Every time our family hears of married couples making it to their diamond, golden or silver wedding anniversaries, I often hear the statement that for a marriage to have lasted that long, one of the two loved the other one more than the other loved him/her.

It makes sense to me that a married couple - if they have widely differing personalities or different backgrounds, would require one to bend over backwards for the other just to keep things rolling along smoothly - simply because it's easier to find a couple where one is willing to sacrifice more than the other, than it is to find a couple where both are willing to sacrifice a lot. And I feel that this is really unfair, but at the end of the day, if you want to build a family, the sacrifice may be worth it, because a family is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

And while this is certainly true of one set of my grandparents and my own parents, I wonder how true it is based on your experience of couples that have lasted as long. Did the marriage endure because one of them loved the other much more than he or she received love from the other? And how do you feel about being the one who perceives that he or she has given up more to keep the relationship going? Or vice versa?

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well to begin with, i am very uncomfortable with the idea that one partner has to love the other more than the other loves him or her for the relationship to work, mostly because i think i would have trouble respecting myself if i found myself in the position of being slavishly dedicated to someone who doesn't do anything for me. thats not to say that i am not willing to make sacrifices, only that if i do i expect my partner to make some too.

as for whether that does occur... yeah i've seen it happen, in many cases. 2 or the 3 intimate relationships i am familiar with, not including my own, seem to work that way. but of the relationships that are unbalanced, i also tend to see them as dysfunctional. so even though the people are still together, it seems to be more out of habit and comfort than out of love. granted my socaial circle is small, but of all the couples i know (beyond the ones mentioned earlier) don't seem to display the trait you mentioned unless they also appear dysfunction. of course that could just be my bias at work. damn imperfect brain!

i also wonder whether making more visible sacrifices is really a measure of love... because some people are a lot more willing to make personal sacrifices than others simply as a personality trait. i'm not sure its accurate to say that those less giving people love others any less... perhaps they just express their love in a different way.

its a complicated issue to be sure. for the sake of my relationship and my sense of self respect, i hope its not true

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Isn't it pretty to think so?

I am in total agreement. Marriage will entail some sacrifice, but it is one thing for one person to make sacrifices within a marriage and another thing for the same person to be sacrificed for that marriage.



Dysfunction is a salient point. Thanks for bringing that up. And I think this does tie to my earlier statement about one person being sacrificed for the marriage to last so long, because when one person is sacrificed that way, then the relationship is also sacrificed until it becomes grotesque in form and function.

There's one example though of a married couple that lasted many decades together. When they were asked what the secret to their enduring relationship was, both of them agreed it was because of the husband: every time the wife would argue her point, the man would just nod his head and say that she was perfectly correct. He did it so often that it became obvious to his wife that he was doing it not because he was convinced she was right, but because continuing the argument would be pointless and fruitless. On that point alone, and with everything else held equal, could that relationship be considered dysfunctional or was it just that heated discussions were rendered dysfunctional by his total agreement? Kind of a rhetorical question there because on the surface, there seemed to be more love than the desire for mere comfort in habitual companionship.

I guess what this leads to is the need to further adjust the scope of my question. Yes, I would like to know more about lopsided relationships whether they are dysfunctional or not.



While we humans live without omniscience, our shared experiences will just have to do to verify the point you've raised.



While I personally equate loving with giving or sharing, indeed, there are many ways of expressing love, and yes, there are some types who do express "giving" through acts of self-denial. And then there are those types who would choose to "give" in a different way. There are even those who "give" in a receiving sort of way - by accepting the affection their partner wishes to pour out to them, even if their love languages are incompatible.

As an aside, have you ever read The Gift of The Magi?

And sacrifice is deeply subjective - I dare say it is rooted precisely in the depths of one's subjectivity. So there may be those relationships that seem so lopsided and dysfunctional only for us to discover later on just how much the less demonstrative partner gave up in order to keep their marriage going.



Right-O. It is one thing to show compassion for one's partner and another thing to lose self-compassion. One can go mad by sacrificing oneself, or one might be mad in the first place, thus perpetuating the dysfunction in the relationship.

And I hope that while there are relationships out there that are lopsided, I pray that not all of them are dysfunctional.

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This doesn't seem to make sense to me. Wouldn't a partnership where the love was very unequal be more inclined to break up, than a partnership where the love was about equal?

Or maybe I should ask in a different way (because I understand the whole dysfunctional-one-partner-bending-over-for-another-partner as a reason for the unequal marriage to be mutually beneficial for both partners)... Why would a partnership where the love was about equal break up? Unless both partners were equally un-in-love...

I'm not sure I know any long term couples where one partner seemed to love the other much more than their partner loved them. :-/ Maybe it's because I know mainly chinese long term couples, and the chinese are pretty damn good at not being romantic or talking about love...

The opening statement certainly runs counter to our common sense that enduring relationships ought to be a partnership between equals. But while that is the ideal, for a relationship to endure so long, it is more probable that one made more sacrifices in the partnership than the other? Like an application of Pareto's Principle that 80% of the work (the sacrifice in this case) is made by 20% (50% in the case of a married couple) of the work team?



That's certainly one model of marriage that is interesting to point out. And I suspect a lot more Te was at work in that model in order to bring mutually beneficial partners together in the first place.

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I think it's probably that most, if not all relationships are lopsided to some degree. It would be rare to find a relationship where the sacrifices were 50-50, but that's proceeding from a purely practical/logical pov... because usually in relationships, nobody keeps accounts of individual sacrifices, nor holds their partner to a 'tit for tat' sort of relationship.

If Pareto's Principle applied to a relationship, I would think it's pretty dysfunctional, but then again, it obviously works for the partners involved.

But I can think of other, more likely reasons for relationships to endure even if the reason is not love...
- culture
- religion
- family/social pressure
- stability
- for the kids
- fear of change
- fear of unknown
- companionship
- oh, and a biggie: falling into the 'sunk costs' fallacy ("Well, we've spent 25 years together, sure, we're miserable, but we can't waste those 25 years by parting now.")

These seem more likely than inequality. To me at least.



It depends on how far you go back.

Also, Fe is largely a cultural force. Chinese Fe looks way way way different to western Fe, so it's possible that Chinese Fe is coming across as Te to you. I know that a lot of older chinese generations are uncomfortable with PDAs as they are disrespectful to those around them... and that's an Fe thing. However, through the western model, chinese relationships can look cold or somewhat clinical... anti-expressive, and thus apparently anti-Fe. But that's another topic.

That last one is exactly what I keep on hearing from the SFs I know who've stayed on in dysfunctional relationships.



More likely - yes.



You mean how many generations back?



Oh, I was thinking in terms of arranged marriages where practical needs were considered in order to form mutually beneficial relationships.

(And yes - that does give me ideas for another topic worth looking into - for instance, cultural factors that affect our perception of different MBTI or cog types.)

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If only you knew how much I wanted to slap some sense into those people!

I think a lot of older chinese couples I know stay together not necessarily out of love, but out of companionship, duty (which I see as just different enough from being in a sunk cost situation), etc, but at least they actually seem happy together, and not everyone's top priority is romantic love. I just do not understand it when people stay together even if they're actually truly 100% miserable.


Yes, but I may be thinking of Hong Kong marriages, which nowadays are more love marriages. Maybe in China, arranged marriages still happen? I really don't know much about China though.


Ah, okay.


That would be interesting to explore.