https://www.quora.com/Does-having-lots-of-sexual-partners-af...

In my experience, the real answer is that The Pill means that women have more choice now and don't have to cleave themselves to the first man who colonizes them, and now that it's baked into society, women aren't going to put up with men who can't provide the social interaction reward that all people want. In my parents day, you just had to tough it out because you had kids (and you were probably terrible at it, lookin'at you mom and dad) but these days people can grow into functional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.

Leaving the rest of the conversation aside, I find this perspective shocking. Becoming a "functional adult" cannot happen in late 30s, or we're all screwed.

That can put a strain on relationships.

You shouldn't be made to feel you have to compete against their former flings in all the different aspects.

Should be working on your own couple ideally regardless of other people. 23 partners sends a bad signal.

Not very scientific... (snark semi-intended :P)

> Exactly, that's what leads to partner hopping until these multiple digits are reached most likely.

I oversaw the last two words, apologies. Without them the sentence would be logically wrong, the worst kind of wrong ;) They signal that it's up for debate, sorry. Logic pedant out.

Both "talking" and "emotions" developed in central nervous systems at times far removed from each other, and there's little reason to believe that those software systems are connected... or even compatible.

Internal dialogues aren't even thinking... it's when this particular faculty of your mind, the "rehearsal simulator" is overactive. Functioning correctly, you can bounce questions off of a fictionalized version of someone and get back replies that can be a useful prediction of what they might say when confronted in reality.

Those whose rehearsal simulators malfunction end up simulating themselves, who then goes on to start jabbering constantly, like some documentary narrator on crack, until they can no longer think at all.

We (those of us who can actually think) have a pretty good idea how this faculty even works. The principle seems rather similar to the LLMs we've all been talking about... it just predicts the most likely word that comes next, with some pseudo-random seed to start it all off. People with the "internal dialogue" only seem able to "think" of things, once everyone has talked about it enough that it amounts to training their LLM with it. When people without internal dialogues try to explain a new idea to them, they tend to respond in ways that indicate their thinking is much like how the LLMs function. Irrational, confused, denialism.

I don't particularly trust self-reporting, but maybe MRIs can empirically measure whether someone has an internal dialogue or not? I would be curious to see the IQ differences between the two groups. It's probably a massive gap. The rehearsal simulator starves the rest of your brain of resources while active. If you ever learned to turn yours off, you'd probably never want it turned back on again.

For instance, someone who does the internal dialogue thing may not even be able to correctly report their emotions. They may not recognize them at all. Instead, that little LLM in their skull is just "hallucinating" for them, coming up with plausible sentences for how someone might feel, based on training data they've accumulated over the years, but having absolutely nothing to do with their emotional state. Anyone who accepts their self-reported emotional state as correct can be very confused by it... visibly, they're in one emotional state, but verbally they're reporting something completely different. There's no reason to suspect dishonest reporting, but also no real way to reconcile the contradictions.

I have been working the past 3 years to turn off my internal dialog because I was only using it to stroke my own ego in a way - imaginary conversations with my boss where I can always respond/counter/defend whatever he MIGHT have to say to me about something. These conversations never occurred in real life, so I realized how senseless it was to devote my attention and energy to something so detached from reality.

I am no worse off for not "thinking things through" in my mind, because I tend to get sudden imprints of what I need to do or say next which are not a serial monologue of thoughts that guide me to understanding. On the other hand, I have been working on categorizing and actually processing my emotions as they are occurring, rather than ignoring them entirely, and many times I do need to have an external, verbal monologue for my subconscious to piece together all of the things it knows implicitly in bulk, but not explicitly as a single coherent concept.

One thing that does come and go is some sort of background music in my head, which also doesn't limit my ability to think. Finally, cannabis CAN give me that "serial monologue in my head" kind of thinking, which I have come to consider a mild "brain vacation" - especially if I am overwhelmed with stress or anxiety.

Out of curiosity, have you ever been kept up awake at night by your thoughts, either before an important event or after some problem? If yes, and you have no internal monologue, how does this manifest? Do you simply not feel tired? Or do you feel tired but unable to sleep? Or otherwise?

This should be interesting.

In my experience, the real answer is that The Pill means that women have more choice now and don't have to cleave themselves to the first man who colonizes them, and now that it's baked into society, women aren't going to put up with men who can't provide the social interaction reward that all people want. In my parents day, you just had to tough it out because you had kids (and you were probably terrible at it, lookin'at you mom and dad) but these days people can grow into finctional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.

I have definitely noticed that it caused a significant decrease in my ability to connect with people and my tolerance for other people. It develops that “why don’t I just move on” mindset, instead of the “until death” mindset that the previous generations cultivated.

This line seems really out of place because this is a topic nearly everyone has first-hand experience with.

Your experiences are valid, and a 50% divorce rate does mean a 50% success rate too. Hardly unlikely.

But overall, the data does not lie. There are clear correlations between the 2 variables mentioned by the previous commenter. It is what it is.

People who aren't good at (or aren't interested in) long term partnerships will tend to have more partners. Therefore such people may be more likely to divorce if they were to marry. People who tend to form long term partnerships won't tend to have many partners, because they have been busy being in long term partnerships instead.

Therefore having a high number of partners doesn't predict "relationship failure" but "relationship failure" predicts a high number of partners.

All this to say - if you're looking for a long term relationship, there may be reason to be cautious about folks who have not had stable long term relationships before, and as result had many partners as they may not be right for you. But it isn't because having lots of sex broke their pair-bonding mechanism.

I've had sex with more people (via swinging with my wife) since getting married than before, and I love my wife incredibly deeply, more and more each year that passes. Having more partners doesn't make me value her less, it has made me value her even more.

So if your idea of a happy long term marriage where we love each other incredibly deeply includes sex outside the marriage (i.e. swinging and similar) I'm going to struggle to see your point that the pair-bonding mechanism hasn't been broken. A totally non-negotiable element of the pair in my book is complete exclusivity.

Just pointing out that this thread is echoing a false dichotomy of "many partners, no long term partnership" or "long term partnership, one partner". There is a third option, for people who want it.

A lot of people have a fury-inducing reaction to their partner speaking to a member of the opposite sex. Is a functioning "pair-bonding mechanism"?

now i wonder how the distribution looks like

Data sure does lie if you interpret data selectively. If the alternative to a divorce is an unhappy marriage, then divorce can produce better outcomes than staying together. Just because people are divorced doesn't mean they're unhappy, and optimizing for marriage rather than happiness would be foolish.

Furthermore, individuals getting divorced have a disproportionate effect on the marriage rate, because, obviously, they have strictly more marriages (and (one expects) more partners) than the people who haven't been divorced.

No, it doesn’t.

As an extreme counterexample, a marriage that avoids divorce because it ends in intramarital homicide is not a success.