Assume that in the future, medicine and technology will make us live to 200. The aging process will happen later, so, for example, from age 20 to 160, we will feel like today’s 20 to 60 year olds.
In such a society, many things will change. For example, people will likely have multiple careers, e.g. they will first study to become a teacher, teach from 25 to 60, then go back to school to study art, be a painter from age 65 to 100, and so on. People will be able to try different types of occupations, because, really, who would want to be in the same profession for 150 years?
One of the things that will change is marriage. Will anyone want to be with the same partner for 170 years? (assuming they get married around 30). I think not many.
How do you envision the institution of marriage to change, if at all? Will people still be saying “Till death so us part” during the wedding ceremony?
What makes you think that 50 years is a short time? If your scenario did come to pass and there were people who stayed married 170 years, would you then argue that no coupling would last to 400?
Well, the fact that half of today’s marriages end in divorce tells me that in fact even 50 years is a long time to be married for many people. So, 170 years will definitely be stretching our long-term-pair-bonding instincts to their limits.
ETA: What do you think will be the fraction of marriages that will go the full 170 years? Even if some people manage that feat, I think the vast majority will not, and so that will change the face of marriage.
What is the distribution of divorce lengths, do you know? Because if they are evenly distributed -you are as likely to get a divorce after 50 years as you are after 5 years-, then you would certainly have a point. However, if divorces are clustered towards the short end and get less and less likely with each decade they’ve lasted, then that would not support the theory that twice the length would double the divorce rate.
I think you underestimate the kind of bond that can form over a lifetime together.
The divorce rate is high, but most divorces happen relatively early in a marriage. I suspect that the rate of divorce for people who’ve been married 50 years is quite small. The rate of divorce for people who’d been married 100 years would be even smaller.
With many people, a long-term marriage means that you grow together over time. After 50 years together, I suspect a goodly portion of people have been through just about everything together and are pretty set. I notice this process, and I’ve “only” been married for 15 years (though we’ve been together for over 20).
When you are in a good long-term partnership, shared experience over time just makes the partnership deeper and richer. I cannot imagine simply getting bored with my wife; we are so much a part of each other’s lives, and have been together so long, that if boredom was gonna happen it would have happened already.
People in today’s world who have been married 50 years are around, say, 70-80 years old. They only have a few more years to live, and are not in great shape to strike it out on their own. So, most who are married that long today decide to stick it out till the end, even people who are not in very happy marriages.
If we end up living 200 years, though, by the time you have been married 50 years, you are “only” 70-80 years old, and thus quite young and healthy. You have 120 more years to live. So, if your marriage is not that happy, you have your youth and health on your side and you can strike it out on your own and try to find someone else. Also, if your marriage is not that happy, you are looking forward to another 120 years with this person, which is much more of a daunting task than waiting it out for 5-10 years, which is what happens with today’s lifespans.
This doesn’t explain why there’s a falloff in divorce rates after a mere ten years of marriage, though. By your explanation described reality we’d expect divorce rates to be relatively constant except among people in their later years.
The simple fact is, after a while you get most of the dents hammered out. I do acknowledge that there could be points of ‘upheaval’ - when the kids grow up = empty nest = midlife crisis = increased divorce rate, but in general the statistics seem to back up the anecdotes and the common sense. If you were going to get tired of them at year 120, you would have been tired of them at year 30.
If I could get that woman to vomit up her damned religion and say yes? Hell yeah. I’ve endured being strung along for ten years due to that crap and remain closely in love. I literally can’t imagine anything worse she could do that would repell me away.
Which leaves sheer boredom - and there’s statistical support that boredom doesn’t effect everybody. So I could easily be one of the lucky 50%.
The explanation I gave of 50 year old marriages is just one case. There could be several reasons for the drop off in divorce rates after about seven years. For example, most people have kids by that time, and kids complicate the divorce and reduce people’s willingness to divorce. And the more the parents stay together, the more the parents bond with their kids, and the less likely the fathers become of wanting a divorce since in most cases that would mean they would get to see their kids much less than if they stayed married. And then, once the kids are all grown up and off to college, if you’re already above 50 years old, your desire and ability to get a divorce and try to find a new partner are diminished.
Look, there must be tons of studies that try to explain the rate-of-divorce-versus-years-married curve, let’s not get into that in this thread.
Going back to the OP, is it your position that the institution of marriage will not change at all, the “till death do us part” will remain in the ceremony, and roughly as many couples will stay together for 170 years as stay together for 50 years today?
I assume a future with a lifespan of 200 years due to modern medicine would mean you raise your kids to about the same age as we do today, or maybe a little longer, so say until they are 25. Definitely not until 50.
Not sure what the fertility age would get pushed to, but that would definitely influence the marriage questions brought up in the OP. That is, if you are 120 and still fertile, that changes your options of what you can do if you leave your current marriage.
Probably because I’ve been reading too much science fiction, I see short-term marriage contracts becoming possible - 5 years, 10 years, until the child is 19 years old, terms like that. As to how property would be divided, how previous contracts would be factored into the decision to sign another one… none of that was covered. I’ll leave it for the future to figure out.
Or it could go that marriage simply fades as a viable option for tens of millions. It has already done so today, in part because of longer lifespans - “to death do you part” is easier to handle when you expect to die at 42 and your wife at 35, obviously it’s more difficult when both partners expect to live to their 70s, 80s. Most people (on both sides of the ideological aisle) seemingly consider rising divorce rates as a purely social issue - people reacting to relaxing social mores, the impact of birth control pills, the country going “Godless”, etc. But I’ve always thought that rising divorce rates resulted from people living much longer and that many people now have an entire “second life” to fill, something that wasn’t even foreseen when our traditional standards of marriage were set.
“Til death do us part” would remain in a lot of people’s marriage ceremonies because people are romantics. Nobody currently gets married with the expectation that they’ll get divorced, yet close to half of couples do. That’s quite a disconnect between expectations and reality! And that’s a disconnect that will continue regardless of lifespans.
There could arise a second class of marriage that is contracted for a fixed term - it’d probably take a while for it to claw its way its way up to the same social acceptance as ‘regular’ marriage, but it could eventually happen, in theory. I don’t know that I would be able to consider that a ‘real’ marriage, though - I consider committment to be a defining part of what a marriage is. A fixed-length contract by definition denies that the couple is committed to one another - enough so that I’d disbelieve that the couple loves one another. It would be a marriage of sheer convenience - a sham.
Maybe. One interesting question (that I don’t think can presently be answered) is what is a person going to be like with the memories of, say, a 60 year old but the still-flexible brain of a 20 year old. People with such a stretched out youth may turn out to be much more changeable over time than present day people.
Or they may fossilize at the same rate we currently do. It’s not as if there’s been any natural selection for brains that stay plastic over such extended periods. The first generation of prolonged lifers could end up looking thirty, and acting a crotchety 75.
Presumably the youth prolongation effect would have to extend to the brain, or they’d all die the same age we do. The question I don’t know the answer to is how much of the decreasing flexibility of age is due to the degradation of the brain.
I’ll leave it for the future to figure out.