Women are struggling to rationalize the sad, bitter consequences of feminism. Is it truly justified?
Readership: All
Length: 3,300 words
Reading Time: 11 minutes
Introduction
What becomes of women after they hit the wall and can no longer ride the carousel? They must invariably face up to the lack of music.
We have the common idea that most women in this predicament will settle, and settle hard to get into marriage. But as time goes on, we are finding that more and more women are absolutely unable to settle hard enough to attract nuptial commitment. Instead of settling, women are wandering through the carnival of life after all the rides have shut down. They’re wondering why the music has stopped, and they are coming up with all kind of rationalizations, which are actually justifications. Many of these justifications are of the victimization variety.
In this post, I’ll review a number of these justifications based on this article at The Guardian (Emma John) Why are increasing numbers of women choosing to be single? (2021 January 17). The author is not groping for a man to wife her up. Instead, the author does a bit of introspection in an effort to find a new identity as a single woman. But forging a new identity is turning out to be much harder than she imagined.
- Single? That’s not an identity.
- Spinster? That’s too hilarious, and it’s still “freighted with pity and misogynist undertones of sour dessication or bumbling hopelessness.” No.
- Never Married? What does that mean?
- A Free Woman? That sounds insulting to everyone else.
- Lifelong Singles? “Sounds like a packet of cheese slices that’ll last forever in the back of your fridge.”
Even “flappers” had more dignity. She never finds a suitable term to her liking.
Let’s dive into the Justifications.
Justification by Demographics
She cites some interesting demographical statistics.
“The Office for National Statistics shows that women not living in a couple, who have never married, is rising in every age range under 70. In the decade-and-a-half between 2002 and 2018, the figure for those aged 40 to 70 rose by half a million. The percentage of never-married singletons in their 40s doubled.
And it’s not just a western phenomenon. In South Korea, the rather pathetic figure of the “old miss” has become the single-and-affluent “gold miss”. In Japan, unmarried women over the age of 25 are known as “Christmas cake” (yes, it’s because they were past their sell-by date). Shosh Shlam’s 2019 documentary on China’s sheng nu explores these “Leftover Women” and the social anxiety they cause as traditional marriage models are upended.”
Nothing to see here…
Justification by Apex Fallacy
She uses these statistics as a springboard to justify being single, and then compares herself to Hollywood starlets, and later in the article, Bridgette Jones, of all people. She writes,
“Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is a valid choice. For a brief spurt, it even appeared that the single-positivity movement was the latest Hollywood cause, with A-listers such as Rashida Jones, Mindy Kaling and Chelsea Handler going proudly on the record about how they had come to embrace their single lives. Jones and Kaling have since found love; Handler announced on her chatshow last year that she’d changed her mind and really wanted a relationship. And when Emma Watson (also not single) announced to Vogue she was “self-partnered” I found myself suppressing a gag reflex. Give it another 10 years, I wanted to say. Then tell me how empowering it is going to parties/dinner/bed alone.
The article is littered with images of Hollywood starlets and pop culture figures who appear to be aging well.
But there I go, living down to the spinster stereotype of envy and bitterness. How is it possible that, despite being raised by a feminist mother and enjoying a life rich with friendships and meaningful employment, I still feel the stigma of that word? Or fear that, even in middle age, I haven’t achieved the status of a true adult woman?
These women had a spirit of urgency. They weren’t waiting for anything.”
From this, we see how women cling to very bad role models by identifying with…
- Elite pop stars, who are actually the worst role models of all.
- Idealized modern fairy tales (e.g. Bridgette Jones), which do not match reality for the vast majority of women, at all.
- Their mothers, who were feminists themselves and who appeared to enjoy it.
There are no role models for being a happily married woman. I suppose that there are, but these have been intentionally ignored because of the shame and guilt that they would instill in her. She wouldn’t want to write anything that might glorify God’s created order or the dreaded patriarchy.
Justification through the Exploration of Literary Mythos
She finally identifies with spinsters described in classic English literature, of the Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and P.G. Wodehouse variety (which I advise everyone to read). But with the news of her younger sister (who is in her mid-30s) having a baby, even this is a bittersweet disappointment.
Yet in all this, she cannot see how the choices she made earlier in her life to emulate these role models could have possibly left her in a state of purposelessness.
I assumed that my own situation was a temporary aberration, one that required no sense of emergency or active response. My social calendar was full, my work constantly introduced me to new people. Mother Nature would, surely, pick up the slack.
Personally, I believe that the persisting ignorance that surrounds left over women is a form of God’s grace. If they ever knew what they did wrong, and what they’re missing as a consequence, the pain and grief would be too much for them to bear. I can also see how the natural psychological defense of avoiding this pain and grief would keep them trapped in a state of ignorance.
“One of the cruelest tricks spinsterhood can play is to leave you feeling like an outlier and a freak – yet my status is far from unique as the statistics show. I see that in my own close friendship group – almost a dozen of us are never-married in our late 30s and early 40s, and none through choice.”
No, they had a choice, but they missed it. That moment passed by and they never saw it. Maybe it passed by again, but they never took action because they thought that opportunity would always be waiting for them “when they were ready”. Meanwhile, they were focused on other things going on in their lives – things that, in the moment, they felt were more urgent and important. This is the main point of the literary examples of Spinsters, but somehow, she’s overlooked this fact.
Justification Based on a Perceived Lack of Opportunities
This justification has the strongest “woe is me” flavor.
“There’s no avoiding that our romantic opportunities have dwindled as the pool of age-appropriate men has emptied. Annually, we manage a small smattering of dates between us. Most of us have grown weary of online dating, which requires you to treat it as an all-consuming hobby or part-time job. We’re tired of Tinder, bored of Bumble – I’ve even been ejected by eHarmony, which, last time I logged on, told me it couldn’t find me a single match.”
In other words, they’ve been through so many men that they are now totally jaded and/or alpha widowed. This alone will eject them from ever being considered as marriage material. It’s sad.
Justification through Peer Identification
Despite all the advances that Female Empowerment and Women’s Liberation has brought, she still cannot escape the social pressures of being single.
“In our 20s, my friends and I used to revel in gossip and talk endlessly about the guys we were interested in; now, the subject is sensitively avoided, even within the sisterhood. The only people who do tend to ask whether we’re seeing anyone are complete strangers, because relationship status is still considered a key component of small talk, a vital piece of the information trade, essential in categorising someone’s identity.
My friend Alex has a range of responses to the question “And do you have another half?” depending on which she thinks the other person can take. Her nuclear option, “No, I’m a whole person,” is deployed only in the most desperate of circumstances.”
The unavoidable truth is that our individual identities are forged in the furnace of our relationships.
- For Christians, this relationship is with Christ.
- For men, these relationships are with their business partners and weekend buddies.
- For the married, these relationships are with their spouse and children.
- For spinsters, these relationships are with the Chads and Brads of their youth.
The question of identity can only be answered by building relationships, and spinsters have great difficulty in embracing the identity that they have built for themselves through their choices about relationships.
Justification by ¡Science!
She writes that this intimation of perdition is backed up by ¡Science!
As we age, the distance between our shared life experiences and viewpoints has only been widening. Professor Sasha Roseneil, author of The Tenacity of The Couple-Norm, published in November by UCL Press, says: “All sorts of processes of liberalisation have gone on in relationships, in the law and in policy.” Her research focused on men and women between the ages of 30 and 55, the period in mid-life “when you’re expected to be settled down in a couple and having kids”.
“But what our interviewees told us was that there remains at the heart of intimate life this powerful norm of the couple,” says Roseneil. “And people struggle with that. Many of them long to be part of a couple – there was a lot of feeling of cultural pressure, but there was also a sense of that norm being internalised. Single people felt a bit of a failure, that something had gone wrong, and that they were missing out.”
“…a sense of that norm being internalized” That is not a “norm”, per se. That is the human heart calling out for love and belonging, and for a soul identity forged through a relationship. In other words, the relationships which have wrought their identities are a one-and-done interaction, and then they find that they have no one to walk through life with them, and help them work out their salvation. She more or less confirms this when she writes,
“Being a spinster can be isolating – it’s easy to become convinced that no one else is quite as hopeless a case as you. It leaves us, the perennially unattached, asking ourselves big questions that we can’t – daren’t – articulate to others. Are we missing out on the greatest emotions a human can have? Shall we slide into selfishness, loneliness, or insignificance? Who will be there for us when we grow old? And is a life without intimate physical companionship one half-loved, and half-lived?”
¡Science! can never answer these questions, so ¡Science! is a dud.
Justification by Feminist Mythology
To answer these questions of the heart, she returns to the religious tenets of Feminism.
“Within the framework of the current feminist narrative, there’s a strong sense that the answer to each of the above should be no – or the questions shouldn’t be asked at all. “We interviewed a lot of people around Europe and that’s a very real early 21st-century experience for women,” says Roseneil. “And people are conflicted – that’s the mental essence of being human. They can simultaneously have contradictory feelings: on the one hand it’s totally fine to be single and I can have a nice life, on the other hand – what am I missing out on and is there something wrong with me?”
As modern, single women, we are not supposed to feel that we’re missing out. And so we feel obliged to hide any feelings of shame or inadequacy or longing.
I know I don’t want to take my many privileges for granted and I suspect that many single women in a similar position to me dread being thought of as whiny or desperate. And so we don’t talk about the subject, and we try not to acknowledge that spinsters still exist.”
Yes, privilege would be utterly shameful, not only to confess the relationships that formed their identity, but also to denounce Isis (the god of female empowerment) and Aphrodite (the god of gynocentric sexuality) as being insufficiently powerful enough to satisfy the needs of the heart and soul. I admire her bravery for writing such blasphemous doubts about the gods of this age.
“Perhaps that’s the reason that, instead of finding my #inspo from modern have-it-all heroines, I prefer to look back and learn from the spinsters who came before.”
So she realizes that the justification through Feminist Mythology fails grandly.
Justification through Solipsism
Turning away from bad role models and engaging in more introspection are good, but it still falls short of a full repentance. But upon further introspection, she still tries to justify her solipsism, by blaming society and recounting the virtues of spinsters.
“Western society has always struggled with the issue of what to do with unmarried women. Take the religious mania for persecuting so-called witches in the middle ages. Communities fixated on single women – their era’s “other” – not only because they were suspicious of their alternative lifestyles, but because of the collective guilt over their inability to cater or care for them.”
What she calls “collective guilt” is actually a healthy fear of corruption.
1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles… 2 And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. 3 For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. 4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, 5 deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
1st Corinthians 5:1-9 (NKJV)
6 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. 8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people.
In Red Pill parlance, this mean that a few loose women in the community will ramp up the competition in the SMP and increase the rate of promiscuity. So it should not be tolerated.
“When single women weren’t assumed to be witches, they were often taken to be prostitutes – to such an extent that the two terms were interchangeable, including in court documents.”
There is a fundamental reason for this, but feminists do not have the discernment nor the courage to articulate the truth of it like Samuel did.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,
1st Samuel 15:23 (NKJV)
And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
Now consider that,
“Feminism is the promotion and glorification of rebellion.”
Deep Strength’s Law of Feminism (2016 February 18)
However satisfying it might be to identify with rebellion, solipsism cannot answer the question of her heart either.
Historical Justifications
Next, the author launches into a 350-word historical review of wayward wimmin throughout western culture, from the original spinsters of the mid-1300s up to the flappers of the early 20th century, all trying to squeeze out some nuance of identity. She manages to find some nuance of a shared identity, but not one that ameliorates her condition. She concludes this review with the following statements.
“What I love about these women is their spirit of urgency – they weren’t waiting for anything. Of all the anxious experiences of spinsterhood, one of the most debilitating is the sense of a life on hold, incomplete.”
This point does bring her to some introspection. Let’s see where it leads her.
Justified by Immaturity and the Inability to Delay Gratification
Twice now in the article, she writes about how she admires women with a spirit of urgency. Whether this is to be admired or not all depends on what the urgency is all about. This goes back to the issue of choice and what exactly is chosen. Is all this talk about urgency just another verbalization of the importance of overcoming the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and embracing the You Only Live Once (YOLO) mythos? Or could this be better framed as the child who doesn’t have enough self-control to delay gratification (as exemplified by the Marshmallow Test) but who does have the courage to be defiant?
As Roseneil argues in her book, membership of grown-up society is marked by coupling. “There’s something symbolic about transitioning into a permanent relationship that says you are an adult.”
This is a separate topic entirely. What brings a person into the adult world? Is it merely sexual experience? A lack of love in the home of upbringing can surely thrust a young person into the adult world, but this doesn’t imply that the person is truly an adult, especially in terms of his/her ability to form healthy boundaries and to assume the necessary responsibilities. However, at the same time, a lack of love prevents them from learning the self-confidence necessary to succeed, and so it places them at a severe disadvantage in the actual handling of the adult world.
For those of us who haven’t, and may never, make that step, we can be left with the strong impression – not just from society, but from within ourselves – that we’re immature or underdeveloped. Consider another wave of “superfluous women”, between the world wars, whose marriage prospects were shattered by the loss of an entire generation of young men. Popular history recast them as dilettantes and flappers: the spinster’s contribution to national life once again belittled and mocked.
She is referring to the MMP fallout after WW1, in which millions of young women had been damaged by the war in some way, either by losing their father or husband (or potential husband). The lack of young men created a sex imbalance in which fewer women were able to marry and more women turned to “alternative lifestyles”.
Justified by Herd Feeelings
We should not be surprised that her last thoughts in this post are about personal feelings and social conformity. Ultimately, it all comes back to Feeelings, and fitting into the Herd.
No wonder modern spinsters feel conflicted about where we stand, and whether we’re all we should be. When Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at LSE, published research claiming that single women without children were happier than married ones, he was taken aback by the response. “I had lots of emails from single women saying thank you,” says Dolan, “because now people might start believing them when they say they’re actually doing all right.” But more interesting was the reactions from people who didn’t want to believe it.
It’s more interesting to her (and less interesting to us) because misery loves company.
“I’d underestimated how strongly people felt: there was something really insulting about choosing not to get married and have kids. It’s all right to try and fail – but you’d better try. So with these competing narratives, you would be challenged internally as a single woman, where your experiences are different to what they’re expected to be.”
Yes, people have a deep visceral disgust to spinsters (s1uts, and wh0res too) because of many reasons. Most obviously, they are defiled,* meaning that they are unfit for, and perhaps even corrosive to a family-based society. This is noteworthy because marriage and family is the setting and context in which people come to know God. If a person outrightly rejects this, then it’s a slap in the Creator’s face. Thus, spinsterhood, in its most egregious form, is not only a rejection of the continuance of society, as well as the race and tribe, it’s also an insult to God, who commanded us to procreate and “fill the earth”.
Whether a spinster is happy with her state depends, of course, not just on her personality, her circumstances, and her mood at the moment you ask her, but an ambivalent definition of contentment. We struggle to remember that, says Dolan, because our human psychology doesn’t deal well with nuance. “Almost everything you experience is a bit good and a bit bad. But with marriage and singleness it’s not voiced the same way. You’ve ticked off this box and got married so you must be happy. The divorce rates show that’s categorically untrue.”
Happiness as an indicator of self-worth is sorely inadequate. She is right that marriage and having a family is also no guarantee of happiness. Marriage and having a family doesn’t even guarantee that you’ll “find God”. But embracing Headship is the one thing that is available to everyone in life that is most conducive to that end.
* I am not saying that all single women are defiled, but only those who become spinsters by willingly choosing the Feminist Life Script (and all the profound sin that it entails) over marriage and family.
Epilogue
After all this frustration, readers will hope to find satisfaction in how the author, and women like her, might see the wisdom of repentance. But because of the plethora of justifications, repentance is still not on her table of options. Instead, we get a dismissive line about “the conversation”.
It is time, surely, to change the rules, and the conversation. As the population of never-married women expands, we should be honest about what it meant, and means, to be one. We should celebrate our identity and the life experience that has given it to us. We should reclaim our history and stop being defined by others. Why not start by taking back that dread word, spinster?
The problem with this plan is that it does not respect God’s Covenant Law, and it works against God’s ordained order. So by embracing this mindset, they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of angst, disappointment, and loneliness.
Oh my… Isn’t that what she is discovering now? Yet in spite of imminent catastrophe, they still seek to justify themselves. SMH…
Related
- Σ Frame: Women’s choice to be relevant (2020 February 6)
- Σ Frame: It was god’s will for her to be a stripper. (2021 January 22)
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1 Timothy2:15 Notwithstanding, through bearing of children she shall be saved, if they continue in faith, and love, and holiness with modesty.
I have seen for a while that Feminists and their churchians teach women to be discontent in marriage and malcontent towards their husbands. No husband can ever be perfect enough that the misandrist pastorbater doesn’t scream at him to man-up, or “How dare you!” But now I can also see that Feminists and their churchians have been teaching women to try to be content remaining single and outside the will of God for them, which is to serve their divine purpose for marriage and childbearing and being keepers of the home. Who but Satan would want these “daughters of the King” thinking they’re dating Jesus, when they’re single, but they are really just kicking “all the least of these”(men equivalated to Jesus) to the curb? The truth is that if these women were of Christ, they’d be shamefaced instead of too proud to marry the single men in the church while they are young. And they’d seek to find contentment and satisfaction inside their marriage, instead of outside of it on social media, from their girlfriends, and from the world.
Unfortunately the church is now “The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth.” All the churches have gone off whoring after the world. There is only a small remnant of individuals that still fear God and flee from evil. It is a narrow and difficult way, and few ever find it. If your church is marketing an easier way, be assured, it is the way to hell.
Matthew 7:14 How narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it!
Jesus said that.
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One of the things that they always leave out of their reckon’ings is men
As in men are less willing every day to pick up their slack
By this I mean the hardcore you go girls’ slack.
I don’t think there is a lack of men willing to get married in the macro. It’s at the micro level where things break down
#2, it is rarely if ever mentioned, how out of control female expectations are. Which at a certian point is likely to be a defensive measure on their part
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The fundamental problem women like this have (and there are many like her) is this: they do not want to accept that their own actions have consequences.
At younger ages they can be somewhat excused for this, because at younger ages women are explicitly told, repeatedly, that their actions at young ages (unless that action is getting pregnant) will not have any long-term consequences, and that they can always switch gears in life and get whatever they want whenever they want, however they want. This is a very loud and explicit message to young women, and it’s designed specifically to encourage them to delay marriage and settling down into married life to some time until they have “had their fun”. Older generations of women, rather than cautioning younger women, instead egg them on, typically, because they envy younger girls for the opportunities they have open to them and can, to some degree, live these vicariously through the lives of their daughters, nieces and grand-daughters. So the normal “information loop” here of older, wiser women advising younger women was explicitly destroyed by feminism and replaced with an older “you go girl!” chorus that actively eggs on younger women to chase everything other than marriage when they are young.
However, most women, most of them, still do get the memo, at some stage in their later 20s to early 30s, that they need to switch gears and place a time and energy emphasis on finding a mate if they actually wish to find one and have a family with one. Most women still do manage this, because they “wake up” on time, even if it results in a sub-optimal matching that ends in divorce in a few years.
The author is in the group of women who never seem to get this memo. That is, they do not make the shift that most other women do that allows them to marry. A certain amount is luck and attractiveness, but the woman in question, as is often the case for the women of such articles, while not very attractive is nevertheless easily as attractive as many women who are married. The issue doesn’t lie there.
My sense is that with many of these women, the problem they face is that the men that are available to them, once they really start to look in the early to mid-30s, are not attractive enough for them to be very interested in committing. I don’t mean physically or viscerally, but attractive enough as mates. Dating isn’t so much a problem as mate finding — the guys that were available for dating a few years earlier that had good mate qualities are not on the market in the same numbers now, and there is more competition for them because of that, so the market dynamics shift, away from a woman who is looking for a mate rather than a date. Again, most women make this adjustment in the timeframe of the late 20s to early 30s and do okay, if not “great” in many cases. But some, like the author, are late to make the shift and so by the time they do, the pickings are slimmer than they want, and they remain perpetually single as a result.
The rest is just window-dressing self-justifying poppycock, as you rightly dissect in this post. The underlying cause is that they waited longer than most to transition to active mate hunting, and it made things much harder and less interesting for them due to the smaller number of attractive mate type men available.
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Getting the memo about young life consequences has been available for a while.
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they do not want to accept that their own actions have consequences.
Because they were told there wouldn’t be any (bad) consequences.
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Mychael has a friend whom she stays with on the long 4 day shifts she does in the ER. She is married to an Air Force retiree, they have 4 kids. One night, she was looking at the bookshelf and noticed that she had the book “The Excellent Wife” by Martha Peace.
The friend is also a nurse, and obviously has a professional life, as well as a home life. The friend is a little older than Mychael, and is very sweet, kind and gentle with her husband. Mychael read that same book about 10 years ago, and asked about it. The two of them are reading through it together, and recommitting to its ideas. What a blessed find to make friends with a woman who also believes in this model for marriage. I’ve seen them together, and it is something.
Now, there are plenty of young girls that these two work with at the hospital. All of them are the you go grrrrrl™ variety. Some are married, and have “egalitarian” marriages. Some are single moms. Others are whatever. But they ask questions. They see these two ladies, (my wife and her friend) raising kids, being good ER nurses, loving and showing sweet kindness and deference to their husbands. They are exposed to it, it some small measure. And here’s the thing–it actually looks counter cultural to them
If that were to catch fire, on a larger scale, you might see a roll back. Not likely, but the ingredients are there.
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Imagine that. A woman being nice to her husband is “counter cultural”.
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RN’ing seems to attract the committed to you go grrrrrrl types.
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One of the churches I used to attend was pretty much a farm for the nursing schools.
To a woman, the new nurses all moved out of their parents house and bought houses and cars within the first year of nursing and spent nearly every dime they made.
Of course, since they typically make more than the median income of the local populace (except big metro areas), finding a man becomes impossible for them, unless they are doctors, managers, lawyers, etc. (the most attractive ones nearly always marry a doctor).
Most remained single for a long time.
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The church types love their daughters becoming teachers and teachers
Let’s them say they are being godly and feminine while they get there you go girrrrrl cred
Girl#1 is one of them nurse practitioner so we have a front row seat to the medical field train wrecks.
The smarts ones stick their landing. Lots of blue collar guys see nurses as a good deal but the stress and how they dont mange it seems to wreck most of those ladies. Booze, pills etc and most of the time, food
I’ve not seen many doctors marry nurses. Leastwise not with the younger doctors. Seems to me doctors marry other highly educated professionals
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12 hour shifts break a man. There is a reason why so many nurses are fat, ugly, and age poorly.
One of my buddies used to date nurses in his party years because they fond of … coffee
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Reckon so? 12 hours seems like a cheat day and technically I am retried
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(the most attractive [nurses] nearly always marry a doctor).
After screwing their way through the resident staff and the younger attendings.
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Yeah lots of dudes target nurses and teachers for quick sex
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(the most attractive ones nearly always marry a doctor).
I married my cute nurse before she was a nurse, and before I was a doctor.
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LOL awesome
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Behold, the most “punk rock” person in modern American culture!
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I use to live near some rock a billy folks
Was an interesting experience because they didn’t look very ward and june clever but they tended to live that way
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It surely varies from case to case, but in general, I’m not sure it’s about getting the memo as much as it is about one’s personal inclination to take note of the memo. They are prone to run on autopilot, and as Novaseeker noted, do not want to accept that their actions (or lack thereof) have consequences. As the saying goes, “Failing to plan is a plan to fail.” It goes back to the female life path, and this is largely determined by individual traits.
In a previous post, The Feminine Dilemma, I made a list of personal characteristics that are associated with an independent female life path.
In this author’s case, I would guess it’s because of…
–Education: In general, more education → more independent
–Emotional Constitution: stronger constitution → more independent
–Personality: More extroverted, more rational → more independent
–SMV/MMV: In general, a lower SMV/MMV → fewer opportunities to form relationships.
–Strength of Libido: A weaker libido is thought to be associated with more independence.
I have also observed that women who grow up with sisters in happy middle class homes tend to be carefree and apathetic about doing the emotional work required to break from the family of origin and establish their own marriages. This seems to apply to this author’s case, but I’m not sure how prevalent this is.
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I’ve also noticed a growing trend in some of the single females I personally know in their 30s and early forties to get on social media, Facebook and Instagram in particular, and ramp up the attention seeking/validation. You’d think from viewing their multitudinous posts that they were really rocking it out in their single, empowered, ‘You Go Girl’ lifestyles; that is until they post what I call the ‘mask off’ post. It’s the one where they bemoan their life situation in whatever way they choose to emote publicly. I’ve seen everything from tear stained confessionals to long winded heavy-hearted articulations of their life situation (usually fairly well written because of all the education they’ve received). Then curiously, once the confessional post is complete and gets all it’s validation, overwhelming from the female herd telling them how amazing they still are, and how brave they are to share themselves so openly, etc. it’s right back to posting pic after pic, or vid clip after vid clip, of the ‘wonderful’ lives they are living. I used to feel sorry for them, especially during my transition from blue pill me to red pill me (remember, I am personally acquainted with these ladies); however I’ve noticed that over time, I’ve lost all sympathy for them as individuals. It’s not a mean-spirited type thing, more like, “Honey, you made all those decisions/choices during your twenties, now you’re going to have to live with them like any of the rest of us would have to do. Suck it up, grow up and face it like an adult woman and maybe you can do SOMETHING positive about it instead of emoting and feeling sorry for yourself.” I do feel sorry for us as a society. For the betterment of all of us, I wish I could wave a magic wand and create that they are all married with kids and content in married life. It’s is adding to the downward spiral of our western cultural among many other forces at work; just one more thing creating the utter sh!t show we’re all increasingly living into as the years of the 21st Century roll on.
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When I was on social media (a big mistake – get the hell off now) I saw something like this with a female high school classmate. In HS, the girl dated a good friend of mine (who was a very average, zit-faced teenage boy, a good guy with some mental health issues). He dumped her right after graduation. She seemed to replace him after a semester or so of depression with another nice guy whom she quickly married. Don’t know all the details but my impression is she wrecked this marriage and after this she went into a wild girl phase from what I can tell. After than she met a super rich guy who had a kid with her but he quickly replaced her with a younger model. After that she didn’t date much from what I can tell. When she did, the guy dumped her after a while which seemed to devastate her even more.
When she was on social media she would lament the fact that she had nobody – that what she really wanted was her grandparents 60 year marriage.
I don’t know how to feel about situations like this. From my perspective, she picked what seemed like a decent dude (not some alpha prick) at about the time that I believe a lot of girls seek a permanent relationship and he dumped her which I’m guessing began the downward spiral in her life. Our standard line is that young women pick alpha douches and should have known better but that’s not always the case. I’m not telling every single guy to marry girls like this but is it wrong in all cases to feel sorry for them?
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There are women who marry nice guys and then he changes or turns out to be not as nice as it seemed at the beginning. It does happen, because I do know women who did it all “the right way” and these things befell them: serial infidelity, lack of continuous employment due to wanting to “not settle” for a boring job and expecting the wife to be the primary breadwinner while he finds himself on the XBox, etc.
Culturally, we have set up a paradigm where the men are more likely to be shafted by their wives, but men sometimes sin against good wives also, and it’s right to be sympathetic to their plight the same as we are to men who find themselves married to treacherous women.
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I don’t feel sorry for the loneliness and desperation they are feeling. I think they might be able to do something about if they’d 1) Admit that they (and they alone) made those choices, and they are now aware of the downline consequences of them; and 2) Humbly (yes, even for secular women), admit they were following some shitty female empowerment script and begin to see if they can salvage something from it. School of hard knocks is a good teacher, IF…Bigtime if, they can learn from the lessons and apply them going forward. The church world calls this repentance (or use to call it that). BUT, the more familiar pattern I’m seeing in the one’s I’m personally acquainted with is something along these lines, “Yeah, maybe I made a mistake or two, but it’s not really my fault (stated explicitly, but more likely implicitly), it’s the fault of ___________.” (fill in the blank).
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In some cases, I do. Not every relationship fits the RP script. I know women who chose what seemed like a good man (to everyone around them) and then got screwed. We don’t say “you chose her” to men who get screwed over. I don’t say that to Nova, Scott (1st wife), Sharkly, etc.
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I don’t feel sorry for the loneliness and desperation they are feeling. I think they might be able to do something about if they’d 1) Admit that they (and they alone) made those choices, and they are now aware of the downline consequences of them; and 2) Humbly (yes, even for secular women), admit they were following some sh!tty female empowerment script and begin to see if they can salvage something from it.
Two fatal flaws to this scenario:
Accountability. You’re asking women to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions and choices. This just ain’t ever gonna happen on a large scale, because women are not psychologically programmed to do this.
Historically, women haven’t really needed to this programming. Our forebears in earlier eras, being much wiser than we are today, knew that women were incapable of accountability. Being fully well aware of the danger to civilization presented by women being let loose to live independent lives for which they were unequipped, they severely restricted women’s freedoms to ensure that their behavioral choices had the most limited impact possible upon society. While a woman may not have been capable of accepting responsibility for her behavioral choices, it rarely mattered in the grand scheme of things because her choices were mostly limited to acts that impacted only her immediate family. This limited the possible extent and damage of any acts of foolish and destructive behavior she might engage in.
Nothing about female nature has in any way changed since ancient times, yet men have completely abandoned their duties of coverture. We see how disastrous the results have been. To use a favorite analogy, expecting women to hold themselves accountable is as foolish as expecting wolves to refrain from eating meat.
Self awareness. This goes hand in hand with accountability. In order for massive numbers of women to admit that they followed a bad life script, they would have to admit that there were alternative courses of action readily available to them that would have led them away from their own base desires, desires they knew on at least a visceral level to be self-destructive. They also would have to admit to the existence of other women who did not follow the herd and who chose a different path that did not lead to ruin.
While self awareness does exist in some women, it is a preciously rare attribute. Solipsism is woman’s default setting, which, again, is why our forebears limited her choices and options in order to protect both her AND society at large. To expect large numbers of women to exercise self awareness is simply unrealistic. Only men proactively limiting women’s options for destroying their own lives will have any effect whatsoever at reversing the trend. It also goes without saying that at this point in history that option is a non-starter. That might change following an apocalyptic collapse, but until then, the ocean of bitter cat lady tears in which we will bathe is only going to grow larger.
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“…but until then, the ocean of bitter cat lady tears in which we will bathe is only going to grow larger.”
Sadly, I thing you are right on the money with this observation.
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Cameron-
Analyzed through the RP lens, I picked exactly right on the first one.
N=0, raised in a deeply religious family, taught to defer to the husband, etc.
I had no concept of the RP back then. It was 1993. But her background and pedigree were spot on.
The hamster spun, and she convinced herself that I was not “the one.”
I had my problems. But I did not violate any of the “big” ones. No drinking, no violence, no yelling, no infidelity. Just young and trying to figure what I wanted to do with my life. Professionally, and educationally I was a late bloomer. That was my crime.
After the divorce, I got my s&%@ together, made something of myself, etc. She grew to resent that I became what she wanted me to after the divorce. (I know this because we continued to communicate for several years after. She came right and told me how angry she was that this happened). Just couldn’t wait for me to figure things out. To this day, I believe she is aware that she could have had a great life, had she been patient. She doesn’t even have any kids.
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..and I would add, after reading my comment that it could be construed as gloating or the “I told you so” consternation of a scorned ex husband.
It is not. I see that story as the colossal tragedy of our bulls%$@ divorce culture. My sweet wife, Mychael, gets the damaged, more cynical, guarded version of me that I became in the wake of such a painful ending.
The second and third order effects of the ancillary relationships also severed that cannot ever really be reconciled. (I actually liked my in-laws, for example).
My children don’t understand how I can talk about the permanence of marriage with a straight face.
Not to mention the bizarre mindF&$@ that my ex undoubtedly went through wondering what might have been.
All in the pursuit of “happiness”
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@Scott, I remember your story very well. After the divorce, she stated that when she married you she considered you “a good start.” As if she had some vague idea of what she wanted you to grow into.
My wife was fatherless and from a very poor family. She didn’t have high socioeconomic expectations. Neither of us was raised in Church.
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Scott —
After the divorce, I got my s&%@ together, made something of myself, etc. She grew to resent that I became what she wanted me to after the divorce. (I know this because we continued to communicate for several years after. She came right and told me how angry she was that this happened). Just couldn’t wait for me to figure things out. To this day, I believe she is aware that she could have had a great life, had she been patient. She doesn’t even have any kids.
Seems to me to go along with this:
Not to mention the bizarre mindF&$@ that my ex undoubtedly went through wondering what might have been.
Counterfactuals are just that — counter to the facts. Fact is: you don’t know if you would have made the same decisions regarding your future if you had remained married to her. It’s possible that you wouldn’t have, and that therefore your current present (leaving second wife aside) would have been possibly foreclosed had you remained in your marriage. And your ex may not have “missed out” on something that might never have happened anyway. Or … it could be that you would have pursued the same (or similar enough) path and that she therefore has missed out. Nobody knows. Everything that happens in life impacts us, shapes what we decide to do in ways that we can’t easily unwind and re-arrange to our tastes.
Analyzed through the RP lens, I picked exactly right on the first one.
N=0, raised in a deeply religious family, taught to defer to the husband, etc. I did the same, N=0, “holy roller” type religious Catholic family, mother in law was a Catholic HS religion teacher, ex-W was 23 when we married. Boom. There are no silver bullets in life. Things take unexpected twists and turns all the time.
I had a work colleague die one morning during his commute when a truck that was traversing a bridge crossing over the Capital Beltway dropped a heavy piece of its payload onto the Beltway running below, at the precise instant that my colleague’s 60+MPH car was traversing that particular slice of space-time, killing him instantly. Early 40s, great health, worked out all the time, 2 kids under 10. shrug. Life is not predictable. Throw other human decisions into the equation (like however the truck driver decided to secure his payload that day) and things get even dicier than the normal mercurial order of things, and that’s also the case when you are dealing with a wife, especially a young one.
Here’s the thing though — I, at least, am not convinced that I “picked wrong”. My ex is not evil, or stupid. She changed. People do change. Between 23 and 31 in today’s culture, people tend to change a lot. And those changes can make a marriage unviable in some cases. It isn’t intentional, it isn’t a character flaw, it isn’t evil. It’s simply life. Some marriages end because of “bad acts”. Other marriages end because one person thinks they can or should “do better”. Other ones end because the people (or one of them) change in ways that make the marriage unviable. These things do happen. Again, life is not predictable. Not all of these things can be vetted before marriage, because some things can’t be predicted. You can screen for things that are bad bets, and you should do that. But there are other risks that remain, and they can blow up on you despite someone passing any reasonable vetting and therefore not being “a bad pick” in any sense other than hindsight, which is irrelevant because no-one has the luxury of making decisions with the benefit of hindsight in any case.
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@ Scott
As a fellow educational, and professional late bloomer, I feel your pain, man. But, that does support the advice for men to get married after they have a direction, or a mission. It’s tough to lead when you don’t know where you’re going.
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@Novaseeker:
“Things take unexpected twists and turns all the time.”
That’s true of course. But we look for patterns and causes and develop hypotheses about what we observe. So why did things work out for me? Maybe I just got lucky but that’s not something that helps understanding of relationships.
It seems to me that most guys here are upper middle class. I keep wondering the same thing – that most of you guys ran into problems because of the socioeconomic hypergamy of the class you married into. Everyone here seems to be: lawyers (Nova,deti, Lexet?), from the big metros: I keep hearing DC, New York. Scott is a PhD. I don’t know the socioeconomic background of his ex. Jason has talked about working at IBM in the bay area. I wonder if that wasn’t his problem. The bay area is not middle America. These are high socioeconomic areas/professions. I have noticed that e.g. Oscar comes from a modest background and I think he has a successful marriage.
Now I’m not advocating all you ambitious guys go down to the local trailer park to find yourself a wife. The lower and working classes have even higher divorce rates (although as you pointed out, not divorced doesn’t mean happy or Christian marriage). Even if I’m right, I don’t know how any of this would be actionable aside from successful men wifing up Denim-skirt wearing Ozark girls from working class backgrounds.
Now if hypergamy (in both senses) is true women already don’t get one primary thing that they want in a mate (the most attractive 10-20% men). If the women in your social class are high socioeconomic or have some reason to expect high socioeconomic status well then they get nothing they want – unhappy wife, failed marriage.
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Maybe I just got lucky but that’s not something that helps understanding of relationships.
I agree, but it may nevertheless be true for many “happy” marriages — people luck into them, in many ways. I mean Scott’s second marriage seems to be a case of that, your marriage does. Meeting the right person at the right time makes a big difference. That doesn’t mean you can’t mess it up by behaving stupidly — you can, and people do all the time. But it’s also the case that not everyone meets that “meet cute”/love-of-life at a marrying age where it’s “actionable”, as you say.
It seems to me that most guys here are upper middle class. I keep wondering the same thing – that most of you guys ran into problems because of the socioeconomic hypergamy of the class you married into
I know you think that, you have said it before. But … if this were the case, our socio-economic class would have high divorce rates, but it does not. Yes, the women are very picky and have high expectations. But they also generally don’t run into divorce easily. Many situations settle into long term distant or less than ideal marriages but not divorce situations. Divorce in my social set is still an outlier. So if it were the case that the women in our social class are more apt to divorce .. well that isn’t what we see happening. Certainly not statistically and certainly not in my life peer group, either.
Who gets divorced in this social group? If I had to put a finger on it, I’d identify one main commonality I have seen. One is early marriage. Most people in this group marry older, around 30 or even a little later. If you marry early, like in mid or early 20s, in this group — look out, because that’s where the hypergamy thing can bite you. In other words, you may be right that the economic/social piece of hypergamy is even more pronounced in this group, but my observation is that it tends to not be an issue if a woman selects a man who is socio-economically hypergamous in a more settled way, in his and her 30s, than if she picks a man who has the pedigree to get there in the early to mid 20s. The latter scenario raises problems, as far as I can tell, more frequently for various reasons — sometimes the man doesn’t perform as well as he was expected to, sometimes he does but the woman outperforms him and wants a different man, and sometimes the woman decides that she wants a different life after all, when she is 30, than she did when she was 23. I do know couples in this SES that married in their early to mid 20s and are still married in their 50s, mind you, but most of the first marriages I know that ended up in divorce are coming from earlier marriages, and not the ones that took place at 30 or later — those are more stable than the earlier ones, if often much less passionate.
So the moral of the story in this SES is avoid marrying young — it can easily bite you for any number of reasons that are impossible to predict accurately. Marry later, once both parties are established, and have a good idea of realized potential (for the man) and what they want/what their own potential is (for the woman), and in our culture that generally isn’t very much before 30 for people in this SES.
Now, of course, that doesn’t mean you will have a passionate or “wildly happy like we’re teenagers” type marriage — you probably won’t. But most people don’t, and never did. Setting that up as the standard will mean a lifetime of disappointment for most people, and that’s the reality. But here, as with the rest of it, it pays major dividends to know yourself — if your marriage has to be like that in order for you to be content enough to stay married, — then do yourself and your potential spouse a favor and … don’t get married. Seriously.
Even if I’m right, I don’t know how any of this would be actionable aside from successful men wifing up Denim-skirt wearing Ozark girls from working class backgrounds.
That doesn’t work, either. Those kinds of relationships are more or less foreclosed today. Mating is class/education assortative, pretty strictly, today, going in both directions — that is “up” and “down” both dislike it.
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I have a million thoughts about this comment, Nova. But I should think a bit more before I go there because I already know my marriage is atypical. We married super young and have mostly had a blast.
It sounds though, like you’re against young marriage if I am understanding you correctly.
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In the higher SES it’s the most consistent risk factor I have seen in that most first marriages between higher educated people (including post-college education) that fail tend to be of the earlier kind. Just what I have observed in terms of risk.
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Okay, I see what you mean, but I find it problematic if this is the case among Christians. Starting out poor should be a solid foundation for growing together in love, grace, and patience.
We started out with a decent income -especially for my husband being 20- but we lived in an apartment with a cheesy sofa and loveseat, a super cheap queen-sized bed, and one car for the first two years, in which we crammed three car seats. Those of you who have known me for a while may recall that we gave birth to three kids in a 12 month period.
Those years were like a glue for us. I think the problem is not so much SES as it is a piss poor understanding, on the part of both men and women, on what marriage is. And what it isn’t.
Ton is right that the marriage decline is far more economics driven than a lot of people care to admit. We’ve cut young men off at the knees both educationally and in the marketplace and wonder why they can’t “get it together” enough to be ready for marriage by 25.
I never had sky high expectations of a fabulous level of life that would be the envy of all. I genuinely just wanted a stable, loving family and to raise my children in a home where there was lots of joy.
I think there are advantages to having a bit of struggle in childhood. We never lacked materially, but between motherless early years and the stress and strain of a blended family that never really blended. That was just the natural effect of your oldest sisters and your stepmother being nearly the same age. My dad and stepmom had a very good relationship, and she was very submissive to my dad, but it just never felt like a family, so I knew I wanted that for my own kids.
It helped that SAM and I have always had a certain chemistry and mental “in sync-ness” so that even the few times when things were difficult, the difficulties were relatively minor and very, very short lived after the first year of marriage. If not for the fact that he had a child, and the dust the ex kicked up during that first year, we might not have had any real issues at al.
But that was because we resolved, “no one is going anywhere. There is no where else to go, no one else to go to.”
That kind of resolve will force you to work things out, whatever those things are. That’s the kind of resolve Christians should have.
The fact that he had that, without even being a Christian the first 4 or 5 years of marriage, is a real indictment against Christians who can’t manage the same.
Just my .02.
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@ Cameron
Correction: my family was dirt poor! But, I gotta pump the brakes a bit. As I said before, most us found these blogs because we were trying to fix something that was broken in our marriages. I’m not an exception.
I don’t discuss my marriage problems because my wife has never consented to that, and I respect her too much to break that trust. But, suffice to say, we’ve had our problems, and they reflect a lot of the problems other men have shared.
1 Cor 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.
My wife literally grew up in a trailer park.
There may be a middle ground. Ever heard of College of the Ozarks? It’s a Christian university in Branson.
https://www.cofo.edu/
The average year of marriage at CO is Sophomore year. Like most colleges, however, 60% of the students are female, which means most of the girls don’t get their man before they graduate. I know several young men who either attend there now, or graduated from there, and it sounds like a great place for a young man to look for a wife.
Tuition is “free” (you work for it, as opposed to paying for it), so it’s pretty tough to get accepted. It’s known as “Hard Work U”.
It’s never occurred to me before, but the fact my wife an I both came from humble backgrounds might explain why she’s never expressed feelings that she could have done better. We’ve had our problems, but we’ve never had that problem.
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I completely respect your privacy Oscar.
My wife grew up right next to a trailerpark in a dirt road duplex in a crappy area of Florida. Her mom had three daughters by three different men (not married to any of them). Her two sisters have had brief careers “dancing.”
My wife and I have had one major marital fight – one really bad period in a long relationship and a few minor ones. This marriage problem was 100% my fault or at least a result of internal issues of my own. This was after nearly 20 years of being together.
The thing is thinking back I have always been treated by her like I was an alpha male – which I am not. She actually used to write poetry to me (really bad poetry). I would like to understand why things worked to help other men (including my sons). I did not find the manosphere seeking answers over marital problems.
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@ Cameron
I’m happy for you, brother! A good marriage is one of the greatest blessings we can hope for in this life.
Ecclesiastes 9:9 Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity; for that is your portion in life, and in the labor which you perform under the sun.
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Just a point of clarification — when I say “higher SES levels”, I don’t mean people who grew up at those levels. I mean people who married at them — that is people who were in the highly educated upper middle SES when they met their mate and married. Many of these people did not grow up in the upper middle. Neither I nor my ex did — we were both from the lower middle and entered the upper middle by means of higher ed. The typical “striver” situation. Of course there are people who are born into the upper middle SES (and its various gradations, which I prefer to refer to as “higher SES levels” because there are some significant differences) as well, and they have a different life experience all the way through — and … they also have lower divorce rates, too, in my personal observation, as compared with the newly arrived striver members of that SES, like me and my ex were. Those people living in the DC suburbs, the SF Bay suburbs, etc., they don’t have monolithic life histories and backgrounds, even though right now they are living in the same set of higher SES levels.
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@Nova, interesting. Something about ambitious UMC women I’d guess and their hypergamy. They need ambition to match or preferably exceed their own? In addition of course to strongly preferring hot guys and spending years in school so developing alpha widow characteristics, etc.
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Something about ambitious UMC women I’d guess and their hypergamy. They need ambition to match or preferably exceed their own? In addition of course to strongly preferring hot guys and spending years in school so developing alpha widow characteristics, etc.
I agree that women in this group need ambitious men as mates, generally — that is true. However, this doesn’t appear to have a negative impact on either the incidence of marriage in this group or its stability — this demographic has higher than average marriage rates and lowest divorce rates. Seems like if there is an anti-marriage-stability effect created by increased hypergamy, it’s counterbalanced by other factors that encourage marital stability in the same general group. All of the women in this class are ambitious — whether they grew up in this class or not. And most marry and don’t divorce, and divorce less than other women do.
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@Novaseeker
I’m sure there’s counterbalancing factors that maybe overcompensate. This group is selected for greater self control, keeping up social appearances, I think maybe satisfaction in the great deal of co-wealth they build together (for females in particular), their high status, existing as a couple in the best social circles, etc. They love their huge houses where they can host parties with other high SES strivers. I am not in that world but I see it at the higher levels of the company.
I suspect a lot of the marriages aren’t happy. I think there’s a lot of infidelity. I know of some in our highest corporate leadership (a limited sample I know). I also notice a lot of these infidelities don’t end the marriage. My friend was cheating on his doctor wife and publically humiliated her since he was caught at work and fired – they are still married.
My guess is ambitious women tend to be dissatified easily. Female dissatisifaction is a main cause of martial unhappiness. Not all unhappy marriages end in divorce.
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Oh the marriages aren’t necessarily “happy”, I agree, certainly not on the standard of “in love like we were still teenagers” standard. That’s true. There’s a fair amount of distant, dutiful marriages. And some marriages that have affairs and the like on one or both sides that do not end in divorce. There’s also a lot, probably a majority, where the marriages are content/satisfied, most of the time, with periods of dissatisfaction, but never to the level of “OMG teenagers!”, but also not down to the level of “let’s call it quits” — just kind of content enough to stay married. The factors you mention all do play a role.
If the goal is a happy marriage as defined by some here — well, I have no idea about that. I’m usually talking about “stable” marriage, as in no divorce. Happy marriage is a subset of that, and not a very large one, the way many people define “happy” as being more than “low level contentment that drives stability”. I have no idea how you can intentionally find a “happy marriage” in the sense that is meant — I suspect it has a lot to do with luck.
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One reason that young (as opposed to 30’s) “striver” marriages often don’t work is each person’s ambitions conflict with each others’. I have seen this – divorce because both the wife and husband wanted an ambitious “business travel” career that interfered with marriage/parenting – neither would yield.
From a personal perspective, I don’t care how educated the woman is or isn’t – she could be illiterate and be a good wife. My mom had trouble with fractions – I’m not kidding. She stayed home with us kids – was there with hot cocoa when we came home on rainy days. Dropped notes in my lunch when I was a depressed teenager – she didn’t know what was wrong but she knew something was wrong because she was paying attention to us and not her boss or her clients. She was a good wife – she loved my dad until the day he died, took the best care of him when he was dying, still loves him. They married at 19 had me at 20.
I will just note that my parents marriage was happy, my marriage is happy and my sister’s marriage is happy (not just duty marriages). I think how you’re raised and family culture makes a difference.
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I don’t know the socioeconomic background of his ex.
She’s a history professor/prolific published author.
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Well there you go, ambitious chick. Now you have a pretty, sweet girl who’s “only” an RN. A real, useful job BTW.
“only” in mocking quotes – don’t get pissed at me.
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I guess I would like to imagine that there’s a lot of space between “low level contentment that drives stability” and OMG Teenagers (which would be nice). The first sounds like a business partnership. I don’t think that would be what I would want – if I knew that was what I was getting into I don’t think I’d marry.
That sounds like what I used to call “Yuppy marriage” back when that term was in use.
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Whatever the justifications, bad choices, excuses, bad luck, or the “times” that has caused this there comes a point where it’s “over”
It’s then time to attempt to regroup, repent, change, and get on………….some women will (I have seen it firsthand….and I can’t be upset at that). Most of these women according to the “studies” will end up marrying because there is and will be for the long term a dearth of very thirsty men.
EVen if these women didn’t “miss the boat” and “blew their chances” many if not most would still be single because of the fact that most women find most men undesireable. It seems to be a no win, unless you are of “the elect” which every married man in this forum is a member of.
All these women are no good for the vast wasteland of older men…..they are no good for younger men. No one can change…..but then the narrative flips “oh, if you want a wife, just read Dalrock, just read this book, this pamphlet…but there are no good women left……”
And again, no man in here is going to give his nineteen year old daughter to a fifty year old man, no matter how “devout” or “holy” or “set apart” he is
So sure……..I get that these women are a risk. A big one…….but 99% of younger women are behaving in the same way, and thus marriage continues to be for men…..an “elect / elite” group
While lower 80% of men just have to “burn” and “deal with it”
Looks like they missed out or blew it as well………..
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Agreed that most women who really want husbands will get them, because male thirst is real and powerful. All a woman has to do is dangle herself and a few well-placed BJs, and she can get a man. Because p*ssy makes men stupid. The problem is the kinds of men they get.
Then as usual you muddy it up with your criticisms of men who post here. No one here believes they’re the “elect”. As for myself, I’m luckier than most. I could easily have been a Scott or a Nova and been divorced. I almost was.
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Because p*ssy makes men stupid.
This right here is the fundamental problem for men, and the fundamental reason we are in the situation we are in culturally. Any man who really wants to do something with himself, economically, spiritually, even personally, needs to have mastery over this aspect of himself in such a way that he transcends this basic problem that goes all the way back to Gen 3.
It’s the “Ur-Problem” of men. Our true Achilles Heel.
And women know it, and exploit it, because why not? Especially when they are the weaker sex physically. Of course they will exploit any advantage they have because they see themselves as coming from a position of weakness to begin with.
Men have to master themselves — master their desires, master their passion for women. Subdue it. Do not be subject to it. If you can do that, there’s a whole world of possibility that opens to you, but if you can’t, no matter what you do, you will be a slave to women, even if you’re an incel.
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If the criticisms were honest, that wouldn’t be a problem. But, as you pointed out, they’re not.
Men rarely find these blogs because they have a great marriage. Most men who find these blogs are either looking for ideas on how to fix something that’s broken in their marriage, or trying to figure out why their marriage broke beyond repair, because they can’t find answers that make sense in “mainstream” sources.
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So men who are married did the “right” thing and men who are not did the “wrong ” thing. My criticisms are honest. You have an ego the size of god himself is what the problem is. Marriage is an elite thing now most men will not get…the ones who do are pretty much born with the right genetics.
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And women know it, and exploit it, because why not? Especially when they are the weaker sex physically. Of course they will exploit any advantage they have because they see themselves as coming from a position of weakness to begin with.
It’s been posited that this is how and why women devised and learned “soft power” – manipulation, deceit, duplicity, shame, behind-the-scenes machinations and intrigue; the feminine social matrix of conferring and denying female status based on marital status, maternal status, and race; and sex appeal. Women can’t use brute force to get men to do what they want. So they use “soft power” to either (1) manipulate men into doing what they want; or (2) manipulate stronger, more powerful men to make their men do what they want.
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@ lastmod
That’s a lie. For example….
No one said that “men who are married did the ‘right’ thing and men who are not did the ‘wrong’ thing.”
You lied. Again. As usual.
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Again you take my comments out of context….typical
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I quoted you exactly. Literally copy and paste. You claimed that someone claimed that “men who are married did the ‘right’ thing and men who are not did the ‘wrong’ thing”, which is a lie, and you know it’s a lie, which is why you can’t quote anyone making that statement.
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Its the context of the sphere Oscar. Men who are married did something right, men who are not did something wrong. Men who are married are good, while single men are “bad” or must be some “blue pilled” thing which is overused to apply to any situation now in this area.
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Show me where any individual here specifically stated that “men who are married did the ‘right’ thing and men who are not did the ‘wrong’ thing”.
If you can’t, then you’re lying.
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No man here is obligated to sell his property at a discount to help make another man happy.
And daughters are property
More traditional men have an obligation toward our forefathers, our last name etc and projecting all of that into the future.
You don’t do that at random or by telling your kids to marry down
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You sell your daughter to a man. Did you buy your wife from your father-in-law? Payment plan? Dowry for the loss of a ‘worker’ in his home? So you married up? Why would that matter if she is a debvout christian?
More traditional men are called caucks here
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Good luck with that
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“Not to mention the bizarre mindF&$@ that my ex undoubtedly went through wondering what might have been.”
I had a Christian girlfriend that I thought was ‘the one.’ Met her when I was 25 and she was20, almost 21; both of us young in our faith. I remember her saying to me that while she was swinging on a park swing set one day and talking to God about us, she said she told God, “I can’t marry him, he’s not successful.” Well, I wasn’t yet. I don’t know why she shared that with me, but I’ve never forgotten it because it hurt like hell. I was beginning to grind my way out and up after a slow start in my early twenties that included a significant setback. I finished my degree in Business, got commissioned by the Air Force and moved away from our hometown. In the years that followed, I attempted to maintain a long distance relationship with her, or at least I thought I was doing so. The idea was we’d get married when she finished her undergrad schooling. She finishes the undergrad, then decides she wants to go to law school right after it. Three years go by, I’m making some rank now, she comes to visit me in Oklahoma and Dear John’s me to my face. She was impressed to see all the progress, but she now wanted to work on her career and date around, i.e. ride the carousel. Some of her last words to me were, “This hurts so much, and if you find someone, I know I’ll be crazily jealous.” I was crushed. For three pain filled months I dealt with my broken heart which I thought was going to crush me, then I finally snapped out of it and got back on the Christian dating scene. Within one year I was married to a great girl that embodied all the other girl’s qualities, BUT was far more faithful and loyal to God and me. The point of this, I did get to see the gist of the rest of her story as the years went by. It was the classic progression: Degree>Law School>Chad & Brad>move to CA>More Chads & Brads>Law practice gets going, she gets in some sort of trouble and either gets disbarred, or comes very close to it>Hits the Wall>Post Wall>No marriage or kids (that I’m aware of)>I see her on Facebook years later, now 46, didn’t even recognize her she’d changed that much in her looks. My thought in the years since, and I don’t mean this in a gloating way, has been something along the lines of “How that must haunt you now in your fifties and looking back–What might have been?” That feminist life script, that is one rough script down line when the ‘chickens come home to roost.’ I’m sure it works out for a select few women that are able to make the jump from it as a world view to a more traditional view and relationship; however in my personal experience (the ladies I know), most do not ‘stick the landing’ in the way we think they might. The couple ‘landing stickers’ I know, have shared with me, “There was this guy back when I was X age…I think about him a lot…have a hard time not comparing my husband to him…I wonder about him and what/how he’s doing.”
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Once I saw the part about her going to law school, I winced. They all end up like that.
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Yeah. The minute she mentions “law school” or “lawyer,” it’s time to run like hell. Do.Not.Go.There…EVER.
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As an attorney, I advise all men to stay away from female attorneys.
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most do not ‘stick the landing’ in the way we think they might. The couple ‘landing stickers’ I know, have shared with me, “There was this guy back when I was X age…I think about him a lot…have a hard time not comparing my husband to him…I wonder about him and what/how he’s doing.”
Quite a few do “stick the landing” when you look at marriage rates and divorce rates. Marriage rates for college degree women are higher than for non-college (so few of them are never marrieds) and the divorce rates are lower than non-college, too. Of course there are still plenty of divorces — but less than any other kind of woman. And still plenty of never-married, but again less.
As for the “I didn’t marry the man I was most attracted to” issue, if that means a woman didn’t stick the landing, then virtually no woman does, because virtually no woman actually marries that man. That’s why sticking the landing generally refers to finding an acceptable man to marry after riding the carousel — not marrying the man you liked the best, or who, in your 20s, may have been the best candidate for marrying.
We have to be careful of projecting here, I think. College educated women’s marriage stats are the best of any demographic slice in terms of highest marriage rate and lowest divorce rate. It doesn’t mean they have “good Christian marriages” — of course not. Most men here would hate to be in marriages like those and would rather be single. But objectively they have stuck the landing.
Your friend there seems like a disaster — almost disbarred? Ugh. Myself and a few others here are lawyers, and that isn’t something that “just happens”. The average woman who becomes a lawyer doesn’t end up almost disbarred. Something seems to be more wrong with her than average, I’d say.
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College educated women’s marriage stats are the best of any demographic slice in terms of highest marriage rate and lowest divorce rate. It doesn’t mean they have “good Christian marriages” — of course not. Most men here would hate to be in marriages like those and would rather be single. But objectively they have stuck the landing.
If the measure of success is “didn’t get divorced”, then yeah, college educated women usually have “successful” and “good” marriages.
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“The average woman who becomes a lawyer doesn’t end up almost disbarred. Something seems to be more wrong with her than average, I’d say.”
It seemed to be something to do with money. Not sure. Here’s the Internet post about it.
License Status, Disciplinary and Administrative History
Below you will find all changes of license status due to both non-disciplinary administrative matters and disciplinary actions.
Date License Status Discipline Administrative Action
Present Resigned
3/11/2001 Resigned Resignation with charges pending 01-Q-00180
1/25/2001 Not Eligible To Practice Law in California Vol.inactive(tender of resign.w/charges) 00-Q-00180
1/10/2000 Not Eligible To Practice Law in California Suspended, failed to pass Prof.Resp.Exam 96-O-05560
7/15/1999 Active
3/29/1998 Discipline, probation; no actual susp. 96-O-05560
6/27/1997 Disciplinary charges filed in State Bar Court 96-O-05560
7/31/1995 Not Eligible To Practice Law in California Suspended, failed to pay Bar fees
7/31/1995 Not Eligible To Practice Law in California Admin Inactive/MCLE noncompliance
12/14/1992 Admitted to The State Bar of California
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RPB:
OK. Your last post explains it. Here’s what I can see happened.
She wasn’t keeping up with mandatory continuing legal education. She wasn’t registering properly. She wasn’t paying the fees required to keep an active license. I’d surmise she might have been practicing law while her license was suspended for not paying bar fees. That is called the unauthorized practice of law, it’s a big no-no, and it’s especially a big no no for lawyers who should f’ing know better.
That last thing is failure to pass professional responsibility exam. My guess is the state bar authority required her to take and pass a professional responsibility examination as a condition of reinstatement following suspension. She didn’t do it. So she got re-suspended.
Bar authorities don’t like it when lawyers don’t fulfill basic professional responsibilities like paying your fees and keeping your continuing legal ed credits current. It shows you’re cutting corners and flouting rules, and they don’t like it when you do that. They really don’t like it when they tell you once not to do it and then you keep on doing it, like your friend did here. She had chance after chance after chance to get this right, and she didn’t do it.
So that’s what was going on with her, I think.
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RPB:
And by the way, the last entry is that she resigned her license while charges were pending. I don’t know what the effect of that is in California. In most states, voluntarily turning in your law license while disciplinary charges are pending against you is “disbarment on consent” and it is disbarment for all intents and purposes. You can’t practice law again unless you petition for reinstatement and it’s hard to get reinstated.
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Dude. Saul Goodman totally pulled it off.
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“Almost disbarred” for a lawyer means you’re in a heap of trouble. “Almost disbarred” means a long suspension. That’s all but a career ender for most of us. You get suspended for a year, you’re probably not returning to the active practice of law when your suspension is up.
So, yeah, getting “almost disbarred” means she was doing some pretty bad stuff.
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Yeah the bar association usually gives you a lot of leeway for your first “foot fault” when it comes to bar fees or MCLE or whatever, but if you’re a repeat offender you’re in for a real problem with them. When I was a young lawyer one of the partners who was teaching me told me, in an aside one day, to always pay my bar fees no matter what — borrow to pay them if you had to, in extremis. Not worth dealing with the association over that. Luckily now you can do it all online anyway so it’s easy enough to do.
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“So, yeah, getting “almost disbarred” means she was doing some pretty bad stuff.”
So, at 25 Dear John’s me for her future law career, rides the carousel, hits the wall….10 years later, post-wall, career over, high N-count, probably struggling financially (another post indicated she had move back to her family in Ohio)…I wonder if she thought about me right around then? The good guy, now 40, married, two kids and a growing career, pretty good money, etc. I think we qualify as a ‘stereotypical’ outcome that the Manosphere talks about regularly. The Rober Frost poem comes to mind:
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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Frost would not equate this poem with the manosphere, or stereotypical outcomes.
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Fact is: you don’t know if you would have made the same decisions regarding your future if you had remained married to her.
I got the “I am mad because I had to threaten to leave/leave in order for you to change” lecture, several years after I went back to graduate school, got my PhD and was commissioned.
And, yes, at first my motivation was to get her back. In the end, I concluded that If I had to be a doctor and an army officer for her to love me, then she could kick rocks. Mychael married me when I was broke, and it was not yet a sure thing that I would get picked up for the scholarship, match to a great internship, etc. In fact, those days of living in the small apartment, her bringing me food in the bedroom while I studied for comps, barely being able to celebrate with a night out for sushi are some of the best days of my life.
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“I am mad because I had to threaten to leave/leave in order for you to change”
IME, any woman who makes regular use of this tactic is a manipulative beeyotch. My ex was a regular practicioner of this. Ironic, given her own unwillingness to change her own life trajectory that was a head-on collision course with a speeding freight train.
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Right.
Why didn’t I get to say this?
“if I had known there was a timeline of specific professional and financial successes I was going to be held to under threat of divorce, I would not have signed up.”
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This would seem to be relevant:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/308654/
Note the date of release: November 2011, almost 10 years ago.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The article was quite relevant at the time. Kate Bolick, a then- 38 year old never married woman, was one of the first to start writing about past regret, future plans, and the question: “What if it never happens for me? What if I never get married? What then?” This was one of the first groups of women running face first into the realization:
“Oh s#!t. There really aren’t any men left. That little thing they kept telling us that there’d always be men around – that wasn’t true, was it? So… what do I do now?”
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From the Article deti posted:
Translation: she wanted to keep riding the CC.
That was her ovaries screaming at her that she’d already expended almost 90% of her egg cells.
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/women-fertility-falls-lose-90-percent-eggs-30/story?id=9693015
CC confirmed!
So, she convinced an “exceptional” man to commit to her, dumped him to ride the CC some more, rode the CC too long, and failed to stick the landing.
This broad’s a walking, talking, breathing, living stereotype. And, if she eventually “settles for a ‘good enough’ mate”, may God help that man, because it sounds like Allan dodged a bullet.
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Yes, Kate Bolick simply was one of the girls who was left standing once the music stopped. She waited too long. Maybe the guy when she was 29 was too early for her — in her circles she could have waited a few more years until around 33 or so and likely still stuck the landing pretty well with a man she finds attractive. But she would have had to have switched gears to intentional mate selection, instead of remaining in “fun boyfriend”mode.
Again, most women do switch lanes — they do switch from looking for the fun boyfriend to intentionally looking for a husband type. This bears its own risks for the men they are seeking, of course, as we have all discussed a lot, but most do make the switch. It’s the minority, like Kate Bolick, who do not — they either do not think they need to, or they do not want to, transition from dating fun boyfriends until a suitable-for-marriage one presents himself in that form to dating husband types. In Bolick’s specific case, it appears to be a lack of desire — she prefers being single to being married to a husband type, if she couldn’t get a fun boyfriend who was also a suitable husband (having missed the one she did get back when she was 29 and “not ready”).
Hard to have any sympathy for Katye Bolick, it’s true. She made her own bed.
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Ten years from now, we might get the Tomi Lahren version of this article.
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Ten years from now, we might get the Tomi Lahren version of this article.
It will be more shrill, less articulate, less reflective, less self-aware, and will probably involve some tequila shot stories.
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So, you’re saying it’s gonna be epic manosphere fodder. Sweet!
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And this is why we need to educate the men. I’ve known several thirtysomething men that have wifed-up a thirtysomething, former (?) CC riders. In my blue pill days I thought, “How wonderful for them!” Now, the red pill thought in my mind is, “Dude, have you done your due diligence? Do you KNOW anything about her past at all, or just blowing it all off? Have you vetted her or just so lovestruck you can’t even think straight?” He’s posing in pics all over social media with his ‘trophy bride to be’ and the two appear to be living it up. She’s sporting one hell of a sh!t eating grin (I stuck the Landing y’all!), and you look like some clueless simp heading into god only knows what kind of future with your still good looking, but well worn woman of the world you got there.
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Note: Kate Bolick will turn 49 this year. As far as I can tell, she is still unmarried. In 2015 she published a memoir named “Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own”.
(Query whether someone who hasn’t even reached age 45 yet has enough experience to publish a memoir or that anyone would care about it. Then again, Barack Obama has published TWO memoirs…)
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Barack Obama has published 3 memoirs,😂😂
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My mistake. I suppose The Audacity of Hope wasn’t actually a memoir. It just read like one to me. Very self-congratulatory. So yeah, two memoirs so far.
Of course the latest Obama release was actually Volume 1 of 2. So in essence, a man not even 60 years old has written three memoirs. The first, he wrote and published while still relatively young.
That man lives to talk about himself.
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You’d think he was Churchill, or something.
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Then again, Barack Obama has published TWO memoirs…)
Unlike Barack Obama, Kate isn’t on the Deep State’s payroll (at least not as far as we know).
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The ecconmic elite love feminism because it doubled the labor pool and cut the value of labor in half
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When all is said and done, how many memoirs will Barry publish?
How many will Hillary publish?
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That picture is just downright creepy, FarmBoy.
OMG…
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My experience was quite a bit different from Scott’s and Nova’s. All of this is hindsight retrospect, which we all know is 20/20.
My wife is 4 years older than I am. We met when I was 26 and she 30; married when I was 28 and she 32. I had just gotten my career started and making OK money. She was 18 months out from a breakup of a long term relationships. A quintessential “leftover” in full on panic mode having just turned 30. She was in Marriage/Baby Defcon 1 with a bio-clock roaring like a freight train. I was so thirsty I would have drunk sea water and p!ss, it was THAT bad. She was (and is) very physically attractive. I knew her dad casually; he introduced us. We got rapidly involved. She feigned attraction to me to get a husband; I pulled out all the stops to date one of the most physically attractive women I’d ever met. We married because I got the “what am I to you/I want to get married” talk a year in.
We’ve made it work, barely. After a full 15 years of maltreatment and crappy duty starfish (and a couple months after stumbling across Roissy’s old blog), I had hit a breaking point. I was just done. I told Mrs. deti she needed to change, now, or I was seeing a divorce lawyer the next business day. Truth be told, two of the main reasons she changed, and I stayed, was because at the time we had an 11 year old daughter and an almost 5 year old son. Their parents’ divorce would have absolutely destroyed them. As it was, those 15 years and the followup aftermath almost destroyed me. I took the brunt of the damage, from which I am still recovering 10 years out.
Unvarnished truth is always hard to face, but it must be faced if we’re to get past it. The truth is that if I had known in 1994 what I learned in 2011, Mrs. deti and I wouldn’t have made it 6 months a couple and we never would have married. I know it sounds haughty and presumptuous, but Red Pilled me wouldn’t have put up with one tenth of the crap she dished at me. (And, yeah, I’m still a wee bit salty about that.) Had we no children, I am sure I would have divorced her at year 15 shortly after the Day of Reckoning. I think if we had never had children, she would have divorced me by year 5.
What it’s showed me is that the prime purpose of marriage is to support children and get them where they need to be. Second, it’s showed me what happens when a Blue pilled simp marries a desperate woman. Marriage happens for all the wrong reasons – desperation for acceptance and a husband to support the kids she wants; desperation for decent sex, hell, for ANY sex. Low to no attraction, poor relationship skills, not making my wants and needs clear for fear of rejection; tolerating intolerable treatment.
Hopefully, someone will read this, recognize themselves in it, and head it off at the pass before you get committed to the trail.
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Don’t anyone here think that this is some kind of Red Pill success story. Let me disabuse you of that right now. This happened because I finally got a little self respect and said “I don’t have to take this sh!t” and she had the character to do what was necessary to keep her marriage and care for her children. She could just as easily have dug in her heels, in which case a couple of my professional acquaintances would have a good chunk of my money right now and case files full of sordid details and boiling resentments.
That Day of Reckoning was a fight that should have happened long before promises were made, earnings commingled and marital property accumulated. And certainly before young lives were created. All you’re really reading about up there is two people putting their heads down and doing what had to be done for promises made, for children’s futures, and for futures that would be somewhat better together and almost certainly worse apart. Before the sex rev, millions of men and women did exactly that – so no one who does it is a hero. I’m not and Mrs. deti isn’t.
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A man doesn’t benefit, in a legal sense, by sticking out a bad marraige
The sooner he bails, the better off he’ll be in court
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I have two first cousins – the only first cousins I have. They are by my uncle – my mother’s brother. They had a tumultuous marriage. I remember being a very young kid and seeing them fighting when visiting at their home or them at our home.
In 1976 when I was 8 years old, my uncle and his first wife divorced. At the time, my cousins – his children – were 7 (daughter) and 5 (son). She left him and took the kids. Her infidelity was probably involved. He said come home right now. She said no. He said “OK, divorce it is then”. And it was a nasty divorce. They became friends like 20 years later, but for a long time there, the two of them downright hated each other. Hate is not too strong a word.
I saw what it did to my cousins. Depressed and anxious before they’ve even hit puberty. Angry. Sullen. Poor academic performance. She became promiscuous in high school. He became apathetic and lethargic. They both grew up hating themselves. She grew up learning how to use and manipulate men to get what she wanted. He grew up without even a fundamental understanding of girls and women.
When she turned 21, she underwent elective tubal ligation because she didn’t want children, ever. I remember her saying “I’m not bringing children into this world.” Her mother hated her and favored her son. We could all see it. So, my cousin grew up hating herself. He became a mama’s boy.
Each of them have two failed marriages and are currently single. He had one daughter by his second wife. He has a girlfriend and works as a mechanic. He says he’ll never marry again. He’s now 49.
She first married a man she was dating – he wanted to marry because his mom was dying of cancer, so she agreed because she felt bad. They got married. Mom went into remission. They divorced a year later. Her second marriage was to a trust fund kid. They got divorced because they just “couldn’t get along”. She works for a state agency. She’s now 51.
Neither of them can create or sustain interpersonal relationships. They can handle only the most superficial, surface type relationships – even with close family. They can’t seem to let anyone close enough to them to keep an intimate relationship like a marriage going. They can’t roll with the punches or give/take or compromise or see a future. To them, relationships have no futures – they always end. Because the most important one to them during their formative years ended in a spectacular crash and burn.
I guess I just didn’t want that for my kids.
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A good man – very unselfish.
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A good man – very unselfish.
BS. No I’m not. I just did what had to be done.
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ok – not a good man – but a better man than I am Gunga Din!
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I guess I just didn’t want that for my kids.
Exactly.
In my experience, looking around at how peers live, this is the main reason why divorce rates are so low among my peers: the kids impact. These folks want their kids to do as well as they can. Not every single one of them is like Amy Chua level Tiger Mother type of scenario, but even if they are not “kidsmaxing” like that, they want very much to avoid adverse impacts if they at all can. This tends to be a significant factor, from what I can see in peers, in what keeps merely “content” marriages together, especially when they hit patches that destroy most marriages in other SES (and even a fair few in their own SES).
There’s no question my divorce had a negative impact on my son in various ways. It has formed him, it is pretty much all he has ever known (he was 3 when we split) so he has only scant memories of us being together, but it’s still something that created a great deal of strain and stress on him and has created negativity in various ways I am certain. His mother moved him around a lot for work (first to Canada for a while, then to NYC — I traveled to see him a couple times a month and/or flew him here during those years), but then he was back here for the last 3 years of HS before he went off to college. Thankfully he has avoided major pathologies so far, although it remains to be seen how actual relationship formation goes in the years ahead once college is finished with. We will see what the future brings for him.
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@ Cameron
Kipling rocks.
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If I was a baby in my mother’s womb, and a genie came to me and granted me one wish it would be
“I want my parents to be married to each other on the day I am born, and to continue to be married throughout my life.”
This is the most powerful predictor of success on every dimension. And it cuts across all racial, SES and other demographic lines. It is the formula to set your children up to win.
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@ Scott
My family went through civil war, repression, immigration, and poverty, and my siblings and I came out of all of that successfully because my parents were married before we were conceived, and stayed married until my dad died.
But, you’re not allowed to say that, because it hurts people feewings.
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Very sad story. The fruits of divorce can be awful.
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I believe morality is ecconmic based
Low end of the curve? Got nothing to protect so no reason not to do short term fun/ bad decisions
Have a sh!t ton of money? You can afford to loose half and still live high on the hog.
Folks in the middle ( lower middle, middle middle, upper middle) have things to protect but not enough cash to waste and still live the good life.
With that it, makes sense that you would see more marriage and less divorce in the various middle classes. They need to combine resources and they need to protect those resources and face the most social stigmas
Not sure how that really plays out with the really wealthy folks. Mostly because of the ages involved. I know their kids tend to be UMC vs upper class
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