original thread title: If you aren’t perfect, you aren’t ready for a relationship yet
dnr warning, I'm too lazy to write a tldr
Why would a normal, mentally sound person who has their life together waste their time on somebody who is a complete mess? They could very easily date the abundance of other normal people around them. Relationships are for those who have a firm hold on things in their life and everything is going well.
I would peg relationships at the “self-actualization” level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, because relationships are meant for perfect people to enjoy life to its fullest extent. The natural objection to this is that there is a level meant for relationships in Maslow’s hierarchy, namely the belonging and intimacy levels. However, this stems from naively viewing Maslow’s hierarchy as a pyramid with disjoint, unconnected levels. Relationships from the top of the pyramid can feed down to these levels and help a person experience belonging and intimacy more strongly, and vice versa. Furthermore, a mentally sound person can use stopgap measures to fulfill their belonging requirements (like friendships) as they climb the pyramid, so a relationship itself is not a prerequisite for having a relationship.
Now consider an example of a person who has not got everything together: a person who is having financial troubles and does not have a job. Given that there are many employed and financially stable people to pick from, people are far less likely to pick that unemployed person. However, the unemployed person has a straightforward answer to his situation: get a job. No matter how difficult it may be, the solution is straightforward as it can be.
But what about people whose problems stem from feeling unvalued to begin with? Let us focus in particular on attachment style theory from psychology. People with insecure attachment are more likely to feel unvalued because they believe that 1) other people are not emotionally responsive to their needs and/or 2) they are not worthy of love to begin with. This manifests as a combination of unlikeable outward behaviors, such as avoidance, neediness, and clinginess. It is a well-established fact in psychology that the cure to insecure attachment is very much having a partner with secure attachment. No amount of therapy can change the underlying feeling that somebody is unvalued without actually having somebody to value them.
However, this creates a trap: people with insecure attachment ooze these unlikeable behaviors through their skin. Many of these behaviors are subconscious and nearly impossible to eliminate without directly transitioning to secure attachment. However, a normal securely attached person is far less likely to waste their time putting up with the mental issues of an insecurely attached person. Therefore, people with insecure attachment (especially severe insecure attachment) cannot find a relationship due to this catch-22.
Now, there is a clear objection to all of this: what if, despite one’s flaws, a normal person chooses to love a broken person? First and foremost, such a pairing is very unlikely to happen due to the prevalence of other normal people throughout society. There would need to be a strong reason to date the broken person, such as very strong chemistry. But chemistry is not the end-all-be-all of a relationship, and mental issues will constantly throw a wrench in the relationship and make it much more likely to fail. What I mean to say is that although a relationship could work out, it is almost certainly guaranteed not to.
Prevention of mental issues is a far easier problem to tackle than the curing of said issues. This is why people should put their utmost effort into flourishing in their formative years. Society has put a large social safety net for children, so if a person screws up as a kid, they can easily move past their mistake. But once this grace period is past, fixing one’s life if they never had a proper life to begin with (and thus never developed secure attachment and proper social skills) is very difficult and requires a combination of effort, luck, and simply guessing correctly at how normal humans behave because there is no guidebook containing information on all the small behaviors that make up normal humans.
So what is the solution for those who are unvalued and suffering from mental issues? We must determine whether these people on an individual level still hold value to a society as a whole, through metrics such as contribution to the economy. If a person ends up being net negative, and they are suffering with no hope for remission, then euthanizing them is not only the right thing to do, it is what we are obligated to do. Such people are both suffering and draining society; their absence is what is best for both us and them.