Greentext

10 years is plenty of time when you're living in a tribe/extended family, which is how we lived for hundreds of thousands of years before today. Forcing kids to stay home until 18 is really counter to how we have been living since the very beginning.

This idea of isolated individual isolated family units with parents who are married forever just isn't how humans are wired. Not every society lives this way. Indians generally live with their entire extended family and I think are better off for it. Communal living is a bug part of this.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fixing-families/202304/why-so-many-marriages-end-after-8-years

Yeah, most marriages die around the 7 year mark.

I'm no researcher, but I know plenty of couples who have been married for 30+ years and not a single one of them is happy in their relationship. They're just going through the motions and the spark of romance died decades ago.

If humans were truly wired for lifelong partnerships, then divorce would be an extremely rare thing. Instead half of marriages fail (around the 7 year mark) and the rest pretend everything is a-ok when it probably isn't. Flip a coin when you get married. If its heads you stay married till you die, tails you're divorced in under a decade.

Which wouldn't make sense at all from an evolutionary standpoint, finding another man to step in as a father is not easy

The "point" of evolution (if a thoughtless natural process could be said to have a point) is to produce as many children as you can so hopefully some of them live to reproduce and keep the cycle going. Not to build a long term family. Find someone, get a baby out of them, raise it until it can feed itself and find someone new and spread the genes around for genetic diversity.

And who said anything about finding another man to step in? They live in the village with everyone else and everyone supervises them. Have you ever gone on a family vacation or something where a few different families all lived in the same space for a while? Everything is WAAAAAY easier when you have 10-20 people working on daily tasks and chores and planning, etc. People fall into whatever role they are helpful in and the kids go off and play on their own.

I also have two 18 year olds living at home who say they desperately want independence but also don't want to get a job or do dishes

Your two 18 year olds have spent their entire lives in a society that has told them they can't be independent until now. You've been suppressing their desires to leave for... what, 5 years? And you're surprised they don't want to do something as mundane and boring as the dishes? Please lol. Jobs are a fucking scam too.

and have the sexual maturity of a potato.

I'm going to assume you have sons. Hate to break it to you but your sons spend most of their day sexually frustrated and are probably nearly constantly jerking off. I bet you've washed like... gallons of their cum down the washing machine. Girls are just as horny too but it isn't acceptable for them to show that. You can pretend that this is a normal thing but your kids "should have" been making babies for a long time now.

I don't think we are "meant to" have any particular relationship type or length, humans are far too diverse for that.

I'm speaking in a passive sense. There is no god or point to anything but we've been molded by evolution for millions of years a certain way and the way we are living now is not compatible with how our brains are actually wired to live.

Remember, "old age" used to be like 30 until basically yesterday on evolutionary timescales. You had your kid at 15, you were a grandparent at 30, and you died shortly after. That was life, for nearly all of our history.