Stay together for the kids!!!

[Cyc]

While I also disagree with the OPs premise, let's take it easy here. Psychoblast is a long-time contributor back from a long break.

This was clearly a navel-gazing exercise from someone trying to put into perspective a deeply personal issue, and perhaps unintentionally came off a bit preachy and sanctimonious.

I'm not saying stay together with whomever you are with no matter what. If you don't have kids with the other person, it's no big deal to split up and keep looking for the person you want to settle down with and EVOLVE INTO SOULMATES with. But once you have kids, you need to fucking resolve that that IS the person you are now PERMANENTLY COMMITTED to evolving into soul mates with, because it is that permanent committment, that core value to keep your family unit together, that paves the way for you to feel comfortable sharing your deepest shames and hidden secrets and values you otherwise fear might drive the other person away and wreck the relationship.

Telling someone who is in a miserable, soul-crushing relationship to resign themselves to lifelong companionship with someone they no longer love is not realistic. Sometimes a relationship is just over, kids or no kids. Does it mean that a couple should try harder to resolve their differences? Sure. Does it mean a couple should expect to make some sacrifices for the family? Absolutely.

But I'm not even going to require a relationship be abusive for parents to split up. Sometimes people just get themselves into an unhappy situation, and sometimes people don't realize how miserable they are until they wake up one day and start crying. We're complex creatures and I don't believe that self-sacrifice to the level you're suggesting is natural by human standards.

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

What I don't get is why just because you have sex with someone and a swimmer happens to make it through the obstacle course, how does that obligate you to transforming yourself into their soulmate? You say situations are just tests, but what's the right answer, and how do you know that re-adjusting to life as a single parent isn't the correct path to take for the test? For a kid, maybe adjusting to life with a fractured parental unit is the test they need. Why should a person accept another person if they have very many things about them that are fundamentally incompatible, not necessarily bad or evil, but just incompatible for a happy life?

You treat having a kid like a magical thing. You bestow upon it some fantastic implications that have little to do with the realities of life. Magical thinking is a form of logical fallacy that causes many problems.