A more charitable interpretation is that people have gotten into situations bad enough where they've ended up seeking advice from strangers on the internet. (Not every relationship squabble ends up in a reddit post.)
Although the number of 'white knights' on that subreddit is very high which leads to very skewed opinions on who is the asshole for relationship advice.
Pretty much the same as /r/relationshipadvice. I would advice everyone not to listen to __strangers__ opinions on the __internet__ on behavioral subjects based on a short description.
> There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively.
I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately"
Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.
It's not that i disagree that work/life balance isn't a serious issue, and a worthwhile topic of discussion, but why do people keep posting these threads in this sort of manner?
Asking advice of strangers without any suitable knowledge of you or your significant other, or your relationship is not going to result in good advice, if one is genuinely unsure of where life is leading.
In fact, most of the threads started in this manner, contain so little information that one can do little but caricature the participants. If you seriously want relationship advice, there are relationship/marriage councilors, if you think it's worth sorting out.
Advice is also particularly pointless, again lacking any proper context for relating to the situation at hand.
So i'm left wondering why these threads are started. Are these attempts at trolling? Flame bait? Is it an attempt to get something down on paper, to clarify the author's own thoughts on the subject (in which case, why post it to Hacker News)?
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As to the respondents, how on earth are you making the judgement that he should or shouldn't leave his girlfriend, given a total lack of knowledge regarding his startup? How can you possibly engage in a responsible cost-benefit analysis (even if it's not really quantifiable anyway), without receiving more than a 215 word description?
Tbh, it reeks of self-help guru. It's almost a meme now, along with "delete facebook, hit the gym, lawyer up" circlejerk you see in relationship forums.
I actually believe the comic has a lot to do with situations pertaining to marriage - or any relationship whatsoever even if the poster didn't think much of it. I think that was kind of the point of the original root comment and the supporting response by the parent, and seems perfectly valid to me comic notwithstanding.
On your second point, there's an enormous difference between saying "I can't continue with the project, someone else want's it?" and "I can't continue, because of A, B, C...Z, someone wants?". When you add the personal touch to a question it's inevitable that someone is going to answer with a personal experience. The same rhetoric you use can easily apply on the inverse case. Making unsolicited comments about you marriage life to a crowd of technologists/geeks/whatever should not be noble (whatever this means in this context anyways) either then. If the project developer didn't want advice about his married life, he should have kept his marriage troubles out of the spotlight.
In any case, there's one important distinction to make: Giving such marriage advice is worth it if at least one person that needs it reads it. The original poster probably didn't give marriage advice because of the odd chance the developer will read it; I mean lets be realistic here, the poster/blog-author is not the developer with marriage troubles, so there's no reason to believe the developer will read this. He most certainly did because maybe someone here in HN could be going through a phase in his/her marriage/relationship that could use the couples therapy, and publicly acknowledging the benefit it had for him can have an positive impact on someone that actually needs that advice and is browsing Hacker News instead of attending to his significant other.
You don't need to spend very long on that subreddit to see that it's just as susceptible to the typical narrow-minded, black and white Reddit justice as every other subreddit. When it's not crystal clear whether the OP is asshole, there is little room for any kind of nuance and people pile on. It's very similar to relationship_advice. Full of people who should be well aware that they don't have the whole story and that life can be complicated, but don't really care, since it's not their life, so it's easy to tell people they're an asshole or that they should break up with their partner of 5+ years or some such.
A fairly specific example of helpful antagonism that this brings to mind for me:
There are a lot of Reddit posts on the regular that describe an obviously terrible and sometimes borderline abusive relationship, followed by a plea about how to improve their partner's behavior. The most helpful responses tend to be the purely antagonistic ones that reject the premise entirely and bluntly tell the person to leave the relationship in a way that a syncophantic LLM never would.
Yes, it was a one-time thing. I've just had three different people do it one time.
I assume the response was for the same reason relationship advice from strangers is always "break up immediately." People are really bad at judging things they know only one thing about.
Well, the top-level comment is describing what's basically an "XY problem problem" equivalent on relationship advice subreddits.
(XY problem problem is when you ask a question about X that's somewhat unusual, and every reply assumes you're an idiot suffering from "XY problem", and therefore ignores your question and schools you on some random thing.)
Didn't downvote, but online forums are rarely a good place for relationship advice.
In particular, if you're marrying someone, getting a grip on what she might appreciate for years is a good first step, especially as the premise is the discussion has already been started in the couple and she voices her own opinions.
How it goes down from there is probably a microcosm of how they'll deal with their future decisions.
> So a less misleading headline might be: Couples that refuse relationship counselling have higher divorce rates. But that would surprise noone.
Relationship counseling is delegating responsibility for your relationship to a third party. Or, in most cases, transferring blame for your psychological shortcomings to your spouse via a faux neutral third party.
(I don't doubt that there are good counselor, but they are probably even rarer than good psychologists.)
In mot especially offended, but it does rub me the wrong way when people make negative assumptions about others, then offer their advice.
To me it comes off as condescension, not actually help. If they wanted to help or cared, they would seek to understand first. Unsolicited and more importantly uninformed advice shows a disregard for the recipient.
It reminds me of legal advice threads where people give terrible advice because they are too busy speaking to even read the original post.
Re-read Lumost post, and then em-bee's unsolicited diagnosis and advice. They are absolutely making assumptions and suggesting a narrative about an uncollaborative and deficient marriage.
At the end of the day, people are free to post what they want, but having some community standards is what prevents things from devolving into rabble and insults.
For my part, I want to use that freedom to tell people that it is unproductive and generally considered rude to make unsolicited, uncharitable, and uninformed assumptions about the marriages of others. Moreso, because I think are giving out factually bad advice.
> I feel like your comment suggests that one of those things is common while I would suggest that the other interpretation is more common.
I read it as people taking that step in a relationship without much thought because that's what society has conditioned us to believe is normal and then divorcing like breaking-up.
I've also seen a similar one about wanting to get out of your marriage. Some people have questioned the antisocial aspect of the concept, but at least its more light hearted than that...
My guess is that some of the people crititicizing here are either macho bragging about stuff they don't actually do, have dysfunctional relationships but don't realize it, or much more likely just aren't or haven't been in long term relationships. Some probably misread or are taking a very negative interpretation to what they're reading.
> online support for people in this sort of relationship
For sociological reasons that bear discussion, there is very little support for men in this situation. You may need to depend heavily on strong, close friends and family members. There is rarely a village to support a modern marriage.
Do not isolate yourself.
A relationship can be good or bad or some kind of stable compromise. When things go sour, one has to take a hard look at the risk to oneself in trying to personally support another person whom the psychiatric field may or may not be able to help. Then there is also the sunken cost of marriage, with home, children, and economic risks.
If I may offer a final personal observation... by the time you feel you are hurt by the situation, you have been hurting for a long time and worse than you realised.
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