“A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships” by johnswentworth

Meta:

• This was written for myself to clarify various thoughts; if you’re seeing it then I thought other people might find value in it or might provide valuable-to-me responses, but other people are not really the audience.
• “We” = “I”; it's a dialogue amongst parts of myself.

Voice 1: A couple months ago I wrote The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships. On a personal level, the main motivation for that post was… I saw people around me who seemed to really highly value their relationships, and when I looked at those relationships, the value people put on them just didn’t add up. Like, when I looked at those relationships, they seemed usually pretty marginal-value at best, and very often just outright net negative (usually moreso for the males). Yet the people in those relationships seemed to think they were super high-value. So I figured, hmm, they must be [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

August 10th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ntELqTE47jyHPnH84/a-self-dialogue-on-the-value-proposition-of-romantic

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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