SOFA - Start Often Finish rArely

> Traditional marriage is the ultimate form of this ideal. You're supposed to stick to it until you die, no matter what, come hell or high water, even if it makes you and everybody around you miserable. That is neither sane nor healthy!

An interesting philosophy, but I don’t think marriage is the best place to apply it. Writing a README and then never starting a project has practically no consequences. Same for picking up a book and then ditching it after a few minutes. Marriage? That’s a whole different ball game, especially when children are involved.

SOFA works great for marriage, if you tweak the params a little. Most secular people arrive at this by default: You marry your 3rd serious partner sometime in your late 20’s.

Start a lot of long term relationships, finish the one that sticks when both partners are mature and more or less done growing up.

I think there’s another shakeup period (statistically) in your mid to late 40’s. That seems related to when kids start being old enough that they don’t act as a forcing function as much.

>SOFA works great for marriage, if you tweak the params a little. Most secular people arrive at this by default: You marry your 3rd serious partner sometime in your late 20’s.

This doesn't really work great:

* Some people get really good at starting and not so good at finishing. They hurt a lot of people, eventually including themselves.

* Many people find it is too late to have the number of children they would have liked, or any children at all. This causes a lot of personal tragedy.

* Birth rates are well below replacement everywhere in the developed world, which is causing serious social problems.

I’m not disagreeing with your other points, but I really dislike the last one. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that we’d try to implement social pressure/coercion to restrict people’s freedom to date who and when they like on the basis of some abstract, top-down perception of trying to maintain the “stock” of humans or whatever. Also, far as I’m aware, the main issue with birthrates isn’t desire or timing but that people feel unable to support kids, which is mostly an economic and policy problem.

I never mentioned coercion - my point was just that the existing way we date doesn't work. As for feeling unable to support kids, a key part of that is having somebody to share the parenting with. Few policies or economic subsidies would be an adequate substitute for that.

I don’t think that’s actually true. I think the largest issue with single parenthood is that children are expensive, so it’s hard to support them on only one income and be left with time to raise them. While single parents will always be at a disadvantage in that sense under our economic model we could, for example, just give them some money for their child’s necessities. Matter of fact I think we oughta do that for any parents and see how that affects the birthrate in 20 years.