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Track record: My own cynical take seems to be doing better with regards to not triggering people (though it's admittedly less visible).
Any suggestions for how I can better ask the question to get useful answers without apparently triggering so many people so much?
First off, I'm kind of confused about how you didn't see this coming. There seems to be a major "missing mood" going on in your posts on the topic – and I speak as someone who is sorta-aromantic, considers the upsides of any potential romantic relationship to have a fairly low upper bound for himself[1], and is very much willing to entertain the idea that a typical romantic relationship is a net-negative dumpster fire.
So, obvious-to-me advice: Keep a mental model of what topics are likely very sensitive and liable to trigger people, and put in tons of caveats and "yes, I know, this is very cynical, but it's my current understanding" and "I could totally be fundamentally mistaken here".
In particular, a generalization of an advice from here has been living in my head rent-free for years (edited/adapted):
Tips For Talking About Your Beliefs On Sensitive Topics
You want to make it clear that they're just your current beliefs about the objective reality, and you don't necessarily like that reality so they're not statements about how the world ought to be, and also they're not necessarily objectively correct and certainly aren't all-encompassing so you're not condemning people who have different beliefs or experiences. If you just say, "I don't understand why people do X," everyone will hear you as saying that everyone who does X is an untermensch who should be gutted and speared
because in high-simulacrum-level environments disagreeing with people is viewed as a hostile act attempting to lower competing coalitions' status, and failing to furiously oppose such acts will get you depowered and killed. So be sure to be extra careful by saying something like, "It is my current belief, and I mean with respect to my own beliefs about the objective reality, that a typical romantic relationship seems flawed in lots of ways, but I stress, and this is very important, that if you feel or believe differently, then that too is a valid and potentially more accurate set of beliefs, and we don't have to OH GOD NOT THE SPEARS ARRRGHHHH!"
More concretely, here's how I would have phrased your initial post:
Rewrite
Here's a place where my model of the typical traditional romantic relationships seems to be missing something. I'd be interested to hear people's takes on what it might be.
Disclaimer: I'm trying to understand the general/stereotypical case here, i. e., what often ends up happening in practice. I'm not claiming that this is how relationships ought to be like, nor that all existing relationships are like this. But on my model, most people are deeply flawed, they tend to form deeply flawed relationships, and I'd like to understand why these relationships still work out. Bottom line is, this is going to be a fairly cynical/pessimistic take (with the validity of its cynicism being something I'm willing to question).
Background claims:
- My model of the stereotypical/traditional long-term monogamous hetero relationship has a lot of downsides for men. For example:
- Financial costs: Up to 50% higher living costs (since in the "traditional" template, men are the breadwinners.)
- Frequent, likely highly stressful, arguments. See Aella's relationship survey data: a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more.
- General need to manage/account for the partner's emotional issues. (My current model of the "traditional" relationship assumes the anxious attachment style for the woman, which would be unpleasant to manage.)
- For hetero men, consistent sexual satisfaction is a major upside offered by a relationship, providing a large fraction of the relationship-value.
- A majority of traditional relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so. Evidence: Aella's data here and here are the most legible sources I have on hand; they tell a pretty clear story where sexual satisfaction is basically binary, and a bit more than half of men are unsatisfied in relationships of 10 years (and it keeps getting worse from there). This also fits with my general models of dating: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don't find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
Taking on purely utilitarian lens, for a relationship to persist, the benefits offered by it should outweigh its costs. However, on my current model, that shouldn't be the case for the average man. I expect the stated downsides to be quite costly, and if we remove consistent sex from the equation, the remaining value (again, for a stereotypical man) seems comparatively small.
So: Why do these relationships persist? Obviously the men might not have better relationship prospects, but they could just not have any relationship. The central question which my models don't have a compelling answer to is: what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?
Some obvious candidate answers:
- The cultural stereotypes diverge from reality in some key ways, so my model is fundamentally mistaken. E. g.:
- I'm overestimating the downsides: the arguments aren't that frequent/aren't very stressful, female partners aren't actually "high-maintanance", etc.
- I'm overestimating the value of sex for a typical man.
- I'm underestimating how much other value relationships offers men. If so: what is that "other value", concretely? (Note that it'd need to add up to quite a lot to outweigh the emotional and financial costs, under my current model.)
- Kids. This one makes sense for those raising kids, but what about everyone else? Especially as fertility goes down.
- The wide tail. There's plenty of cases which make sense which are individually unusual - e.g. my own parents are business partners. Maybe in aggregate all these unusual cases account for the bulk.
- Loneliness. Maybe most of these guys have no one else close in their life. In this case, they'd plausibly be better off if they took the effort they invested in their romantic life and redirected to friendships (probably mostly with other guys), but there's a lot of activation energy blocking that change.
- Wanting a dependent. Lots of men are pretty insecure, and having a dependent to provide for makes them feel better about themselves. This also flips the previous objection: high maintenance can be a plus if it makes a guy feel wanted/useful/valuable.
- Social pressure/commitment/etc making the man stick around even though the relationship is not net positive for him.
- The couple are de-facto close mostly-platonic friends, and the man wants to keep that friendship.
I'm interested in both actual data and anecdata. What am I missing here? What available evidence points strongly to some of these over others?
Obvious way to A/B test this would be to find some group of rationalist-y people who aren't reading LW/your shortform, post my version there, and see the reactions. Not sure what that place would be. (EA forum? r/rational's Friday Open Threads? r/slatestarcodex? Some Discord/Substack group?)
Adapting it for non-rationalist-y audiences (e. g., r/AskMen) would require more rewriting. Mainly, coating the utilitarian language in more, ahem, normie terms.
- ^
Given the choice between the best possible romantic relationship and $1m, I'd pick $1m.
Absent munchkinry like "my ideal girlfriend is a genius alignment researcher on the level of von Neumann and Einstein".
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