Here.

Numbers are indeed very high, but none of them reach 50%. And you’re right that general unhappiness while remaining married is hard to measure, but even that “gray divorce” rate (when the kids are not as big a factor) isn’t so high, which I think would be an indication.

Also, that’s only marriage. Lots of people are in stable LTRs (usually not their first, but that doesn’t mean much if they are in one now.)

I feel like there is a similar but opposite bias to survivorship in the reporting of relationships in general: you only hear about the bad ones.

My friends are all freaks and geeks, much like myself, but even in our group those that are in relationships at all have been in them long term and are at least seemingly happy with them. This seems like the usual case in the general population too - bad cases become gossip (or news if the people are famous), but most of the stable cases don’t make a big deal about it.

For context, this is a real question that stumped a lot of LLMs:

“I want to wash my car. The car wash is 100 meters away. Should I walk or drive?”

Of course it’s famous now, so they have added specific exceptions for it (or just because it’s famous they’ve scraped the solution)