement with a third party in violation of the Vow of Concord, the Vow of Honesty takes precedence over the agreement and I might have to violate the latter and pay whatever fine is necessary. ↩︎
We are taking an "updateless" perspective here. The disagreement point is fixed in the counterfactual in which we didn't marry in the first place, it does not move to the counterfactual of divorce. Notice also that marriage is guaranteed to be an a priori Pareto improvement over no-marriage because this is our current estimate, even if it turns out to be false a posteriori. ↩︎
If the violation shifts the Pareto frontier such that the previous optimum is outside of it, the new Pareto optimum is chosen s.t. the violating party bears the cost. ↩︎
This makes all of the Vows weightier than they otherwise would be. The Vows can be unmade by dissolving the marriage, but the act of dissolving the marriage is in itself subject to the Vow of Concord, which limits the ability to dissolve it unilaterally. ↩︎
In other words, interpretation is according to the extrapolated volition of us at the time of our wedding, where the extrapolation is towards our knowledge and intellectual ability at the time of making the judgment. ↩︎