Why are upper class marriages more egalitarian yet less prone to divorce?
Readership: All
Length: 2,300 words
Reading Time: 8 minutes
Introduction
Elspeth asked me a question a while back, which I thought would benefit from a more detailed response.
She wrote,
“I actually popped back in here because I wondered Novaseeker’s take on [this page from American Compass: Let them eat daycare], which I find fascinating for a number of reasons. It really speaks to the fracture in our culture that the more education and money people acquire, the more they reject the more traditional, patriarchal model of marriage and family. If you just look at the money, it seems counterintuitive, which leaves the education factor as a major contributor to the disintegration of the type of family structure in which children most thrive.”
My first impression was to think that the author and publisher must be Woke. But upon further contemplation, it is indeed striking that, based on various data, higher educated people (generally higher earning) tend to…
- Have children almost always when married (and not otherwise).
- Embrace egalitarian sex roles within marriages.
- Have the lowest divorce rates.
It likewise appears that lower educated people (generally lower earning) tend to…
- Have children more frequently without being married.
- When married, have more traditional sex roles in their marriages.
- Have higher divorce rates.
Overall, it seems clear that upper-middle (and higher) class marriages (which I will refer to here as UMC/+ Marriages) are more egalitarian and more feminized yet less prone to divorce, while lower middle (and lower) class marriages (which I will refer to here as LMC/- Marriages) tend to be more patriarchal, yet more prone to divorce.
In fact, the data are even worse than this, when one takes into account family formation. In that data, the percentage of kids raised in intact families by “class” is compared. However, that data looks at “couples” only — in lower SES segments, single parenthood is much more common. Because of this, the data concerning how people who aren’t in the couples category are doing, with respect to breadwinning in the lower levels, dramatically overstates the difference, I think, because it omits the data that relates to the children that are raised outside stable couples in those classes — situations where there isn’t any “intact patriarchal model” at all, because there isn’t an intact family of any kind.
This does, indeed, break down by the mother’s education levels, married and unmarried, as seen in this article from EconoFact: Widening Socioeconomic Differences in Childrens Family Structure. And, the data also “leaves out” the highly educated high-income people who are not coupled, or do not have children, too. So it skews on that side, too, although the overall tendency is for uncoupled UMC and higher people, who are not divorced, not to have children regardless of their sex.
In general, all of this tends to undermine what we believe about Patriarchy and Headship, where we would expect that couples of any SES category who are following a patriarchal headship model to have higher marriage rates, lower divorce rates, and a more stable family life than couples who eschew patriarchy, headship, and any sex roles in marriage. Is there an explanation for this?
The Secular Life Script Works for Successful Secular Outcomes
The UMC/+ Marriages tend to result from the common life success script that we have discussed quite a bit at Sigma Frame. This is the life script that emphasizes college and, in many cases, some post-graduate education, career formation, traction, travel and personal development in the 20s, with marriages taking place around age 30, and child-bearing in the early to mid-30s.
Key elements of this script, when it comes to marriage, family formation, and children are:
- Avoidance of children prior to marriage (and aborting if necessary)
- Income sufficient to source either housing in top school districts or elite private schools
- Career traction for both members of the couple to finance that income (outside of cases where the man has a truly high income)
- High parental investment (particularly time) per child relative to past parenting methods
- High amounts of “enrichment” activities/experiences for children of all ages, which are often very expensive
These life choices tend to result in positive external/secular/material results for the people who can manage them (as discussed in the next section below) and who wish to pursue them. That is, they tend to result in increased income and earning capacity, which makes for more attractive candidates for marriage from a secular perspective. They also tend to facilitate the sourcing of top school districts or elite private schooling, which tends to lead to a higher percentage of external/secular/material “results” in the children (albeit with a significant fail rate, as there always is with children in any scenario).
Who is it that is successful in pursuing this life path, which leads to more stable than average families and marriages?
ADIEU skews heavily towards the Upper Middle Class
Not everyone is equally well-suited to execute the secular life script successfully.
In a previous post, I explained why Sticking the Landing is for the Elite (2021 May 10). Women who are UMC or higher, and are able to stick the landing, have the following traits:
- Attractiveness / Looks
- Discipline
- Intelligence / Smarts
- Education
- Upbringing
All else kept equal, people who have more of the ADIEU characteristics will tend to reach more successful outcomes, as determined by the secular life script, and external/secular/material standards, because these characteristics all serve to facilitate success in that life path.
The Rise of the Secular Life Script Has Weakened Christianity Substantially among the ADIEU
In the relatively recent path, the life script for secularly upwardly-mobile people did not openly conflict with traditional Christian ideas about sex, family formation and marital sex roles. With the social revolution of the period from 1965-1990, that dramatically changed.
The primary change was the vastly increased emphasis on women’s education and financial independence as a requirement for the upwardly-mobile life script. This conflicted with Christian sexual morals by postponing marriage, which resulted in a massive increase in extra-marital sex among Christians. It also conflicted with Christian ideas about marital sex roles, because the new upwardly mobile script featured substantial female incomes as a part of the upwardly mobile familial trajectory in most cases, and this trend tended to make most marriages egalitarian because income egalitarianism generally leads to social egalitarianism in marriage.
The Christian response to this has been varied. Much of Christianity has tacitly accepted the new secular life script, and all that goes along with it (including delayed marriage, massively increased fornication, smaller family sizes and marital egalitarianism), turning a rather studied blind eye when necessary. A smaller group within Christianity has redoubled its emphasis on traditional marriage roles and Christian patriarchy, but most typically where there is not a substantial male income available (and this is not common, because such incomes are not, in general, common) this approach comes at the expense of the secular upwardly mobile script.
Because of this, the UMC/ADIEU/elite class has become both less Christian and, when it remains Christian, much less morally orthodox. This is the case, even leaving aside the secularizing influence of university education (which is, of course, substantial). The kind of Christianity that is practiced generally in most UMC/+ Marriages is not generally morally orthodox when it comes to sex (particularly the couple’s sexual history outside of marriage), procreation/family size and sexual roles in marriage, and there are plenty of people in UMC/+ Marriages who have simply left Christianity altogether. This can happen due to the conflict between the morally orthodox Christianity of their upbringing and the life script they wish to pursue, their disinterest in any other forms of Christianity, the secularization of their university educations, or the pervasive influence of the social culture of their similarly-educated peers when it comes to the kinds of issues on which Christianity and the secular life script conflict.
For those with further interest in these kinds of issues, Ross Douthat, the “house conservative” at The New York Times, has written about some of the challenges we face in countering the trend of de-Christianization among the social class that has the most stable marriage and family life today.
Stability, Divorce, and the Golden Handcuffs Effect
Of course, stable marriages are not necessarily happy ones.
That is, the fact that a marriage fulfills the success track of the secular life script in external/material/secular terms does not mean that the husband and wife are emotionally, sexually, and spiritually engaged, fulfilled and nourished in these marriages. In fact, there have been at least some studies suggesting that egalitarianism in marriages tends to suppress sexual satisfaction in them. My own guess is that a fair number of these marriages are average to below average in marital satisfaction. But it does not appear to increase the divorce rate — the divorce rate for this group is the lowest overall.
Why is this the case? Why doesn’t this group divorce more, if it is no happier than other married demographics?
Generally speaking, in my view, having observed this group for decades as a newcomer to it myself, the basic reason can be described as the “golden handcuffs effect”.
In other words, the upper middle class striver set tends to be in a very particular situation in terms of household income. That income tends not to be so high as to obviate any negative financial impacts of divorce, but also not low enough such that the loss of income does not have massive changes in lifestyle on both spouses.
For example, an upper middle couple in the Bay Area or Boston may have a combined household income of $400k (let’s say $200k per spouse). If that couple divorces, the main income effect is child support for the non-custodial parent, but the diminution of lifestyle is felt massively by both spouses. In a place like SF Bay, the difference in lifestyle between a household income of $200k and $400k is massive — in many cases, it will drop one or both spouses out of the upper middle set, because in these larger metros (where these kinds of couples are concentrated to begin with), the income bar is higher for entry into the UMC housing areas and the like.
For a couple with lower household income, the financial pain of divorce is also significant, but for the most part they remain in the same general SES category, whereas for the UMC, in the expensive places where they tend to congregate, a divorce can move them down from UMC to MC simply due to the fact that the UMC is mostly comprised, in such places, of married couples with twice their income. This kind of drop in lifestyle (and status) is particularly traumatic for people who, after all, have constructed their entire approach to life around being upwardly-mobile strivers. It’s therefore an outcome that many of these couples will actively bend over backwards to avoid, even when the marriages are of average or below average satisfaction.
A related factor is the impact on children. As noted above, a key part of the secular life script for the upwardly mobile is their focus on setting up their kids. As noted, this is one of the main reasons they avoid having children prior to marrying. Once married, they similarly tend to avoid getting divorced, for similar reasons — to do so, even in a so/so or somewhat unsatisfying marriage, blows up the entire life approach that these people have pursued for a decade or more, of setting up their own lives so that they can set up their kids to outcompete the kids of other people. Divorce generally undermines that goal substantially, especially when the painful income depleting effect on this class in divorce is taken into account.
Overall, then, the particular income level of these couples, in the context of the hyper-expensive places they tend to congregate, and their heavy emphasis on setting up their kids for similar secular/external/material successes, tends to make divorce much less common among this group. It would appear that the overall happiness of upper level income families depends more on lifestyle and economic status, and therefore, marital happiness is less of an issue in the stability of these marriages compared to other population demographics.
Conclusions
In the end, of course, secular outcomes are of this world, and as Christians, we are to be in the world, and not of the world. It therefore stands to reason that when the world’s criteria and requirements for “successful” marriages, seen in the worldly sense of family formation, family stability, divorce avoidance, and secular success for children, are at odds with Christian moral orthodoxy, the lives of Christians, in a worldly sense, will suffer if they adhere to moral orthodoxy for themselves.
That is, we should expect Christians to fail in these areas if the standards for success in them are established by the secular culture in a way that is at odds with Christian morals. We may very well live in an odd time in which it is possible for people who are highly immoral (the UMC/+) to have the external trappings of what those of a previous era would have associated with a moral family life, whereas Christians will struggle mightily to do so because both parties to the marriage are free to act as they wish, and outside that immoral group, the incentives are not the same to avoid out of wedlock births and divorces. The key for Christians is not whether they are marrying, or whether they manage to stay together in marriages where upwardly mobile secular people would, but whether they obey God themselves, in what they do in their own lives, in terms of the things that are in their own individual control.
Related
- Σ Frame (Lexet): The U.S. Census Bureau sanctions Divorce (2020 January 25)
- Σ Frame (Novaseeker): The Upper Middle Class Career Life Script Model (2021 May 17)
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I think the UMC marriages are more stable in spite of being more equal. Agree many aren’t happy. The women at my job notice how affectionate wife and I are over the phone, the jokes, the “I love you”‘s, the terms of endearment. A lot of their relationships seem cold and business like.
Been around the lower classes my whole life. Their marriages often end because someone does something awful. The men cheat, they beat the woman, they abuse drugs or alcohol. Relatively less of the UMC “She’s not happy” for some stupid reason. She’s not happy because he’s banging her bff, or because of her black eye, or because her meth habit takes their money. Sometimes the women do this too. Yeah, an egalitarian marriage doesn’t give tingles but she’s less likely to get cheated on or hit. Also UMC people simply have more self control — one reason they are UMC.
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Right — the UMC “have their act together” more, and so they tend not to have physical abuse as commonly, and for other kinds of issues that they do have, they tend to weather marital problems better.
But there are also powerful incentives for them to do that financially. Powerful enough, in fact, that things like affairs, even long-standing ones, often do not result in divorces in UMC marriages where they do in lower SES marriages. It’s the handcuffs and effect on kids factors, both.
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You might find this interesting, Nova as it touches on what we have been talking about. earlier today I heard an interview with Sohrab Ahmari about his new book. Being a devout Catholic Christian, Ahmari referenced a story in his book where he describes his nightmare for his son (the boy is only 4 now). The nightmare was that his son would be wildly successful but devoid of any spiritual depth, inclination, or truth. I found an article referencing that, and I thought I would share it because it resonates so well within me. It offers a crystal clear distinction between the values of the UMC/UC as you describe them and what Christians should value.
It just works. Of course, Ahmari is wildly successful himself, so he has his work cut out for him, raising his son in those circles.
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Right — it works.
Ahmari is interesting in that he understands that you can’t have that, as a general matter, unless you completely change the culture around from the top down. That’s the basis of his disagreement with David French. French is sanguine about the culture of individualism as long as he has the opportunity to live as he likes and to seek proselytes. Ahmari, by contrast, believes that unless you control the heights of the culture, you will always be in a losing position, in terms of facing the nightmare of his son’s dystopian future (from a Christian perspective). French thinks that the liberty-based approach of America’s past can work again, whereas Ahmari believes (rightly, in my view) that the present situation was always inevitable given the liberty culture and its values, once the song played to its end.
In many ways one can note that Ahmari’s view is more Catholic, while French’s is more Protestant, and I think there is some truth to that. But the issue runs deeper, I think. It has to do with how committed one is to the essential viability of America’s experiment in “ordered liberty”. Again, here French sees a workable equilibrium in the past settlement that was reached, whereas Ahmari sees that equilibrium itself as having always been unstable and under pressure, in an “interior” way, due to the underlying values of the liberty-based order — liberty will out, in other words, eventually, and will dominate all other social values, since it is the underlying logic of the entire structure, so you have to fight the problem there, at the root, rather than fighting the symptoms.
Of course, fighting the problem at the root is basically impossible today, while tinkering around the edges remains somewhat possible, even though the scope for doing that continues to shrink as well. So in that sense “Frenchism” retains a limited continuing viability in a practical sense that “Ahmarism” does not — but even there, Ahmari’s critique is that by tinkering around the edges and shoring up the existing system, you are really just digging your own grave because the logic of the system is set against you. French doesn’t believe that, obviously — he’s still into the idea that the American “ordered liberty” concept can work. Ahmari disagrees, and therein lies the difference between the two, and it is deep, stark and quite bitter (if you have seen them debate, it isn’t exactly cordial).
Of course, it’s also personally undoubtedly much easier for Ahmari, being an Iranian immigrant, to distance himself from that “dream” of the American experiment than it is for French, with his background in the US military. In this regard I remember well the sermon that a former Orthodox priest of mine gave the Sunday after Obergefell was decided — the basic theme was “America’s experiment in ordered liberty has failed” — this coming from a man who had spent much of his life as a military chaplain himself.
We won’t avoid this issue from the ground up — Ahmari is surely correct there, I think.
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I woke up this morning thinking, “I don’t know if it gets any better than this. I am thankful.”
I suppose more riches might make it so. But I can live with the deplorableness of patriarchy.
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This is most likely due to an innate personality trait/flavor that makes you happy in just about situation you find yourself.
I am this way. My maternal grandmother was too. Every good thing that happens to me is perceived as way over what I expected and therefore I experience gratitude for things that most people take for granted.
I can’t give myself credit for this. I did not develop it or cultivate it in any way. I have always been like that.
It remains my belief that contentment is a state that is naturally difficult for women to achieve (see the curse) but it is no impossible. (Men have their own curse and subsequent commandment difficulties). If you find a woman who is truly low maintenance (is happy no matter what) you keep that one. This is gold.
No matter how hot/pretty/good in bed/high income/high education, if she does not have this trait, you will be miserable the minute she gives into her cursed nature.
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I was never content by nature growing up, but I changed.
I’m grateful and feel blessed every day too. I’m a very happy person and have been since about age 19. With a few early marital hiccups.
Part of changing is just a decision to change.
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Just to add, I think a lot of the key to happiness is habit pattern via an “attitude of gratitude”. Habits are powerful.
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Me too – always been that way. When I got new shoes as a little boy I was so happy I slept with them on. Saturday I was excited to find a nice pair of pants and shoes at a thrift store for $6. And my oldest son flew home from Utah so I was incredibly happy all weekend.
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In the absence of a profound religious or traumatic index experience people do not make global/personality level changes. (Christians might call this “heart level”)
And even when they do, it presents itself as merely a modification of a previously maladaptive trait. Because the organism really wants to hold on to it. It’s like a pool ball traveling across the table really fast that lightly grazes another one— it continues in the same general direction just slightly off its original trajectory.
When the water seeps into a chunk of granite and freezes and splits the rock, it is neither the waters fault nor the rocks fault. They are doing what they do.
Secular therapies are also a parlor trick of outward behavior change agent and the person usually falls back into their real self 6-18 months later.
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I have only myself to go by.
We already know chemicals are powerful…even a person’s underlying chemistry can change (with hormones and so forth). A girl on hormones can be a different person than not. Testosterone levels and estrogen levels change men.
I made a decision to change 30 years ago, and did change.
Is anyone the same person they were at 20 when they are 45, for that matter?
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Mike will say (and has, many times) I’m the happiest person he knows.
His friends tell him he is lucky to have found such a happy content person.
I can tell you this isn’t the way it was growing up.
I lived in a very unhappy home. I don’t remember a moment of joy in childhood.
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Thinking further, I did find joy in church (usually solitary joy), in my teen years.
That might be where I learned joy (through the holy spirit).
So perhaps it was a spiritual epiphany that kind of enveloped the rest of my life after I left home. I do think habit pattern is powerful, however. I do not agree it’s a parlor trick. One can change one’s happiness chemicals over time, just like other chemicals. And it goes the other way too.
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Liz while I’m not doubting Gods role, notice you were discontent/unhappy under bad conditions. For a person discontent under good conditions I think many will continue to be that way.
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I’m not sure, Cameron. Mike has read up a lot about happiness. Think it was this book:
That talks about changing one’s happiness baseline.
I have it but haven’t read it. Has been a long time since we’ve discussed this book but as I recall there are real life examples.
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Yeah. That sounds like me. I actually could’ve written that.
We’ve not gone without financially since around year 3 of our 27 years. In that regard it’s been fortunate.
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My experience is that this doesn’t change much in most people, in terms of their base life orientation.
I do think that some people are more malleable than others in this respect, and that malleability is part of their own psychological bag-of-tricks as well. Most people, in my experience, are not that malleable, which is why most people are not very adept at making major personality changes in life, even when they try to do so.
Behaviors are a different story. Behaviors can be changed. Attitudes are harder, and that’s where it gets to the malleability trait I think — some people can change these and others (most) really can’t.
One of the main problems is that the people with the changeability trait tend to dominate the discussion in the United States, because we have an overwhelming cultural bias in the United States towards overt happiness (aka “up-beat-ness”) and extroversion, which are both personality traits and, in most people, not very subject to change.
This is why in my view it’s more profitable to get people to focus on specific behaviors that may be self-sabotaging, and cut those down (which is also often hard, but doable), and then see how people are doing when they have healthier behaviors. They may not be up-beat/sunny/grateful/overtly-happy personae, by nature, but they are at least not self-sabotaging. And of course, there’s a difference between being someone who doesn’t have a naturally up-beat and sunny disposition, on the one hand, and someone who is depressed, on the other — in our culture we tend to confuse the two, which is unfortunate but typical for our culture.
My family historically comes from a culture (the UK) which has a great regard for eccentrics and curmudgeons, and a simultaneous intolerance for self-pity which is nevertheless coupled with a great suspicion of overly up-beat personae (this is common in many European cultures), so my baseline is more along those lines than it is along “classically American” lines. I remember when I first lived in California in my early 20s, and everyone there was so upbeat and sunny all the time and it struck me then as such pretentious, put-on nonsense, such fakeness. But I have long since realized that some people really are, strangely, like that dispositionally, as odd as that is for me personally.
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No one would ever describe me as upbeat. Friendly, frank, and resolute, yes. Contented with my life and mad about my man? Yes.
But not upbeat or bubbly. I don’t think happiness or contentment necessarily translate as upbeat or bubbly. Scott doesn’t strike me as having an upbeat temperament either. He can correct me on that as it’s just a hunch. Never met him in person.
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Novaseeker, I’m sure people are different and some more malleable and so forth.
But consider some things we know (or at least, I think we can all agree on).
Social media has made people less happy (comparison is the thief of joy, and all that).
If it is true in one direction, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be true in the other.
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I think people are generally programmed to look for problems because that’s part of what allows us to survive in challenging environments. In the wilderness, fat dumb and happy isn’t exactly a recipe for longevity. Which can cause unhappiness. So I try to focus on happy things. Joyous music, gratitude, and so forth. Sometimes I have to take breaks from politics it’s just too depleting.
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Agreed. Though I am generally upbeat.
Think about what it’s like to come home to an angry/depressed/resentful/nagging person all the time. A few folks might know what that is like. Does this have an impact on one’s outlook over time? I think it usually does. It’s the same (in the opposite sense) being around a person who is content/happy/grateful/helpful.
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Ten of us living in a 1400 sq ft home with a 200 sq ft edition. It would be nice to have more bedrooms but I am grateful for good wife and kids. The things I want most for my children can’t be bought.
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@ Cameron, Liz (anyone else with FL connections):
Just popped in to leave a link to my newest review. I don’t know if your kids have read this book Cameron. Believe it or not I didn’t read it in school. But it’s worth a read:
https://readingbetweenthelife.com/2021/06/17/a-land-remembered/
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Elspeth I haven’t. I think some of the older kids did. My sister is a big Flotida history buff.
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I think one of the biggest factors is just age.
UMCers are older. How many big life changes do people go into (voluntarily) after age 45?
People over 45 tend to be more risk adverse I think.
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I think that’s true for the older ones, but the younger ones also have low divorce rates. That is, between the time they marry (around 30) and 45 they aren’t getting divorced at the same rate in those years, either.
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That’s fair….but how many people have reached that income category before 35?
Probably not many. I suspect the below 40 400k family income crowd is very very small.
Those are extreme outliers, after 40 it is more common (though still a small percentage).
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Yes I think it would make sense to distinguish between the two groups. They would have different kinds of motives at different ages.
It would be interesting to look at why the people who eventually reach the UMC in their mid-40s (and then don’t divorce) got there as non-UMCs without divorcing. It seems misleading to me to include them in the “UMC’s have lower divorce rate” stat if they are not UMCs when they are in the “prime divorce years” of 35-45, but I am sure that they are rolled in. Another thing, I suppose, which lessens the meaningfulness of the statistic.
Ideally, we would need stats for (1) people who were UMC at marriage and continued to be, and (2) people who were not UMC at marriage and then became UMC later on and (3) people who were not UMC at marriage, and never became UMC. Then we would need to look at the divorce rates between the 3 groups and determine what made group (2) different from group (3) in terms of divorce rate (which we know would be the case because UMCs have a lower divorce rate).
If I had to guess, I would hypothesize that it has something to do with the same set of “success factors” which resulted in them eventually becoming UMC, which, if true, would indicate that its the presence of these factors that will tend to lead both to lower divorce rates and eventual UMC status. It could be, for example, that the innate personality traits that led some people to become UMC faster (at marriage) vs later on (by 45) are present in both groups (1) and (2), but in different measures or perhaps coupled together with different “starting points” or what have you, such that it’s the same underlying personality drivers for both groups that are present, and this would explain the depressed divorce rate for group (2), even though it was not UMC throughout the prime divorce years.
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I’ve been exposed to many 20-30 year-old UMC couples and my friends have told me about their friends in this boat. The typical story I am hearing is they drive cars they can’t afford, live in houses that are 2x what’s reasonable, pay crushing property tax rates, have the best vacations and home decorations. They send their kids to expensive custom learning daycares. And they’re totally trapped in debt. The wife knows this fantasy bologna life style ends the day she divorces.
A same age relative bought the most expensive Lexus SUV to drive to a job that pays less per year than what the SUV cost. Traded it in 6 months later and got a 20k car with better claimed fuel mileage. I tried to explain to the family that they lost 30+k on that vehicle they couldn’t pay for — not only a few dollars in gas. Now a year later they are building a home with nearly 20k per year property tax. They have good jobs but don’t make more than me and my ex did.
I lived in 1 of these neighborhoods for awhile. My neighbor used to joke and tell stories that half the people that were totally broke living there pushing up this fantasy life. Neighbors had bought 2 loaded GMC Yukons 7 months later with no plates. From what I’ve seen, if you can’t tell your wife “no”, then you’re working for free. Many of my friends wives have got them to buy half million dollar homes.
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This has been my experience too. The world is filled with debt laden poseurs in this crowd.
When Mike was delivering pizzas, the largest homes in the richest neighborhoods tipped the worst. Sometimes they wrote checks (because back then the checks were the only way to use debt, pizza guys didn’t take credit cards).
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To many people, debt appears to be more addictive than crack cocaine or methamphetamine. I’ll never understand this; the stress that debt puts on your life, the fact that it robs you of wealth and future stability, and that it simply enables others to become wealthy from your pain and financial insecurity should make it something to want to avoid as much as possible. Maybe it’s just my personal values, but I can’t imagine any material possession or status marker that would make a lifetime of crushing debt worth the investment.
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“When Mike was delivering pizzas, the largest homes in the richest neighborhoods tipped the worst.”
Liz, I can relate. I did valet work in Dallas. My first night, my boss told me not to expect a good tip from customers with high-end vehicles. He was right. Our best tippers were either regulars or couples with normal family cars. It didn’t take me long to realize why.
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I have discretely gone behind my Dad, when he has insisted on paying, and left more for the tip. He has lots but is very stingy.
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Heh, Mike delivered pizzas in Plano, TX.
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Small world. I valeted up there quite a bit as well, mostly at Shops at Legacy.
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Yes, of course, but this is true everywhere.
The folks in Manhattan and SF Bay are also spending most of their high incomes. They save in 401Ks and spend the rest, and yes they are leveraged to the hilt. They aren’t worried about not being able to service the debt, so that’s what they do. That approach is not ubiquitous, but it is very common in this class.
I would say, though, that people who don’t actually have a UMC income but are trying to look like they do are not actually UMC.
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Which is a good thing! By spending their high incomes, the UMC are keeping the LMC/- employed by purchasing their goods and services. And these goods and services can be just about anything from vacations, to jewelry, maid service, home furnishings, etc.
They are leveraged to the hilt, but I believe a good portion of that debt is in appreciating assets such as their primary residence and a second vacation home which are located in desirable areas. In the long run, they will have made more money and become wealthier because they are able to service the debt.
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That’s what they think. The ugly reality about the fragility of 401Ks and IRAs is very soon going to hit a couple of generations of people like a kick in the gut.
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Right, and that is true as long as they can service the debt, and they don’t have a lot of credit card or other very high interest debt. The debt tends to be tied up in homes and cars — very conspicuous consumption — which then frees up cash after debt service to spend on other things, but they tend to have low credit card balances, if any.
It works unless something bad happens (uninsured illness, job loss without similar income replacement), in which case it falls apart, but the whole thing is based on a track record of success — that’s the entire foundational assumption behind the life plan, so of course if that assumption proves false in a particular case, the plan fails, as we would expect it to do.
Many of these people are substantially leveraged with educational debt as well (most of them from law school and med school and B-school have a mountain of debt from that), but it similarly doesn’t bother them as long as they have jobs that provide income well in excess of debt service. Again, this all serves to limit their life options (they are handcuffed to their jobs, in effect), but this doesn’t bother them because these people generally want the highest paying, highest stress, highest profile/trajectory jobs in any case.
In other words, it’s an entirely differently-oriented life, from soup to nuts.
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Nice! A very encouraging essay to read. Honestly, I can’t begin to tell you how oppressive it’s been lately when it comes to this subject. Mainly because there’s this female Atheist on my Boss’s podcast who’s my age (34). And while I still have the hope of getting married despite the odds, so long as I just keep working on staying in shape and building a financial foundation… If you hear her speak, it’s always so negative.
She’s constantly bringing up the divorce rate and then, literally said, “I believe a majority of people are miserable in their marriages.” My boss and I immediately disagreed and surmised that her perspective was the result of the people she associated with. Meaning, if all you do is hang out with miserable people, or had the misfortune to see nothing but miserable people in these kind of marriages, of course you’re going to think that.
Not to mention… I really think people use the divorce rate and their parent’s mistakes as an excuse to indulge in non-traditional lifestyles. So pretty much, whether they end up in horrible relationship in marriage or outside of relationship, it’s always someone else’s fault. As if we don’t have the ability to not repeat our parent’s mistakes.
And like this essay says, as a Christian, I can’t expect people like her to understand my hope or my reason, faith, and discipline for refraining from indulging in the hook-up culture and live-in relationships the way she and even so many of my relatives have. They’re looking at me like I’m stupid and foolish and missing out… They’re telling me I should change my ways… and then get mad when I stop talking to them or asking them about how things are going.
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Da money,of course!FRAUD elites don’t get married!They have a orgy then another orgy!ELITES/THE MATRIARCHY ARE THE DEPLORABLES/TRUE NOTHINGS like hillary ”child molestor” clinton that think they are saved &are not!!!Their always idealistic&noble in their high-calling of fornication&adultery!!!I want the idealistic&noble decency police to charge them with decency in the highest degree!!!True redpill is 4life!!!Elites are shielded because of the money/satan,the manosphere already figured this out a decade ago!!!
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Member of Upper Middle Class here: attended a top university, grew up in a 2.2m home, played golf and tennis at the country club, had expensive ski vacations, drove Mercedes and BMWs.
The phenomenon is best described in Charles Murray’s Belmont/Fishtown analogy in “Coming Apart.”
UMC couples do not get divorced because women marry in their early to mid thirties and are less willing to risk “trading up.” Even though after two years nearly every marriage becomes sexless, the wife is not going to leave because she will lose her social standing. UMC women are not as retarded as average women, so most of them are not stupid enough to think they will be trading up by divorcing at 40.
UMC men work in professions that require full dedication. My father worked during every single vacation, so all marriages must have the support of the community, which is run by aging prog whores. Since UMC men do not marry virgins, and are supposed to look at their biological desires as sexist and evil, there is no reason for them to attend church, unless said church is connected to some high-status activity such as a private country club.
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Can’t relate to that. Don’t understand the point of a sterile, loveless, sexless marriage. I guess to provide stability for your 1.6953 children. I’d rather be single and free.
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Sounds horrid. Our way is so much more fun satisfying.
For a southern economy, we have a very solid income. Decent lifestyle, but not luxurious. But very few UMC tastes or tendencies besides commitment to excellent education for our kids.
But loveless, sexless, lacking fun or affection? That’s as foreign as living on Mars. SAM never understands men well who complain of that but he tries to be compassionate.
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It’s a different life plan. These are people who really strive for very high success (I’m talking about the high education route, not the self-made route that Joe2 is). Like really high success. Very important to them.
It is incorrect, however, to say that their way of life is less satisfying, to them, than yours is, to you (or Elspeth or what have you). They are different people, with a different life orientation. They are very, very driven in ways that are hard to understand if you are not either like that or have not lived/worked/studied with such people for an extended period. They would not work, as personalities, living a differently-oriented life.
There are some in this group who are somewhat more balanced, and that segment tends to downsize a bit or step off the advancement pressure track at some stage in their 40s. Generally speaking, the 40s is the winnowing decade for these people, because it’s when the striver set separates into the small portion that will actually reach the stellar heights (biglaw managing partner, CEO/direct report F200, hospital founder, MD of an investment bank etc), or get capped out in the doldrums of the upper middle management tier (SVP, staff doc, non-equity partner, etc). The latter positions offer a very comfortable life financially, still, but have no “trajectory”, no “oomph”. So they either find something else to pour their “oomph” into, or they become about perfectionist process, or they focus on their kids (very common in this age range since they have kids later anyway, and the oldest are typically 10 or younger when this winnowing happens).
I’ve always been an outsider to that group. I was a striver when I was very young, but I came from the LMC, so I flipped social classes. When I first met “born UMC strivers”, I was a bit aghast, similar to what you have expressed there. And I didn’t see myself in them. That hasn’t ever changed, but having worked around them for so long, I understand them a lot better than I did when I first came across them in my mid-20s.
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That’s too extreme a portrayal.
The ones I have known are not totally loveless or sexless or lacking any fun or affection. There is that, in some measure. But there is also a strong focus on the “business side” of the marriage, and generally the spouses are very aligned on that as a focus, so it is a source of strength for them, even in the ups and downs. They also very much enjoy consuming together, generally, and living that lifestyle together (much more than they would alone), and they tend to be very proud of kids and pour a lot into their kids.
My marriage was different from that, but we both were class-flippers, so different background than the typical “dual-raised-UMC” couple that I have known.
It’s different from your marriage, yes, but your marriage is an extreme outlier in any case, even for people who are not UMC strivers.
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50% divorce rate among the lower classes tells me otherwise.
UMC marriage might be in most cases loveless, sterile and dull, but children are still children and the benefits of having high-status can for many people make up for the lack of Traditional marriage or community. There’s Viagra for when your wife hits the wall. It’s not like the lower classes don’t prostitute their daughters in whore school (middle/high/college) and marry virgins.
Unlike most couples, UMC couples are not completely retarded and understand that marriages involving 30+ year old women are going to be for the most part rather sexless after two years. It’s an arrangement for having children and improving one’s status.
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The UMC men I have met are not in the professions. They own their own business and / or own their own job. And they do not put in long hours, but they work smart and are very talented in what they do. They seem to have some combination of natural ability and / or “old money” through inheritance.
1) A relatively young man (married) in the UMC/+ who worked in and now owns the family fuel oil distributorship. Education – some community college.
2) An older man who paints “classic” cars and has a small shop. I told him my new car cost about what he gets for a paint job. He has magazines where his cars are featured in jewelry advertisements. Several years ago he built a custom home in Virginia which was recognized as one of the most distinctive home in the US. He sold it for multiples of what it cost. Education – high school.
3) An auto mechanic who started working for someone and now owns his own shop and employs several technicians. Has a family home on a lake with private dock and boat in a major resort area. Education – tech school.
I don’t believe these examples can be dismissed as outliers of the UMC/+
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All of those examples are of successful working-class or lower-middle-class vaishyas, not upper-middle-class brahmins. Class is occupation, not wealth. Trump (vaishya) may have more wealth than Fauci (brahmin), but the latter can shut down the country for a fake pandemic, while the former can only whine on Twitter.
A successful diesel mechanic may make twice as much money as a CFO who started at PWC and got his MBA at Yale, but the former would never be asked to join the country club, while the latter would be asked by his clients.
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This thread brings out how people of different SECs hold different values.
UC values life success, education for the sake of status, financial stability, wealth preservation, the status-laden lifestyle, and making sure their children can continue in the same. They marry for the trans-generational continuation of the same.
MC values career success, education for the sake of upward mobility and income, fashion trends that imitate UC (like having a large house and an SUV), and a focus on the family and religion. They marry because “it’s the right time”.
LC values “fun” life experiences, resiliency, and later in life, socializing. They marry for “love”.
Elspeth is an outlier.
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For Nova and others. Roosh has just been baptized into the Russian Church (ROCOR actually). He left the Armenian Church (non-Chalcedonian Orthodox).
He says Armenians don’t have private confession. Just scripted corporate confession (sounds like Anglicans)
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Cameron,I maybe would’nt mind belonging to the non-chalant orthodox or catholic church!I roll casualy everywhere as everybody very well knows!I have my very own GBFM-mobile with a v8 engine too!All paid for&debt-free too!!I also never complain,I just wonder why I’m constantly told on the manosphere that elites are good when their anything but that!
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The link is here: https://www.rooshv.com/why-i-left-the-armenian-church-for-rocor
That’s most welcome news, actually. Many years to Roosh!
ROCOR is a fine choice, although now that he’s “in”, the distinction will make less of a difference to him, probably, over time. ROCOR long since buried the hatchet with Moscow and is now an autonomous church within the Moscow Patriarchate (which means Moscow confirms the appointment of its primate, but otherwise the ROCOR operates itself on a day-to-day, while being “under the omophorion” of the Patriarch). And ROCOR people attend non-ROCOR parishes and vice-versa all the time now, as well. There are not as many ROCOR parishes, so it’s quite possible that one can be living in a place where there isn’t a ROCOR parish around, but, again, once you’re “in”, you’re “in” and you can attend and receive and become a member of any Orthodox parish.
So good news for Roosh!
My son is 1/4 Armenian, and has lived in Armenia, and has learned some Armenian, and he’s much more ethnically-engaged in his Armenian-ness as a result. But, either way, ROCOR is a good place for someone like Roosh, I think.
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All of this is because American/Western society has redefined marriages contours, characteristics, and purposes.
Marriage 1.0:
Nuclear family model. Contours and characteristics: A legally binding union between one man and one woman. The society encourages formation and continuation of these unions, and interferes little in their formation and dissolution. Society does not micromanage the unions, but leaves that to the participants. This union is indissoluble except for extreme and limited circumstances. Front end work choosing mates, and in forming the union; i.e. most of the hardest work is done at the beginning because this forms the foundation for everything that follows. Man is “leader”, Woman is helpmate. Children are subject to parents. Union intended to be self contained, self financed, self sufficient, self-operating – the only perpetual motion machine ever created.
Purposes: Give the man a little “empire”. Give the woman a home, safety, and security. A safe place for man and woman’s sexual expression. A safe and secure place for rearing children and preparing them for adulthood. Amassing some property to pass on to children. Overall order, peace, and tranquility.
Effects of dissolution: Devastating and lasting mental, emotional, and physical damage to everyone.
Marriage 2.0
Hedonic model. Contours and characteristics: A sort of binding union between whomever wants to form it, for as long as they want it to continue. Society does not care how or whether these unions are formed. Society’s only real interest is in regulating their dissolution to ensure the fewest public funds possible are expended on the participants or products of the union. Society micromanages the unions and their participants during the life of the union. The union is freely and easily dissoluble; the only issues being who will finance the pieces of the former union on and after dissolution.
One may use as much or as little effort as they wish to choose mates. There is little work at the beginning. The hardest work is at the end, when one or both decide to end the union, and the children (products) of the union must be financed. Or, the union is not dissolved, but rather, rearranged, or new parts appended to it (woman’s alpha sex partner; less often man’s mistress). There is no “leader”, in theory the man and woman are exactly equal participants and directors. Children are subject to parents, if the parents want that. Children are also subject to school, government, employers, each other, and themselves for the purposes of education, life experience, and life enrichment. Union intended to last as long as the participants want and to be self contained but with operation from within and without, as need be.
Purposes: The self actualization of its participants in all arenas: personally, socially, sexually, professionally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. The happiness, fulfillment, and serenity of its participants. The education and enrichment of the children to ensure their betterment and ability to receive and manage what their parents pass to them. To amass as much wealth and property as possible to finance the family’s lifestyle and to pass to children. The emphasis is on “this is what I want right now” rather than “we will work for what we need now and what we want later”. Overall happiness, personal enrichment and enhancement, and ever-increasing self-improvement.
Effects of dissolution: Devastating and lasting loss of wealth and property. The efforts that had been expended to conserve and amass property have ended, which now requires that the previously accumulated wealth and property be expended while new income streams are found, resulting in inefficiencies, duplication, and waste. Breadwinner is required to continue the income stream to non-breadwinner. The emphasis is on “who will pay”, not “is everyone OK?” The emphasis is not on love, mutual affection, and recovery; but on recrimination, wealth transfers, and who will come out ahead.
1) You get what you incentivize. When you incentivize love, higher purpose, future time orientation, and God-worship, you get Marriage 1.0. When you incentivize wealth accumulation, self-purpose, present time orientation, and self-worship, you get Marriage 2.0.
2) Marriage 1.0 does not work without mature, outward minded, God-fearing participants who care about the children and future. Marriage 2.0 works with people who can dissolve the marriage anytime, are self-centered and self absorbed, and ignore God.
3) In a society that encourages M2.0 (which we have now), there is no reason to form a 1.0 Marriage, because society will actively work to undermine and destroy it. In the event it dissolves, it will be done so under M2.0 rules, which crush the participants and care only about “who’s gonna pay?”
4) If you’re a bottom 80%er, you can’t amass property without it being taken away in a later divorce. If you are in this set and you marry and later divorce, you both will be REALLY bad off, probably worse off than if you had never married in the first place. There is no reason to amass property if it will just be consumed in a divorce.
5) One need not marry to have sex, or bear or raise children. Current society has removed all restraints on sexual behavior, and has normalized out of wedlock childbirth. The only logical reason to marry now is if marriage will magnify and maximize property accumulation.
The main reason we have a sexual free for all and out of wedlock birth is because for a long time, our society has been rich enough to pay for it and to absorb the social and monetary costs.
Patriarchy is for the Deplorables.
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Marriage 1.0 – We must make sure everyone is OK, safe, secure, and loved.
Marriage 1.0 dissolution: This is a tragedy and we must still make sure everyone can be as OK as possible.
Marriage 2.0 – We must make sure everyone is self actualized and enriched.
Marriage 2.0 dissolution: We just need to know who will pay. We just need to know who will finance this mess.
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Prior to divorce, my now ex-wife and I were very solidly UMC in income… Well on our way to double the base line for UMC in our state. The ex decided she wanted a divorce because I was “too controlling” (patriarchy, anyone?). She admitted under oath there was no adultery, no abuse, no addiction… She just wanted to have “more fun.” Less than a decade later she went from UMC to being on welfare and crying because she can’t get in to see a decent doctor with her Medicaid card. As far as the religious aspect goes, following the divorce she openly renounced her faith… She says she no longer believes “any of that stuff.” She gave up her faith, her marriage, etc. because she couldn’t live under “patriarchy.”
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Okrahead – On our ride home last night Mrs. Apostle and I were talking and she told me she unfollowed a Christian author/blogger/personality named Jen Hatmaker. A couple years ago she and her then husband came out (pun intended) in support of what basically amounts to accepting homosexuality in the church. At the end of 2020 she divorced and recently she gave full support to her daughter with an apology for not making the gay daughter comfortable in her sin as they raised her.
Then I read your comment about your ex-wife and faith and there seems to be quite a bit of the following. A woman does not like God’s authority structure. She rebels against God which usually breaks the marriage and seeks “freedom”. After that there is a full on sprint from her once professed faith. Hatmaker and Nikole Mitchell are prominent examples, but I can think of cases I know of personally and it seams many of them involved sexual sin in one form or another.
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Yep.
In both the Hatmaker and Mitchell examples, the break with the faith came before the divorce, whereas in okra’s case it seems to have been after the divorce when the faith was openly rejected … still, regardless of when the disdain for actual Christianity is raised, it generally is raised in these kinds of situations.
Sex is the core issue. It always will be as long as the sexual revolution governs the broad society’s sexual mores. It’s also the main reason (leaving aside the people who are sexually abused or what have you) for why people leave the faith, generally, not just divorcing people — people don’t want Christianity’s rules about sex, and they don’t want to feel guilty about sex, either, so they leave and flit around from X to Y non-Christian pseudo-religion like Pop Buddhism or something similar where they can feel “spiritual” but not have any moral rules about sex. This is the entire reason people are “spiritual but not religious” — not because they are die-hard atheists (those people tend not to be spiritual, they see it all as “woo”, as a site like RationalWiki makes clear), but because they don’t want any moral rules about sex because they don’t want to follow any of those rules, and also don’t want to feel guilty about breaking them.
It’s. All. About. Sex.
It truly is. The rest is a smokescreen in the case of most people.
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So I guess yes… for a large portion (majority?) of American womynz, mud huts and freedom to slut around are preferable to patriarchy and the white picket fence.
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Been pondering this question of natural temperament (Scott) vs. people can and do change (Liz).
I think in our marriage, we represent a little of both of those positions very strongly. I touched on this a while back when I characerized my husband as always having been a “good man” when Deti shot me to pieces, LOL. Here is what I meant by that, and it has been a steady trait throughout our marriage.
He’s always been honest; brutally so (although he’s tempered that with grace over the years). I always knew the score even when it hurt. He’s always had a heart for defending those weaker than him. He’s always been generous with those who need his help and resources (although he isn’t foolish about that and again, brutal honesty. All of those things have remained the same and been amplified by faith.
However, he also had a hair trigger temper and was known to get into a fight without much reluctance. He was an angry man. What’s that line from the Hulk: “That’s my secret. I’m always angry.” He isn’t anymore. His patience with people makes mine look paltry by comparison. He has his moments, but they are few, far between, and he reins it in pretty quickly. So he kept the best parts of himself and shed the worst parts.
Like Liz, I haven’t always been this content. My expectations of life used to be far less measured. To be honest, it was as if a blanket of contentment draped itself over me when I married my husband. I was suddenly okay with “whatever comes after this”. It wasn’t a conscious thought, but it was a pretty abrupt change. This sounds stupid girly pablum, but right up until I realized I had a gaping spiritual hole in my life, my perception was that he completed me. I was good. Until I wasn’t but rather than turn on my husband, I turned to God. Our marriage got better, not worse because I never lost the understanding that pleasing SAM was a big part of what being a wife is all about.
Long story short, there are parts of us which can change, and there are things that are part of our essence, which remain the same but can be subdued if necessary so that we behave as we should.
As it relates to UMC vs others and marriage success/happiness, it basically comes down to self-awareness (something most people lack entirely in one respect or another), and our ability to prioritize properly. What parts of my personality, desires, and dreams am I willing to sacrifice for the whole of my marriage and family?
We spend a lot of time and treasure on our kids. I was online today shelling out money for summer stuff and taking advantage of early registration discounts on all kinds of books for their fall classes (which also cost a lot) and whatnot. But we decided that our lives are not going to revolve around them. We concluded that our relationship, opportunities to spend time together, our intimacy, and our ability to communicate our love for each other and for God is far more valuable to them than external material trappings and impressing people who don’t give a darn about them.
Besides, what happens to our marriage 8 years from now when parenting is done and we turn to each other having not done the work to stay connected?
Time will tell, I suppose, if we set the right priorities.
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This is me and my wife! So, I’ll give you one data point. We were MC strivers with two kids through the 1990s. I worked, wife was stay at home and worked on furthering her education– teaching and counselling. Married in 1989, rocky point at the infamous 7-year itch, 1996. Wife unhappy–budget management was just making ends meet barely; hubby working fairly long hours, and when not working, being dad to the two kids and trying to be good husband to the wife. She was unhappy, but mostly dealing with issues from her growing up years–her mother was a piece of work, father okay, but he had passed away from a brain tumor at 47, so BSC (bat sh!t crazy) mom was running the family and running it into the poor house. My wife had a ‘nervous breakdown’ right about that point, and got help for her growing up issues with her mom. Her daughter, my wife, related to me a few years later when things had gotten better, around the 10-12 year marital mark, the ONLY reason she stayed, she had done the math in her head. Something like, “If I leave him, I get x amount of $ to live on, and her MC standard of living would have dropped without my half.” She dreaded dropping down to LMC status, and feared what impact a divorce might have on her kids down line.
But God intervened in the whole mess, she got her ‘mommy issues’ on the road to resolution, we stuck it out, and by around the 20-23 year mark, BOOM, we broke through to the UMC. Moved from the economic ‘killer’ Northeast part of the country to the South. My salary jumps well into the six figures; kids are now grown up, and voila, standard of living rises tremendously. Not like in being filthy rich, but 3200 sq ft home for 315k, same home in NJ would easily have been 1 mil. It all worked out in the end. Now, at the 32 year mark, things are really good. The two major ingredients: Faith in God, AND, not blowing the marriage up midstream before the dividends of commitment and Trusting God paid off handsomely.
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@ neofuge:
You are misinterpreting me. For one, I recognize that there is a lot of dysfunction in the lower middleclasses. I was raised in the lower middle classes, as was my husband, and we wroked our way up 1 and 1/2 levels. I say 1 and 1/2 because again, I agree with you. Income is not an indicator of class.
We did not prostitute our daughters in whore school. That’s a well known story by many around these parts so I won’t rehash it, and it hasn’t been without cultural and relational costs.
When I said our way is “more fun” I was speaking from my admittedly unusual experience of having married young, moved up in socioeconomic status, had children, and remained happily married.
There are risks that come with young marriages (a lot of passion can backfire) just as their are risks with older marriages (passion eroding quickly). I’m of the mind that a lot of these issues can be overcome in either scenario when the couples have a determination to do so; that both types of marriages can be lasting, satisfying and produce strong, stable, moral children.
The commentariat here often attempts to disabuse me of these overly optimistic notions.
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Marrying and having children young is always more fun than marrying older. If I caused offense, I wasn’t referring to you personally.
Most people in the lower classes marry for love while marrying older (average female marriage age in US is 29), and divorce as a result. You and your family are not “most people,” which is a blessing indeed.
In older marriages passion erodes quickly because the woman if unmarried previously almost always has had too many partners and the man is not nearly alpha enough to match up to that. It’s a running joke at the law firm that all the married men become nearly sexless after two years and get into porn.
UMC couples face the same problems as LMC or WC couples, the difference in that the former rarely divorce because of them.
If a Mr. One-in-Thirty who used to bang 12-year-olds when he was in middle school (I knew people like this) marries a 30-year-old woman, that marriage will often succeed because the man is very alpha. However, Mr. Average marrying 30-year-old Miss Average will turn sexless very quickly, as Mr. Average is comparatively not very manly.
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Exactly.
Yes although I knew one of the 1-in-30 guys who was (is) UMC and he was so alpha that he couldn’t manage to stay married when he did marry in his mid-30s. His divorce after 3 years was fairly smooth, though — no kids and the woman had a similar income so as far as divorces go, it was smoother than almost all of I have seen. Not the marrying type, and we all knew that. But, generally, yes, if one of the 1-in-30 types actually wants to settle down and be married and act like it, they can have a good marriage due to attraction being high, whereas in other cases (most later marriages) the man is inferior to her former lovers in terms of attractiveness, and so the sex just doesn’t work for her after a while.
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Some may face the same problems but the marriage killing problems are less common in UMC. Drug abuse, physical abuse, and rampant cheating are more common in the lower classes.
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The first two are more common in the lower, but not cheating. The difference with the cheating is that UMC are both more discreet about it (get caught less, often only years later/after it’s done) and more tolerant of it.
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That’s what I suspected you’d say. I think the difference between the lower classes and upper classes is less for cheating vice drug/physical abuse but I strongly suspect lower class people cheat more. I don’t have any statistics to back that up.
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It could be, or it could be that you notice it more. I have seen a LOT of cheating among UMC professionals in working around them for the past 30 years. In my experience and observation, a high amount of it in this class takes place on business trips which, if you don’t travel with them like that, you’d never see (and this is also a strategy by the cheaters themselves to keep the cheating “contained” so as to not impact the marriage in a way that a local affair would).
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No offense taken, neofugue.
My general point was that people (no matter their SES), have agency, and the ability to choose. We can do better if we make up our minds to do so. It comes down to personal choices and we can al make good choices no matter who we are.
Overall, I agree with what you have to say, particularly as it relates to class structure and values.
This past weekend, we met a guy who is 38 years old, no college degree, married 20 years with 10 children. He and his wife were both homeschooled. He owns a company that had $37 million in revenue last year (I googled to verify his claim). It’s a blue collar company, of course.
Is he an outlier? Absolutely. Is he, with his super religious outlook, lack of education credentials and way too many kids, going to be asked to join any exclusive clubs or societies? Absolutely not. I highly doubt he cares, though, and that’s what it boils down to. What do you value?
Over the course of our life, my husband has come into contact with several highly influential people, people clearly outside our social standing. Way higher up the social chain than we are. Many of those contacts have served him quite well because he’s good at what he does.
He’s never felt looked down on, even with his lack of credentials. Some of that, I suspect, is the halo effect, but it’s mostly an outworking of the fact that he doesn’t really care what they think.
Not everyone can be elite, but everyone choose to be ethical, moral, and hardworking. I even believe everyone can choose to have a good enough marriage that provides genuine comfort and solace.
It just occurred to me. Maybe I am a lot more upbeat than I realized.
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I second this, Nova. Happening in the heartland too.
This is probably one of the “safety valves” that keeps the pressure off these UMC marriages – the sexually dissatisfied partner simply finds another one. The UMC have the money, means, and methods to conceal them when they need to. They’re exceedingly discreet about it. So when I say I’ve “seen” it, I mean they either talk about it matter of factly and very quietly; or the signs are really really subtle, so much so that you will miss them if you don’t know what to look for.
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This is a new term to me. Is this like the one guy in school, the top of the food chain Alpha; the proverbial ‘Big Man on Campus’ (the old school term for him)? Same dude?
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There was a study of roughly 400 college males and their sexual histories. I’m not looking up the study, but according to memory, over half were virgins, roughly 40% had 1-3 partners, 5% had roughly 5, 4% percent had roughly 8, and three of the 400 had over 20+ partners.
You may know him, you may never see him. He could be the big man on campus, but sometimes he is not. It’s not that he pursues 12-year-olds, it’s that 12-year-old girls pursue him, and he adds them to his rotation of whores.
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It’s the kid you knew who was getting laid in 7th or 8th grade with regularity. That kid. There was one in our 7th-8th grade class.
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When girls started banging, which some did at about 13-14 years old, they generally banged older boys.
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Generally, yes. But if you had one of these guys in your class, you saw the 1-in-30 he is talking about who is the exception. He isn’t the “generally”.
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Okay, gotcha now. I don’t have a clue who that was back in my time in Junior High. By High School it was clearer. The girls were chasing the top tier males, in particular the stars of the sports teams (no surprise there), and the ‘Bad Boys,’ head stoner and ‘Harley McBadBoy’ (not necessarily a bike, but certain types of cars, Camaro Z-28 for instance). How much screwing they were actually doing, who knows? The urban legends circulating HS had them getting laid a lot at parties. The old joke was the girls were partying their panties off literally with these dudes.
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Yes, in essence I am the same person I was in my 20s.
That is to say, the same basic internal structure that drives my behavior is intact and has remained constant since my prefrontal cortex stopped developing in my mid 20s
I have learned to make external behavior adjustments in the service of what I perceive are my best interests.
I am able to pretend like I am interested in strangers at parties.
I no longer allow others to buzz around like bees while I sit still.
I make sure everyone around me is taken care of and comfortable before I rest.
Stuff like that. The natural me is obnoxious, aloof and cocky. It’s very off putting to most people.
But if left to my own devices. I would eat junk food from 7-11 three times a day, weigh 300 lbs., have a BS low-intensity job, and sit around feeling sorry for myself about my divorce 20 years ago.
The real me has not changed. However there are 2 voices in my head every morning.
One says, “Lie around. Do nothing. We are all dying anyway so what difference does it make?”
The other says, “Get up. You are a lazy slob! Hit it hard! There are more things to accomplish on this earth than you can possibly to get to before you die. So get started now. The sun came up and God has opened your eyes, again. The day is beautiful and you could miss it.”
99% of the time I listen to the second voice.
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This sounds to me like a man who has changed. What we do shapes who we become.
You may still possess some of the same temptations as you did in your 20s, but your ability to overcome those speaks to a very clear trajectory of growth; which is evidence of change.
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What defines the “real me”?
IF I was a 400 pound woke scold who cheated on my spouse and stole from the neighbors, would the “real me” be the person at 20 who wasn’t any of those things? “I don’t really want to steal or cheat in my heart, it’s just those two voices… and these days, I listen to the wrong one!”
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I’m nowhere near as fit as Scott, but the way I get myself in condition (yoga 3 times a week, run 3 times a week, peloton 3 times a week)…I start with putting my shoes on. Sometimes it is hard, but when I do it consistently I start to miss it when I don’t. My body feels stiff, muscles start to atrophy. It is difficult to start once one stops for a long while, and it is uncomfortable (physically and mentally) to stop once you get going and doing the exercise regularly. It’s a habit, just like the rest.
Bad habits are similar. The way to stop is to break the habit…often there’s an association with something, like if you smoke every time you sit down at a computer you will want to smoke when you sit down at that computer. Once one breaks the habit (difficult at first) it becomes easier.
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Same with the “home personality” complaining constantly, being angry, ect… has a way of becoming a habit. People become attached to their grievances.
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“The other says, ‘Get up. You are a lazy slob! Hit it hard! There are more things to accomplish on this earth than you can possibly to get to before you die. So get started now. The sun came up and God has opened your eyes, again. The day is beautiful and you could miss it.’ 99% of the time I listen to the second voice.”
Yep! Mine says something like, “Get up, get going, even though you don’t have to because you’re retired, be productive! Others are counting on you including, family, friends, and others who can benefit from your life experience and wisdom. Keep developing yourself! Stay relevant! No ‘coasting to the finish line,’ e.g. the graveyard. Go out strong and making some sort of difference in the world.”
The neat thing about all this, I’m increasingly finding myself relevant to younger people, particularly in the 35-40 age range. I wonder sometimes if that is a combination of three things: 1) Being a Christian for 40 years now since I was in my early twenties (so in effect I’m ’40 years old’ or so internally/spiritually); 2) My on-going, never ending focus on self-development, like a HABIT of working on getting better and better and never settling for, “Ah well, this is good enough;” and 3) Things like this site. Studying relationships. I feel like I’ve learned more in the last four years about relationships, particularly between the sexes, than all the other years combined. In those previous decades, the learning was ‘trial and error,’ school of hard knocks kind of learning inside of a blue pill frame or mindset. The last four years, it’s been looking back on all those experiences with a red pill lense, and re-interpreting what happened more correctly, and then continually refining the interpretation with each new iteration of learning. I feel like now, I walk around the world with relational x-ray vision seeing what’s really going on around me. Everything has been gradually coming into focus on how relationships are supposed to work by God’s design, and how fallen men and women (and blue pill Churchians) have so utterly distorted it to create the unbelievable mess we’re now experiencing throughout society.
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UMC marriages do have more at stake to “preserve” wealth, so to speak. When I lived in SF (1996-2008), among the people I met in my neighborhood who were my age and married (late 20’s), it was usual to see one who had inherited a house in SF from grandpa, grandma, or a great aunt. That is a lot at stake. Owning a home in San Francisco at that age frees up a “sixteen-ton” of money, even if you were not making 200K or 400K (which most were not…. The people I knew were still building their careers).
But the house! Victorian or Edwardian. Large bedrooms. High ceilings. Decent neighborhoods…. not in the most posh areas of town, but quite decent. Usually held in a family for a few generations. One guy I knew, his great, great grandparents had the house originally built in the 1890’s, and it was passed on through the family since then.
They also had many other things going for them…….. Better than average looks. Better than average educations. Not “elite rich” or “old money”, but money passed on properly and looked after. They had something else I cannot put a finger on. Some were cool. Some were that typical “SF snobbery” or “smugness” that is found there. I was paying $3,500.00 a month in 1996 for the condo I was renting in SF. I could afford it, but when you’re NOT paying rent…. Boy! That is a HUGE plus at that age! It frees up income to invest, build the skills you need in your career, and relieves enough pressure to go out more, or meet that person who always was “better than me”.
Look, if you’re a pretty gal, degreed, inheriting the house…. then you are going to attract that guy who is driven as well and has the looks to match, and usually the sperm count to prove it. The marriage does have a massive head start because of the house. I would put forth that this is common in Boston, parts of Manhattan, areas of Chicago, Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley / San Jose / Palo Alto), and the north bay which has its rolling hills, wineries, vineyards, and just that gorgeous California topography (Marin and Sonoma counties).
These are things that, when called for, are worth “fighting for”. This is what we want to protect, I guess.
I think there is something in this as well for the UMC class in some of the more tonier and blue-blooded areas like SF…… and even Connecticut — being married at a younger age (mid to late twenties) in a place like this — If you are a guy or gal and you have inherited THE HOUSE or the PROPERTY, then this is a big weight lifted. It is an appurtenance of privilege that I believe, in many cases, adds to that stability in the marriage.
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I hope God gives them what they deserve soon. The wicked prosper while the righteous suffer.
They say: “Who is the LORD. That we should worship him?”
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Today’s newspaper brings another data point regarding the “golden handcuffs effect” in the larger coastal metros: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/01/a-million-over-list/
Things are even worse than usual this housing season for various (some of them obvious) reasons, but this just serves to heighten the overall effect. Being in the UMC here requires either one megaincome or two incomes to reach a combined megaincome. If neither spouse has a megaincome, a divorce means falling out of the UMC, with a resounding thud.
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Great discussion.
From what I can see:
–The lower and middle classes are marrying less, because there’s just no reason to do so. They can do everything married people do, with no social opprobrium. They can date, have sex, live with someone of the opposite sex, have children with each other, support those children, and sleep around. They can end those relationships easily, and form new relationships. They can do all this but consume nearly all of their resources.
–The working class rich, i.e., the tradesmen who own their own businesses and the people who marry them, have upper middle class money but retain their working class mannerisms, lifestyles, and tastes. This is why Paul Plumber who owns his own plumbing outfit and does $1 million and up a year in gross revenues doesn’t get invited to join the country club or to the wine and brie parties. This is why Dan Dealership, the town’s GM franchisor dealer, who does $5 million a year gross with $2 or $3 million in inventory, also doesn’t go to the country club.
–The working class rich are also the bulk of the big money divorces. Big money, working class mores and values. When it gets too much or you don’t get along, you split up. No working class woman will stay with a man she doesn’t want anymore – she can always get a new one. No working class man puts up with crap from a woman – he just moves on. The real problems happen here, because these working class folks find out just how tough it can be to work out a property division in a divorce.
–The upper middle classes marry mainly for upward mobility and stability. Men marry to exhibit stability. The women who marry them do so mainly for status and provisioning. (The women who marry these men get huge status boosts.) They partner up so he can advance and she can move about the feminine social matrix, and they can both accumulate wealth. Oh, of course, there is some love and affection and mutual purpose, but these are secondary to the main purposes of forming what is in effect a business partnership.
–The upper classes do the same as the UMC but with much greater status, money, and stakes. In a lot of ways the UMC is imitating the upper class and hopes to break into it.
–The lower and middle classes get divorced because that’s part of their values and mores. No reason to stay with someone you don’t want anymore. Loss of money and property aren’t an issue because there’s no money or property to divvy up. The UMC and up don’t divorce as much, because there’s so much at stake – his money and property, and her status. This set divorces when she can retain a lot of her status, he can retain a lot of his money, the kids will be “ok”, and there’s more than enough money to pay for everything.
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The UMC and UC are today’s “royalty” and Middle Ages/Renaissance landowners. They don’t marry for love. They marry each other to keep the property in the family, to steward it, to grow it, to teach their children how to manage and grow it, and to pass it to their children, who will do the same as their parents did. This is exactly what the royals, the nobles (the House of Lords set) and landed gentry did; and it’s what the UMC and UC do now.
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Good synopsis. So the ultimate question for me, as a Biblicist, LOL, is: “Is the marriage solely for the accumulation and transference of wealth, property and status an approrpiate reason to marry? Does the Bible mention the role of sex in marriage? Is it acceptable to marry and then decide sex is no longer necessary after 2.3 kids (unless both parties agree to that)?”
We certainly have things in place for our children’s future. Not UMC/UC level, but we are planning, saving, investing, doing what we can. It’s an important duty that we should embark on as parents. So I’m not against that, but at the end of the day, what seems to be extolled here is a version of marriage that, while providing earthly wealth, success, and approval, may fall very short of what God would have us pour into and receive from the marriage relationship. I’m not referring to head swirling romantic love here, but something more, that can sustain and be healthy till death do us part.
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“Is the marriage solely for the accumulation and transference of wealth, property and status an approrpiate reason to marry? Does the Bible mention the role of sex in marriage? Is it acceptable to marry and then decide sex is no longer necessary after 2.3 kids (unless both parties agree to that)?”
Of course the Bible answers these questions in definitive ways. We know that. I think a huge part of sex and marital relationships discussions in the Bible are to directly address humans’ sin nature, to celebrate but regulate sex for those reasons, and to promote stability and contentment. We know St. Paul is giving very practical advice to ordinary men and women here.
No one is really extolling the UMC/UC staying together to amass and conserve wealth. No one is saying this is the best version of marriage. What I am saying, at least, is that that’s the main purpose of marriage now in Marriage 2.0 Land. I am also saying that the main reasons for marriage that were sold to us don’t hold true now. I was brought up on “you marry for love, never for any other reason. You marry because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s the only legitimate place to have sex, and because it’s the best way to live”. I tried it and utterly failed, and almost lost a LOT in the process. If I actually told people that the above is why people should marry, I’d have even Christians laughing in my face.
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I am also saying that “love, the right thing to do, and legitimate place for sex” as reasons for marriage do not keep people together. You and I both understand “something more, that can sustain and be healthy till death do us part” because we actually got there, kind of, and worked like hell for it. You think today’s average working class man and woman can see, or even try to see, 5, 10, 20 years down the road? Hell no; they’re worried about making the rent and where next weeks grocery money is coming from.
You think today’s average college graduate Stan Stemlord can do that? Hell no; he’s worried about keeping his job. He can’t think about “something more”. You have to have “anything at all” before you can have “something more”.
Today, E, “something more” is unattainable for most people.
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One issue I’ve slowly become aware of with the UMC in the Atlanta area is the issue with the progeny unexpectedly or inconveniently ‘going off the rails’ using drugs, in particular heroin and meth. Other issues include their princesses riding the CC until they hit the wall and then living at home or on ‘mommy and daddy’s’ dime in some apartment somewhere in the city waiting for Mr. Right to show up out of thin air off some dating app to wife them up. The UMC lifestyle seemingly can unexpectedly ‘blow a tire’ at anytime and their is no readily available solution for it, e.g. getting junior or missy clean and sober and ‘to the church on time;’ or finding princess a Capt. Save-A-Ho after she’s run her N-count through the roof chasing Chad, Brad and Tyrone throughout her twenties. The increasing wailing of ‘Where have all the good men gone’ is testament to that. These men were supposed to ‘be there’ to give her the white picket fence and 2.3 children she’s due when she hopped off the carousel at 30-32-34 years of age. Now she see’s many men her age walking around town in a t-shirt with this weird acronym ‘MGTOW’ on it. The UMC has it’s issues too, no matter how large the double income is.
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Today, E, “something more” is unattainable for most people.
Yes.
What you have now are
and
Everyone else …. is cooked.
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the issue with the progeny unexpectedly or inconveniently ‘going off the rails’ using drugs, in particular heroin and meth. Other issues include their princesses riding the CC until they hit the wall and then living at home or on ‘mommy and daddy’s’ dime in some apartment somewhere
Yep, like I said above, there is a fail rate. Everyone knows some UMC kid who hit the skids, jumped the shark, went off the rail and so on. There are no certainties with kids. But … even with those cases taken into account, overall they do very well.
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I use “Biblicist” not as an insult (which is the way I think Sharkly took it) but because “Protestant” refers to Lutherans who are different from e.g. Baptists in many ways. I think Biblicist is an accurate phrase – not intended as a putdown.
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In the UMC and up, yes, this does happen. It always has, really, in part because the UMC on up has the money and clout to insulate their children from the consequences of going off the rails. See, e.g., the Kennedy dynasty.
The protection extends only up to a certain point, though – you can lose it all if you stay off the rails long enough. See, e.g., Mike Tyson. Erin Moran. Dana Plato (google her – the sister on Different Strokes). Robert Downey Jr., who got down to his very, very last chance, and only then turned it around.
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While hanging a boatload of laundry and doing some ironing (yeah, some of us still do that!), I was just listening to Michael Knowles. He got a letter from a woman that so caught my attention that I replayed him reading it. This is what she wrote to him:
I’m a new mother to an 8 month old girl with a second on the way. I waited until I was 36 to have my first child and that is a regret in itself, but my real trouble is that I got into a whirlwind romance with a coworker and decided that trying to have a baby was what I wanted because I was getting older and feeling lonely. I got pregnant and we married 5 months later. We decided to try for another quickly so our children would have each other. He’s a good man, a hard worker, loves me and the family, but I don’t love him. I am determined never to be a divorcee and to provide a stable two-parent home. I think love has to be the foundation and not something you strive for after rash decision making. Any advice?
Being a devout Catholic, he gave her some really good advice. What you’d expect from a devout Catholic, along with some historical context that most people didn’t marry for true love and didn’t get to marry their true love. Good stuff. His advice was top notch. His one misstep may have been leading with the fact that he married “the one”, which is something I never say to women who come to me for advice. It’s not helpful. I say it here, but this is a different forum.
If she’s listening to Knowles, she’s already some combination of very religious/conservative/traditional (regardless of her bad judgement). Another takeaway I got form it was the danger of marrying as an end in itself and without a clear understanding of what marriage is.
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Ironing? – put it in the dryer on dewrinkle. That’s what I do. Yeah, I’m a beta that helps my wife around the house when she’s overwhelmed – she hasn’t divorced me yet.
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My husband helps around the house too. That’s not beta. It’s just family life.
As for ironing, my middle class crunchy side coupled with lack of attention to details is the source of that.
There’s a chemical in wrinkle free shirts that I don’t like. Dryers damage clothes so I refuse to pay $50 for slacks (I know that’s cheap to some) and then speed up their wearing out. Especially since SAM doesn’t like to shop.
That means I pick a day and iron shirts to make life easier during the rest of the week.
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According to certain female Christian (supposedly) marriage bloggers, what you just wrote amounts to erotica. If you were wearing an apron at the time of helping with the laundry they would consider it virtually x-rated! 🙂
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For what it’s worth: I throw all of my clothes in the dryer except unmentionables which I spend quite a lot on, because 1) I basically shop at Target and Old Navy unless it’s for an anniversary date or something, so my clothes are even cheaper than his and 2) I don’t like to shop, but I don’t really mind it, and he wants me to update my wardrobe fairly regularly.
But it’s actually true that dryers do a lot of damage to clothes: their color, shape, and size are affected with each pass through the dryer.
https://www.absoluteappliancesrepair.com/how-a-dryer-can-damage-your-clothes-2/
So when I buy nice shirts and pants for my husband to wear to work, I want them to last.
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I do the typical “man chores”. Fixing things. Replacing and repairing fixtures. Changing light bulbs. (I kid you not! If I didn’t change them they’d just stay burned out! No one else will do it, even though it’s one of the simplest things to do.)
Car care and maintenance. Bill paying. Banking. Finance. Dealing with outside vendors and contractors. Yard work. Anything that weighs over 30 pounds that needs to be moved. Firewood splitting and moving.
That in addition to earning 95% of the family’s income.
And that’s enough for me to do.
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$50 dollars for slacks? That’s expensive. Don’t think I ever payed that much. Just got a pair of wrangler khaki slacks from a Catholic thrift store for $1.
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They’ll end up divorced anyway.
Good advice, but wasted. It’ll be
“I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t love him the way he deserved to be loved. So now I’m divorced and we have a great relationship. He takes our daughter whenever he wants so I can get back out there and date and have sex with the hot men I used to have sex with, tee hee!”
Another day, another condom in the landfill.
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Our oldest son recently broke up with a girl who was going to veterinary school.
She was very nice, accomplished, and so forth.
Just didn’t do it for him.
If I’d insisted she was my choice that would be overbearing and a pretty crappy thing to do. This happens all the time, and stringing a person along so they will continue to do nice things for you is worse than breaking up with them.
Pity is worst. I know someone who married a twat because she threatened to commit suicide if he didn’t. Guess how that one worked out.
My mother’s choice would’ve made me miserable.
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Liz
Be gratified that you never married Mom’s choice.
It’s too late for the 36 year old woman in E’s comment up there. Now she’ll have to send her kids through the divorce meat grinder.
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There was no chance of that.
I owe most of my success in life to doing the opposite of what she advised.
(the exception was that leg lengthening surgery to correct that childhood injury, glad I did that)
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I am a Mod, and thus all my shirts and startched, ironed, and collared properly. I do send shirts out when I am getting a suit or coat cleaned, but that isn’t oo often. It’s a weekly chore of mine usually on a Saturday or Sunday almong with polishing my shoes and Doc Martens. Keeping my boots and shoes free of scuffs, a high gloss and dust is a chore. In college during the New England winters…my friends and I always had a contest to see who could keep their peeny loafers or wingtips free of salt-scum and water marks. Fun times.
Sure, I can change the oil in the car, rotate the tires…but as to the mechanics of toddays engines? No way. I remember the big V8s of the 1970’s 1980’s. “Umm, that’s the distributor, and that’s the alternator….. Okay, yes, that’s the carburator.” But repairing them? Even as a teen, I really couldn’t do it. I would be with my father under that 1972 Dodge truck, and I was the helper. “Hand me that 3/8 drive.” Stuff like that. As for overhauling an engine. Nope. Building my own? Nope. My ear is trained well enough though, I CAN tell if a Chrysler 318, 340, and 383 engine sounds okay, if that means anything. I had enough of them while growing up. (My whole family… aunts, uncles, cousins… all drove Chrysler products!)
I am good with small motors and electronics (taught myself to read wiring diagrams, and for repairing turntables, reel to reel decks). I even fixed my own refrigerator a few months back. The compressor went out. I actually knew what was wrong, bought the parts, and repaired it.
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We tip well because I’ve waited tables so I appreciate the hustle involved. I thought their lack of such experiences might be part of it.
But yeah. It could also be that they can’t spare the change. We don’t eat out a whole lot because I can cook well.. So maybe once a month as a family and once or twice as a couple, but if we are tightening our belts for whatever reason we skip it.
Tipping is part of the expense of eating out.
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Kisses to you. I always tip heavy for the fact that I lived on tips for several years. I know the BS waiters and bartenders go through, by their customers and coworkers
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I completely agree, actually. My husband mostly does the same things, but on occasion he helps out in other ways. It’s not the normal order, it’s not at my behest, and it’s usually something he wants to do. For instance, he inexplicably likes to help 13-year-old clean the kitchen when it’s her turn. I suppose it’s a time that they have particularly good chats? He occasionally likes to cook because he is more daring in the kitchen than I am. Stuff like that. And yes, he earns 97% of our family’s income, so like you, he mainly sticks to the “man jobs”.
But when we had lots of minor children, he stepped in a lot more. A toddler, a baby, and three kids who were in school full time with extracurriculars and all the logistical difficulties was a very different dynamic for me to navigate than what we have now.
This is not directed at you deti, but trad conservatives love to spin a weird fantasy where a woman can be perpetually pregnant, homeschool well, keep a clean house, cook full meals, look nice, on her own all day and all without bothering her husband, yet still have the energy for enthusiastic sex after putting the kids down.
That’s not a realistic scenario, and it’s one reason why even Christians are having only 1 or 2 children even when they have an income that can support 4 or 5. It’s not appealing.
Cameron and his wife have 8 children. Even with earning all the money, he sometimes has to help out.
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Which is why we lived in a not very clean house and ate a lot of leftovers and pizza delivery when detiette was little.
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She’s not a super clean freak – so her standards are different than what I grew up with where my mom kept everything spotless. No big deal – the best thing is to have a loving and loyal wife – being a great cook or great housekeeper is a bonus, but not really what makes you happy IMO.
Homeschooling is hard and time consuming. I used to do math with them. The kids that didn’t “get it” quickly – I would get visibly frustrated and start to snap at them. So I know how hard it is to be a teacher, a housekeeper, while nursing a baby, she can’t even go to the bathroom without a kid pounding on the door – my boss at work doesn’t do that – I’d call HR on him if he did 😊
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You’re an understanding husband Cameron, as was deti. Lastmod is right though. The understanding and patience you two demonstrated with your wives is not extolled online in the trad sphere. It’s usually proposed that a wife should be able to accomplish exactly what I posted up there. And with a smile (joyful, joyful!)
Our house became a lot less tidy when our children were little. House cleaning was a back burner thing for years; exception for kitchen and bath because hygiene. My husband is laid back about a lot of things. He is pretty patient with me, and he lived with the clutter without complaint.
The one thing he is very particular about is his food. So that was the area where I focused my homemaking energy. The upside is that autodidactically, I became an excellent baker and cook (my stepmom isn’t the best cook, but she was very young and pretty, supportive and could cook a little). But even with that, I didn’t cook every day because that would have been impossible.
Homeschooling is hard work, and I only homeschooled two of our five children. I can only imagine trying to juggle 5, 6, or 8 kids. The burnout was a large part of what directed us to looking for schooling support. Trad bloggers and anti-feminist writers need to be a lot more transparent about the struggles.
The farther away we get from hard times, the more we forget how hard certain things were was, and we can tend start pontificating based on our unrealistic ideals.
Factor into all of this, the additional pressure everyone feels to be like the UMC, and it’s no wonder that childbearing has bottomed out across the classes overall, including the LC/LMC.
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If the choice was between:
Perfectly clean house, kids behaving precisely as they are told, nutritious well balanced hot meal, wife with great make up and perfect figure from 2 hours at the gym but who is bitchy and kind of cold to me when I get home
Or
House in disarray, kids faces dirty from playing outside, TV dinners in the microwave if I’m lucky. Still kind of cute, maybe a few wiggles from babies over the years messy bun wife who jumps into my arms and showers me with kisses whispering “I can’t wait to get the kids down later”
I choose 2. Every time.
I wish every wife in America knew this.
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Ah but not every man thinks that way. There are quite a few men who prefer the orderly life with the pretty wife, who has some attitude, rather than the scenario 2. Of course I don’t think any man actually likes a cold-hearted bitch over the long-term, but I do think many guys, even when it comes to their wives, will give up some of the lovey-dovey, and some of the sex, in exchange for prettier and more orderly.
Again, different preferences.
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Scott not only has different preferences in general, but he also has little kids, and several. When you have little kids, and more than one or two kids, then expecting orderly perfection is just being unnecessarily anal. In my opinion. My experience is that you can’t really go wrong building strong relationships.
Now that our youngest is 13, my husbands preferences and tolerances have slightly shifted, as well they should. Why? Because the kids should play a substantial part in keeping the house neat. If the house is a mess, it not only means that I haven’t done what I should, but that I haven’t trained them properly to do what they need to do.
So although he doesn’t have white glove standards, he expects the house not to be a mess. He expects me to put some time (and maybe some money) into my appearance. Again, not UC standards, but he has a standard and its clear: “I take good care of you. I need you to look like it.”
Every man has his preferences.
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Actually, I think most wives do know that. I think they don’t care, or do not believe their husbands deserve it.
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“Actually, I think most wives do know that. I think they don’t care, or do not believe their husbands deserve it.”
Bingo. Each wife who chooses this course has her own specific reason for why not (too tired, you didn’t help enough, I work too, too full, don’t feel like it, you need to romance me, etc), but they all know what would make their hubby happy.
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@ Scott:
Actually, I think most wives do know that. I think they don’t care, or do not believe their husbands deserve it.
I think you’re right that some wives know this, but I wouldn’t say tat it’s universal. I know exactly what my husband prefers in just about every regard. I behave accordingly, but he helped me out immensely by just spelling it out. “This is what I want. This is what I don’t.”
And even though I was very highly motivated to please him, I was getting a few things wrong.
For instance, before I cam home, I had very measured standards for housekeeping because I worked, so it was easy for to “justify” falling back into his lap at the end of the day. But when I first came home full time (at his request), I suddenly felt an overwhelming pressure to keep the house just so. I felt that the only way to justify my not being on the job or in school (which I’d also quit) was by keeping everything spotless, and cooking and all the things. The fact that we had three children under the age of two did little to ease my neurosis. That didn’t happen until my husband actually said to me:
“I don’t care about that. You don’t have to justify to anyone else why you don’t work. Come. Sit. Just be with me, and we’ll deal with the kitchen after the kids are down. Rest now so you won’t be tired later. You’ll need the energy.” He communicated very direct and unambiguously, which my fried brain needed.
That was all it took for me to get a clue, but I needed that desperately. So we watched the kids toddle about, put them down at 7 or maybe 8, tidied up and then focused on each other for the rest of the night. It might have taken me a lot longer to figure things out if he had expected me to just know, and then sat around stewing about how his wife put the house and the kids first and then claimed she was too tired to have sex with him. He set the tone very early in our marriage on a lot of levels.
I know my anecdote is not data, and I know that a lot of wives really don’t care (I’ve heard them say as much), but some do care. I’ve talked to them as well. As much as men claim women want them to be mind readers, I wonder how many men expect their wives to be mind readers too.
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Elspeth:
I know you think every marriage in America could be like yours if people would only try. I know you think every wife could be like you if they would only put in some effort.
Let me just bring the mystery to an end.
They can’t.
Most people will NEVER EVER have the kind of marriage you have. Most men will NEVER EVER get the kind of love from their wives that SAM, Scott, and Mike get from you, Mychael, and Liz. I’ll never have that. I’m convinced Mrs. deti simply isn’t capable of it. Most women aren’t. They aren’t, because they married men they aren’t anywhere close to as attracted to as they were to the men they had sex with when they were younger. They aren’t, and they can’t, because they didn’t get to marry the men they really wanted.
Them’s just facts. Always has been, always will be. The difference between now and 100 years ago is that our society has now empowered women to do something about it, and what they usually do is divorce, or treat their husbands like sh!t.
And that is everyone’s cold dose of reality for the day.
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Every man has his preferences.
Yes.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have been capped out with 6s in my dating/relationship history, so no smoking hot women along the lines described in Scott’s scenario 1. But I have had conversations with men who are married to such women which have led to my understanding here about preferences.
I remember one rather vividly, with a work colleague, who was on a business trip with me back when I traveled a lot in my 30s. He was having a hard conversation on the cell phone with his wife, it was quite testy. When it ended, he rolled his eyes and swore under his breath, and I mentioned something like “she seems like she’s a handful” or something like that. He admitted that she was (big nods), but then thumbed through his phone to show me recent pictures of his very high 7, borderline 8 wife (she would have been around my age at the time, this guy was around 7 or 8 years older). His comment was “when they look like that, there always a handful, you know? Kind of goes with the territory. You pick your poison, you know?”. I nodded, and the conversation went on to other things.
A few of my own takeaways from that conversation, which was enlightening on many levels, were (1) men who prefer and can achieve really hot women as wives will give somewhat, perhaps a lot, on personality and treatment to secure hot, (2) this appears to be at least as much about their own ego and how they perceive themselves and how they perceive others to perceive them (as being the kind of guy who can attract a woman who looks like that for marriage), and (3) they are aware that men like me can’t do that and are happy to point that out to men like me (in tactful and socially acceptable contexts like that was) to nail the point home.
Anyway, yes — men have different preferences here. If they didn’t the behaviors would not be rampant among certain women to begin with.
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Elspeth – What you wrote is a pipe dream for 90% of married men. Almost all women don’t have your mindset about marriage and almost no men can enforce what you wrote without blowing up the marriage or being accused of abuse. You just cannot deny the way the feminist saturation of our culture has seeped into women. I expressed to Mrs. Apostle what I wanted and all I got was pushback, excuses and fighting. To give context, Mrs. Apostle was in college when we got engaged, I was a few years into working after college, she was early 20’s when we got married and N=0. We both grew up in church and have remained in church the decades following our marriage. We are not the typical feminist life script couple. But …..
Like your SAM, I don’t emphasize the spotless house or cooking. I’d rather have had alone time with Mrs. Apostle. The words she used were different depending on the situation but they were always coming from the same heart attitude of “But this is what I WANT, so that’s what I’m going to do. Your preferences matter less than what I want and if you try and enforce what you want you will experience all sorts of whining, pouting, manipulation, childish behavior, name calling, comparisons to others who do it better or outright arguing to tear you down”. Oh, and if she doesn’t get what she wants 99% of the time sex is not happening. THIS is what the average husband has to look forward to and, anecdotally, what I described is most likely a little better than average.
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3) they are aware that men like me can’t do that and are happy to point that out to men like me (in tactful and socially acceptable contexts like that was) to nail the point home.
I doubt he was trying to make that point. Typically men like that are pretty self absorbed and don’t realize how they are coming across. Mike runs into this often in the airline industry (on trips…the let me show you my wife bit is pretty common).
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Nova
Bizarre.
When she is in little shorts, socks, t-shirt and a pony tail I go crazy.
And she knows it.
Been like that since the beginning.
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Yes, I see how it’s bizarre to you with your own preferences, but different guys prefer different things, have different personae, etc.
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IN the airline industry they have quite a few pilots who are into the “collect stuff” category and they usually have the big homes/nice cars in addition to the “hot” wife.
The airlines (at least the majors) pay well but one is always just a turn in the market away from everything changing. And then they’re in a really bad place. I remember all the new nurses that went back to school who were married to airline pilots furloughed after 911.
They could’ve made it on the lower salary but they’d become too accustomed to that lifestyle, their sense of self worth tied up in what they owned.
I’ve observed these types for a long time, which is why I focus on things like happiness and what it really means and how different interpretations of it can lead to a life of misery and unfulfillment.
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Sure – this is not surprising Nova. Men’s tradespace is hotness vs. agreeableness.
Women’s if hotness vs. dominant personality (or signs of that) vs. money/status vs. likely loyalty.
Their equation is harder to solve as you’ve said.
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“This is what I want. This is what I don’t.”
It is more or less illegal to speak to your wife like this in the US.
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Likely viewed as a form of Duluth control, especially if the man is larger physically (and therefore naturally imposing even if he doesn’t act as such), earns more (also intimidating to wife, even if he doesn’t act as such) … per Duluth, that statement, in either context (and one of those is present in almost all marriages) is taken as an attempt to exercise control, which flunks the “abuse” test of Duluth.
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I’ve already decided that if Mrs deti starts bringing the Duluth model into my marriage, sics the cops on me, or threatens me in any way, we are done. I simply will not live that way. If I have to live in my car for a year and then a crappy one bedroom apartment, and eat Spam, so be it, but I will not live that way. I won’t do it.
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I doubt he was trying to make that point. Typically men like that are pretty self absorbed and don’t realize how they are coming across. Mike runs into this often in the airline industry (on trips…the let me show you my wife bit is pretty common).
Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. There are some subtle subtexts when men talk to each other, especially men of our age. No one says “My wife is way hotter than yours is, check out that bikini bod I get to go home to… and you don’t. It’s displayed in all manner of subtle ways.
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Elspeth said:
I see it all the time on “red pilled” sites, some MGTOW content. Every guy has a wife who does this evidently effortlessly, and if you don’t have a wife like this, or if you girlfriend isn’t 100% this way “dump her / kick her to the curb / major red flags if she doesn’t know this when you are dating”
Hence again why there are fewer marriages….. it makes it sound as if every woman now who isn’t Weezie Jefferson or June Cleaver is some sort of “lazy woman”.
My mother worked full time by the 1980’s, kept a tidy home, and raised me and brother who was VERY sick and special needs, and there was always a proper dinner mostly every night.
My father did help too at home. Tradition for the most part was dad on one of the weekends all morning would keep me and my brother occupied. Mom got to sleep in. As we got older, that also included dad telling me, “Sweep and mop the kitchen!” or some other chore. Dad would ALWAYS clean up the bathroom after he cleaned up from work (heavy construction worker). He never left the bathroom dirty for mom to clean. Never.
My older brother would have to fold laundry or put away dishes…….dad would drink coffee, smoke do some small things and if any of those old “Bugs Bunny” cartoons were on if was a Saturday he would laugh and watch TV. Some fun memories. Breakfast would be made for mom one of these mornings.
I know, how dare my mother get to sleep in one day a week……..
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I’m not very good at fixing things and don’t really like to unless I have no choice. My wife is actually better at fixing things than I am and doesn’t mind doing it. If it requires heavy lifting, pulling, grunting like a caveman I’m her man. I do all yardwork (or my boys do it). When I used to do my own car maintenance, I always did it although she did replace the starter on or van.
A Christian couple once told us that we’d have marital problems if I didn’t do the fixing of things around the house e.g. replacing toilets (which I’ve done). That was nearly 20 years ago – nope! – so far so good.
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People just seem to have odd priorities to me. A guy here today mentioned that he and his wife sent the kids to daycare Friday and then went out on the boat for a day of fun (he mentioned it because his kids got sick and their day got cut short). Bizarre to me – to give your young children to a stranger to watch while you play with your UMC toys. I would live in a trailer and eat beans rice and peanut butter before I sent my kids to be raised by a stranger.
My grandma nannied for a UMC couple – anestesiologist and corporate lawyer for Harris in Melbourne. Same thing – couple would go out to do fun things , go to the gym instead of being with the children.
When we lived in St Cloud years ago my wife was known as the wagon lady because she didn’t have a car so she was always towing our young children around town in a Radio Flyer. We always placed raising our own children over material things.
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People just seem to have odd priorities to me.
People have different priorities.
Folks in the UMC, especially the women of the UMC (but not only them), are very, very questioning of the priorities of other people as well. The peak of the public “Mommy Wars” was probably in the 1990s, but the attitudes are still there, and they are there on all sides.
Most UMC folks are totally convinced that they are the ones, and the only ones, who have it right, and everyone else is doing it wrong. They truly are. And they tend to be very dismissive of other lifestyle choices.
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When our three older girls were around 3 and 4, (SAM and I were 25 and 27?) we faithfully had my nieces (15 and 17) drive out to our place the last weekend of the month. We trusted them, they was full of energy and engaged with the kids; art, games, baking cookies etc. Perfect setup.
While we never stayed away over night, we went out on dates those Friday and Saturday nights, enjoyed each other immensely, and I never felt guilty about it. We did that every month for about two years. Then the girls started school and he adjusted his schedule where he took off one Friday a month and we’d spend the day together. Alone. Sometimes we went out, sometimes not, but he always tried to make sure we carved out time where it was just us.
Never left our kids with strangers though. Unless you count the school…
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My older sons and daughter watch the little ones so we can go out alone.
I hate daycares. A single mom at work – her toddler boy layed on the ground with a fever, sick all day while the workers ignored him because he was “being good.” (not bothering them). This was a high end daycare not a trashy one.
The women at work punch out the baby and a few weeks later leave their baby with another woman all day- defective. Something wrong when I have stronger mothering instincts.
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Day cares are in general, a bad idea. I agree. The horror stories are endless, not to mention that they are like petri dishes.
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Typo: They “were” full of energy. I started out referring to my one niece we started with and forgot to change the verb tense when I corrected it.
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Off topic, but speaking of deplorables:
https://notthebee.com/article/desantis-kicks-off-pride-month-by-signing-a-bill-banning-biological-males-from-womens-sports
Hotter’n Hades down here right now, but our governor’s got cojones, LOL. On the first day of “pride month”. Perfect!
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I was latchkey since 1979 (age 9). Mom and dad would wake me at 5:30AM. Mom would kiss my forehead. Dad would give a bit of a smirk (I have the same smirk now btw) tell me to “do right by me” and they would leave for work. I would get my older brother up. Help dress, clean him up and ready for his special school (NYS had the BOCES system back then for kids like my brother, NYS residents wil know what I am talking about…..it also has vocational training programs for high school students). I had to feed him, usually if he started using his hands to eat……my parents and his teacher was strict on teaching him to use a fork and knife.
His bus would come. I would ten have a bit to clean up, get myself ready and catch my bus. Had to walk about a 1/2 mile to the bus stop (it was the sticks, rural) even if it was snowing. My brother had to do this too. When he left for his bus, our dog (a trained German shepard would go and wait with him to the bus stop, and run home when he was picked up. That’s how I knew he was okay). Our nearest neighbor was four miles away. All the kids in that vast area would meet at one bus stop / pick up and drop off. 1970’s and 1980’s until I went to prepatory and got mu license.
Today if a kid has to walk more than a quarter mile, parents FREAK out and when people hear that my special needs brother had to walk as well to the bus stop……..people tell me that “your family could have sued the schools, they were breaking the law even in the 1970’s for kids like him”
No one died. No one was killed. It was the 1970’s in rural America. Not much had changed in fifty years aside from electricity, car styles and hair styles.
My parents would have a “date night” here and there. They would go out to dinner, I could run things by myself, even as aboy……if Greg got sick, I would bathe him, clean him up and put him back to bed…..I was mature beyond my years here but of course in other areas….even now, still so behind only a miracle could fix me. I don’t put faith in miracles at my age.
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We’ve had the cops called on us a couple of times because the kids were too far from the house. On our street which is 1/4 mile long
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The smirk – the older we get the more we resemble our dads. Mine’s gone too.
The bus stop on a dirt road – we had to walk far too -we used to play marbles in the dirt while waiting. The marbles were colorful with cool, descriptive names. Kids don’t do that much anymore.
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Greg must have had other medical problems.
I saw this teenage boy with Downs at the Orlando airport years ago. Parents had just bought him a Toystory doll. “Thank you. I love my doll. I love you” I don’t know if they’re mostly like this but sweetest teenager ever.
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Yes, Cameron…very observent. He was born without an esophagus, so when he was born, they had to take a piece of his large intestine and graft it there. He also was born with three holes in his heart. He was one of the first babies in teh USA to have open heart surgurey (not the first). Remember, the first open heart surgurey was done in 1965. This was 1966. He has profound mental retardation as well. He couldn’t walk until he was three. Though my parents did have him bathroom trained by three (he couldn’t go to a day program unless he was). My parents sent him to psychologists and the like at Plattsburgh State University. The special education field really was being built at this time. BOCES for kids like him in New York State started in 1971. He was non-verbal until about six or seven.
He had to be fed through a tube in his back after he came back from the hospiatal in early 1967 (he spent the first eight months of his life at Albany Medical Center) until the espohagus healed. It devasted my mother….twenty years old, and her baby was sick, tubes, wires, monitors……and everyone else seemed to have a healthy baby in her social circle. She mentioned once “Had your father not been as old as he was, I don’t think we would have made it. Your father had age and maturity to help me.” (dad was 12 years older than mom).
Greg also has a very weak immune system. He ALWAYS was sick. Getting over a cold, or coming down with another one. ALWAYS sick. It was hard for me as a kid and teen at times. I could never have friends over…or very rarely. I always had to help care for him.
I knew at a VERY young age…..I mean, like two…..that my brother was “different” from me. The dog we had also knew he was different and had to be watched.
It was a different time. Much better support and programs today (well, well meaning at least….most them enable parents and kids like this today).
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What is nova talking about above?The UMC are the most tolerant&non-judgemental people in the whole world!They love sodomite marriage&their intolerant of others choices!?Also mod&elspeth I know what your talking about these real man trads/redpilled guys who beleive even more than feminists that ”women can do it all easily”!!We all know that is’nt exactly true as even ”the only real man in the room” dalrock would help his wife out washing very tough pots&pans!!
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I can see your point professor. While generally I agree with the Manospherian teachings that men need to ‘wake the hell’ up to female nature and societal conditioning, otherwise known as losing their Blue Pill mindset; some of what they say shows that they need to GROW up themselves. For example, when I hear them say about a woman, in a married situation or STR/LTR, something like, “Shut up and make me a sandwich, or there’s the door”, I’m thinking, “What f’ing planet are you living on dude?” Now the crude ones, usually the younger guys, might say something along those lines, while the older one’s are more subtle with their way of putting things. The older one’s give themselves away when they say something like, “Next her if she hasn’t given it up by the third date, preferably by the the second date.” or “She’s ‘of the streets’, aka a ‘Ho-Ho-Ho’, if she gives it up on the first (pump her and dump her), but she’s a goner if she hasn’t given it up by the third date.” Really? So on the third date she’d better be naked and riding you, or ALWAYS, or get rid of her? Doesn’t she have a say in the matter of when sex happens? And these idiots will in the same breath say, “A key that opens all locks is a master key, a lock that can be opened by any key is a faulty lock.” Now I get what they are saying, but I thought you idiots wanted N=0, “No hymen, no diamond” girls, or some dumb saying like that? Now I agree with them that the men shouldn’t be out there spending significant sums of money on women because they can get used for their cash on those dates, e.g. expensive meals on dates (foodie calls), etc. It’s better to first have coffee dates, or maybe going dutch on a reasonable dinner date, until the man is sure that there’s attraction on her part (and that should be be showing up in her GENUINE IOIs), and that he’s not getting played.
My point? Some of this sh!t men say in the ‘Sphere is ridiculous… If I was a woman genuinely interested in dating and meeting a man for a possible LTR, I’d be offended by it. It’s crass and shows a real lack of emotional maturity. And some of the dudes I’ve heard say this are some of the ‘big names’ in the ‘Sphere.
Okay good, I had to get that off my chest. We need to police our own male space here and tell men their full of sh!t when they are talking sh!t. Not ‘White Knighting’ here, far from it, just a little tired of this from our side of the fence in the ‘gender wars.’ ‘Nuff said.
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RPB, I agree with your overall sentiment that there’s a general lack of maturity. Most Red Pill advice is geared toward getting “results” without first having to do the hard work of building character and charisma. Advice that is geared towards genuine growth and maturation is patently dismissed as “too theoretical” and “ineffective”. Mixing this in with Christian morality and wisdom will cause it to be routinely ignored. Put it on an internet blog, and it becomes mere entertainment. Thus, a certain amount of sensationalism and smack is necessary to hold the attention of a general audience. All of these reasons can explain why this blog is not as popular as some others.
Rollo (The Rational Male) is popular because he applies evo-psyche to real world situations, which is both insightful and entertaining.
Roosh (Return of Kings) was popular because “experience”.
Roissy (Chateau Heartiste) was popular because of his cocky godless attitude and “Science”.
Dalrock was popular because he assumed women have agency, which is a incongruency that is both true and funny.
I tried to use more humor in the early years of this blog, but being in the form of written text, it was consistently misinterpreted. I’m still trying to find an approach that will reach the masses with some of the essential truths that I (we) have found. Maybe I should adopt a Romanized name that starts with an R, like Raphael, Rembrandt, or Rocco.
On another point, you are mixing together axiomatic advice based on different contexts.
Axiomatic advice is a pithy saying meant to capture a larger body of knowledge that is too long and awkward to state concisely.
The different contexts are for (1) men who are looking for sex, and (2) men who are looking for a good wife. Once you understand this, the advice should make more sense.
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Thanks Jack! Good words. I guess I come from a frame of mind that we men all need to be helping each other navigate this red pill journey with greater understanding, increasing wisdom and growing levels of maturity; and the older guys need to be helping the younger guys along as best we can. Every now and then, stuff said on ‘our side of the fence’ sounds far from ‘wisdom and growing sense of maturity’ in the realm of gender relationships. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m seeing this not only through a red pill lense, but a greater life experience lense since I have a few decades under my belt of real world experience. What’s new for me, four years or so running now, is viewing it through a red pill lense instead of a blue pill lense. I have to remember that when I get triggered by stuff the guy’s say that lands over here with me as immature, selfish and self-centered, and not forwarding the conversation to the benefit of all men (My interpretation), that it’s all a part of the journey. An old adage comes to mind about farm animals, “They eat the hay and leave the sticks.”
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A lot of Game and Red Pill advice at least used to be geared toward getting average frustrated chumps to stop taking sh!t from people and stand up for themselves. At least, married men were finding out that just saying “no”, being more assertive about what they want and need, and starting to take charge of things was working and turning things around in their marriages. Single men were finding out that just stopping the bad stuff (pedestalization, supplication, fawning, “being nice”, doing whatever women want on their command/demand, spending money on a first date) was turning things around.
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BOCES of Saratoga / Warren / Essex Count. (F Donald Meyers Educational Center). This is where my brother spent his daily education until he was 21. They also serve the regional high schools and have vovcation training for high schoolers in these counties who are not going to college…and train for vovational fields.
They still do Special Education and closed classrooms, but the “do gooders” now mainstream kids like my brother who would have zero use in high school English, and everything else instead of focusing on the potentials they do have to live in a group home setting and hold a job. My brother became a dishwasher and janitor assistant with the local Marriott (neat freak like me) where he worked until his health declined.
I was supoosed to be a special education teacher, but after one year and my student teaching (special education has become baby sitting, paperwork and teaching these special folks useless stuff and having them meainstreamed while slowing down the rest of the class due to some intellect and mostly behavior issues). But hey…..we all can feel good about ourselves that mainstreamed kids now have NO skills and live soley on welfare and the state!
Yeah….
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True, here is a real life example.
A neighbor who lives in the apartment complex has some type of intellect development problems. He can’t tell time using a clock, but he knows sports, can do laundry and heat up some prepared food. Social services directly pays for his apartment rent, pays for utilities, pays for a sports package on cable and pays for a private taxi service to pick him up in the morning and take him to the “center” and bring him back home. He does some type of janitorial work there for which he gets paid. His caseworker shows up to check and take him to the supermarket now and then, but he eats mostly at the convenience store. His parents live very nearby (like 2 miles away) and he visits them only on major holidays – Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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My bad….it is supposed to be this
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Women’s is hotness vs. dominant personality (or signs of that) vs. money/status vs. likely loyalty.
In my admittedly limited experience, good looks and a dominant personality often go together. Loyalty is something we’re taught to be from childhood. Men who have a loyalty code often have a strong one. I feel blessed to have found these three in one.
Money/status never mattered to me outside of a baseline level of comfort, and I feel blessed that we accomplished a lot more than where we came from, we live in a nice enough neighborhood, and that we’re not broke. That’ll do. I never really got why family with two kids need a 5000 square foot house. Keeping 3000 sq. feet clean and maintained is enough of a headache.
But again, it’s those preferences Nova keeps mentioning. Everyone has their thing. We have what elites might call deplorable preferences. Patriarchy, close relationships, etc. I suspect the toys, trinkets and conveniences of wealth often serve as a replacement source of joy. We all work with what we have as best we can.
If I cared about being wealthy and having status, then it may have been that no amount of handsomeness or confidence would have made this work. It makes me wonder if a large part of what ails marriage is not only a lack of proper understanding about what marriage is, but also a profound lack of self-awareness and ability to properly adapt.
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Yeah, that’s women’s tradespace – the things I listed. Women vary individually as to how much the emphasize one male quality vs. the other (even if the ideal male has them all). Just like men vary in how much they value “hotness” vs. e.g. a sweet, girl next door type. NAWALT and NAMALT.
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“good looks and a dominant personality often go together.”
Elspeth, I agree that looks and social dominance are correlated (in men). Yeah, there are handsome wusses but the two often go together. This makes it even harder to be an “alpha” (in the way that Nova defines it) for most men. Shrinks the pool of “alphas.”
Wherever loyalty comes from (nurture or nature) it’s one more thing that complicates women’s choice. Do I go for the gorilla or the peacock. What about his money, status? Will he be loyal to me or do I risk a guy who will bolt or cheat.
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I have concluded that this depends on when and how the man (or woman, often) realized that they were physically attractive. Depending on how they were raised, they may have had no frame of reference in which they viewed themselves as somehow better. Late bloomers, and all that.
Years and years ago, back when Oprah was a thing (I think it was Oprah), Brad Pitt was being interviewed and he said that at a fairly early age his mother told him -roughly paraphrased- “People are going to treat you differently because of how you look. Doors will open, and you’ll often get things you don’t deserve. Don’t become a jerk because of that, be kind to people, and treat everyone with respect. It’s not as if you did anything to earn special treatment.”
In other words, he knew early on that he was good looking. My FIL was like that. He was from a different time and place so he had a hard life in many ways, but he also experienced success beyond what should have been for a man of his station and temperament. A lot of that carried over to his sons, also good looking men, who owned that identity from an early age.
Some people, however, are just late bloomers. I had a friend who used to say that while youth is beautiful, really most men don’t ripen till around 30, LOL. If you’ve been walked over and pushed around by chicks most of your life up until that point, you can be a handsome wuss.
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I think your looks, physical size, etc. affect your personality but I think a fair amount of termperment is inborn (genetics, womb environment, who knows) and/or influenced by very early child development (the time we can’t remember).
I do know some guys around here (shock: white guys) who are tall and fairly good looking (I’d guess they’re 80-90 percenters) who are fairly soft-spoken, introverted.
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I suspect the toys, trinkets and conveniences of wealth often serve as a replacement source of joy.
No, they would say those are the “perks”. Their source of joy is achievement. Considering themselves, and objectively being, “accomplished”. That isn’t about income level (although it often goes with it), it’s about how they perceive themselves and are perceived by peers in terms of their accolades and accomplishments. The money and the toys are perks, not the driver, for almost all of these people. They are achievers, first and foremost.
This is why when they run up against walls in terms of further achievement (which happens in the 40s, because that is when the few who are going to the top level get tracked for that, and the rest of the achievers get effectively capped at higher levels of management), they can struggle in terms of motivation, and often switch gears and pour everything into the 1-2 kids, to achieve through them what they are now capped at achieving themselves. And sometimes they take on other personal crusades that can result in extra-curricular achieves, like running for school board, advancement in competitive hobbies, and so on. Achievement is always the motivator, not the money itself (one of the reasons why many of such couples have a high-achieving low earner in them, like a professor or a non-profit worker or non-rockstar journalist/writer/etc).
I never really got why family with two kids need a 5000 square foot house. Keeping 3000 sq. feet clean and maintained is enough of a headache.
They outsource the cleaning, whether it’s 3,000 sq feet or 5,000 sq feet, so that’s generally not even on the radar screen for this crowd. Like literally a non-consideration.
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Think it often happens even to people whose careers aren’t “capped” that way.
I knew a corporate CEO who just stood up and walked out one day. Couldn’t take it anymore. I think the midlife crisis is a real existential crisis. Mike went through it too… right at the time his career was taking off. He just didn’t like the future he was going into at the time. So he changed it.
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Yeah I actually knew that about the cleaning being outsourced, but it’s more than just the cleaning.
One of my things is hating everyone being off in separate corners for hours without missing one another. We can sort of fall into that trap even in our smaller house, but it seems much more prevalent in the homes of acquaintances who have much bigger homes.
Unless they have a lot of kids, and in our circle a lit if people have a lot of kids; defined (laughably to Cameron I’m sure) as 4 or more kids.
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“This is what I want. This is what I don’t.”
It is more or less illegal to speak to your wife like this in the US.
I had no idea what the Duluth model was before Dalrock, and none of the women in my circle have heard of it either. Maybe that is not relevant, but the idea that speaking clearly and directly about what a husband wants from his wife is illegal seems suspect to me. After all, a wife is free to do the same and a good many husbands will feel compelled to comply. Mine would need to see a coherent line of thought and would have no qualms about saying no, but he is not typical of American middle class husbands.
Surely there is a legal case to be made under the equal protection clause; assuming it’s only illegal for a man to express his standards.
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elspeth – You are trying to apply reason and rationality leftist thought. You have ZERO chance of grasping leftist thought unless you first detach yourself from God’s truth. The Duluth model is based on power and control. Man keeps wife at home = abuse because power and control. Man expresses what he likes sexually (within biblical boundaries) and expects his wife to comply = abuse because power and control.
Here’s one of spokes on a Duluth Model of abuse wheel. “Using Male Privilege: Treating her like a servant – Making all the big decisions – acting like the ‘master of the castle’ – Being the on to define men’s and women’s roles.” So if SAM reads and applies the Bible to your marriage, like God calls him to do, he’s abused you. Like I said leftist “thought”.
On a side note, other than the Male Privilege one, all the other signs of abuse on the DM wheel of abuse are tactics feminist women use against men every day. Mrs. Apostle is a special case in that she has used all of them against me, including the male privilege part of trying to define my role in the family. She’s a type A overachiever. 🙂
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speaking clearly and directly about what a husband wants from his wife is illegal seems suspect to me.
There’s a bit of hyperbole here, but not much. The legality of a husband speaking clearly and directly about what he wants from his wife depends wholly on how sexually attracted she is to him.
It is “illegal” because a wife will say “that is abuse” and she will call police on him and peep “I feel unsafe” because he is “abusive” by saying that he wants things from me.
I’m being very serious here. A woman feeling that her husband is issuing orders to her and telling her what to do and making demands of her is “abuse”. Most law enforcement agencies will view that as “abuse” particularly if a woman complains about it.
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If she’s willing to call the cops on me for anything short of nearIy killing her then I don’t want to be married to her anyway.
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If Mrs. deti calls the cops on me for ANYTHING, it’s over.
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IMO, willingness to do this shows fundamental disloyalty.
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As a man who has (regrettably) used physical violence against her, I can relate that I didn’t have the cops called on me. I could very well have – I definitely would have gone to jail. We worked things out. Only thing I’ll note is mine is a loyal one who is attracted to me.
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Duluth passes the equal protection clause because it generally isn’t a legal standard in terms of what gets you convicted, generally, of domestic violence. The legal standards are in the statutes and in most states they aren’t Duluth-based per se.
The Duluth model is generally used as an “intervention program”, such that guys who are convicted of DV are sentenced to include mandatory participation in some neutrally named “domestic abuse counseling” or “domestic abuse intervention” program. Those programs are pretty much always Duluth programs, but the Duluth content itself is not court-mandated. It’s legally a “Kabuki dance” — the court mandates you to participate in the program as a part of your sentencing, and the court knows it’s a Duluth program, but the program isn’t called that, and the court doesn’t mandate the specific conduct of the program, it simply requires participation in a “state-certified domestic abuse intervention program”.
In that context, you won’t get an equal protection argument to work (some groups have tried).
So what happens is this kind of scenario. Husband discovers wife’s affair. Verbal blowout ensues, husband loses temper, screams profanities at wife at the top of his voice, slams the table. Wife calls cops, says she is threatened. Mandatory arrest rules apply, in many places mandatory TRO (temporary restraining order) applies, too. Man is eventually convinced by the state to plead guilty to a lesser offense (some kind of misdemeanor), and the “jail portion” of the sentence is suspended by the judge in exchange for the agreement to attend a court-mandated, state-certified “domestic abuse intervention program”, which is Duluth. For a year. With evaluations of the facilitators sent to the judge regarding your participation and your cooperation with the program (it isn’t all a lecture format … you need to participate, and affirm the truth of what is being pushed there). If you fail to do any of that, the judge can un-suspend your sentence, and off to jail you go.
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The important part are the reports sent to the probation officer by the provider.
Every week must include phrases like “client is progressing”, or “client is learning to replace his patriarchal thinking with new ways of conflict in relationships”, and so on.
It doesn’t matter if its codified specifically into law. If those words do not appear in the reports, every week, you are violating probation and back to jail you go.
Reference: I was the report writer for three years.
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It also doesn’t matter if anyone has heard of the Duluth model. It is the standard by which mens behavior is compared and applied vis a vis their marriages, and will come down on you hard when your wife has had enough (or some friends of yours report your husband for being too dominant)
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I really can’t stress this enough.
I have been the person who writes the report and sends you back to jail for not progressing (i.e., thinking correctly and saying the right things in the group).
Many of those men were just like Elspeth’s husband. No one is immune.
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That’s a legal -and rhetorical- sleight of hand though, isn’t it? Anything that can cost you liberty and access to what you earned and work for is a legal tool. As such, it should be subject to scrutiny under the equal protection clause.
Of course, we all know that American jurisprudence started the slippery slide from being based on the rule of law to subjective execution based on political preferences and power a long time ago. So this is what we’re left with.
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Gender gets “intermediate scrutiny” under the equal protection clause — a law passes if it furthers an important government interest and uses means which are substantially related to that interest. It’s very hard to make a case that Duluth fails that test, even in cases where it is being used in a way that would impact the equal protection clause (as in mandatory arrest policies and the like — but not plea agreements, which are agreements and therefore not subject to the equal protection clause of the constitution because you do not have to agree to them).
Race is different because it gets strict scrutiny under equal protection (must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest … which is much harder to pass).
So to me at least it makes sense that Duluth passes the equal protection clause.
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The analysis on Duluth’s compliance with equal protection is sound – it meets “intermediate scrutiny”. Absolutely no judge in the land will decide it does not.
Ever happens to me and the long arm of Duluth falls upon me – It will be as a divorced man, because I will not go back to that house.
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Just realized I made SAM sound like an ass, and it probably isn’t the first time. But he does care about my preferences. Really. For example:
During the pandemic he decided to go without shaving for a good, long while. He usually only wears a goatee. At first I thought, “I like beards, so I might like him with a beard.” As it grew in, I realized that parts of his face that I find particularly alluring were too covered up. I didn’t say anything for a month, thinking he would reach the same conclusion as I did. Somehow he was not able to read my mind! So I told him, “I think I’m gonna need you to shave that beard. I miss your face.” And he shaved it back to a goatee.
It’s a little thing but it meant a lot to me. Because I am very easy to please, he is very accommodating. I’m actually (in his estimation) occasionally too low maintenance. He’s been trying to get me to make a request for a grand gesture in honor of my milestone birthday later this summer. I’m not very helpful. After much soul searching I asked for something techie that will be helpful as my workload picks in the fall.
He was underwhelmed, as were most of my friends who told me to request a trip or a piece of jewelry of something like that. It just doesn’t interest me. If the Lord allows me to actually live the little bit to see that birthday, I already have more than enough in my life that fulfills me. He likes to spoil me though, so I’m trying to think of something material I want. It’s just not who I am.
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❤
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This is also somewhat misleading because the application/enforcement end comes in the form of the guidance that each law enforcement agency gives to its officers. Which, I have seen and are usually made publicly available on websites and such.
The guidance always favors arresting the man. Even on equivocal cases.
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Yeah — for purposes of the mandatory arrest policy, the constitution applies, but under intermediate scrutiny it passes (is substantially related to furthering an important government interest).
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Another issue is that most cops are men, and tradcon at that.
They LOVE to come into these situation and save the woman. They get what blogger epathologism used to call “the lift”
Every man reading here knows what the lift is. It is that feeling you get when a woman (any random woman, really) displays that look of approval/gleam in her eye when she approves of your chivalry.
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You’re the legal expert here Nova, so I’m going to take your word for it that Duluth passes the equal protection clause legally.
Ethically however, it fails miserably. In a country which purports to be all about equality between men and women (shouting it from the rooftops every chance they get), then men and women should be held to the same standards under the law. My knowledge of the law is basically nil, but my understanding of right, wrong, fair and just is based on simple common sense observation.
To be clear: I appreciate the imbalance of physical power between men and women. I get that men should be held to a higher standard since the wife is a weaker vessel. And when women acknowledge that we are indeed the weaker vessel, that biological reality makes us vulnerable, with a particular need for men in particular areas (even in this postmodern era), and women behave accordingly, then okay. In the event that ever happens again, I will accept that administrating these rules differently based on sex is warranted. It may even be just.
But so long as we are pretending to be striving for equality, promoting the absurd pretense that women can do anything that men can and be anything that men can, then the law should reflect that. Anything else is unjust.
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I don’t disagree in theory, although I would say that nobody ever really wanted actual equality. That is — men and women being treated the same in all instances. That wasn’t ever the goal. The goal, the idea when they used the word “equality” was equal access to things they wanted access to — namely means of acquiring power (education, career, wealth, sex, etc.). It was never about equal treatment. In fact, I think it was acknowledged that equal treatment would, in fact, not get to the desired goal of equalizing access to means of acquiring power.
In short the idea never was equality in terms of equal treatment. It was equalized (or better) access to power for women. Everything else that was in place to protect women was to remain in place for the most part. And this wasn’t necessarily the idea of the feminists themselves. It was the men who mandated feminism legally and culturally who made it so, because they very, very much wanted to preserve these things for their familial women (daughters, nieces, grand-daughters especially), while given them enhanced access to accumulating personal power. Certainly these guys had no interest in treating them equally to men.
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Yes, I know. I just hate the lie.
Did they anticipate men having power stripped away and women holding all the cards? Their sons and grandsons being treated as criminals and second class citizens?
I suspect I know what your answer will be. Something along the lines of being able to shelter their own sons and not caring about the sons of plebes.
We are so screwed…
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E
This is why I think conventional wisdom in “the reaction” is that total collapse (a hard reset in the form of financial calamity, war, violent revolution) is required and even hoped for.
The problem is everyone thinks THEY are tough enough to survive in that environment and will have submissive women lying around licking their boots in sorrow over the disaster they created.
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More or less.
The view is basically this: If you’re such a weak male that you are threatened by the power we decided to give to women, and they are beating you, out-competing you, dominating you socially and so on, that’s because you’re a weak male, and you deserve what you are getting.
The “pop culture” translation of that basic idea is: “You’re just being insecure. You have to accept your weakness and vulnerability, and accept changing gender roles. If you find it difficult, it’s just because your sex had it too easy before, and so now normal setting feels like hard mode. You’re just being ridiculous. Just listen to the women .. they’re wiser and more emotionally mature, and also better educated than you are, so just swallow your foolish, misplaced pride, get over your insecurities, and listen to them.”
This is blaring 24/7 everywhere outside the ghetto.
But yes, the men in the UMC and UMC+ do not care if men suffer under feminism and the tilt, because the men who do are “weak” in their eyes. They have no worries about competing with women, because in their class they still do outcompete women (see Congress, CEO positions, rich people, etc.), and so they are not personally threatened by it. The men who are? Worthless and weak.
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But yes, the men in the UMC and UMC+ do not care if men suffer under feminism and the tilt, because the men who do are “weak” in their eyes.
I’d think Metoo would turn this on its head.
They didn’t care when it was the plebes (and military before anyone else), but surely they can see it now it has taken out some very big players.
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Privately quite a few of them are dismayed with #metoo. #metoo came from the women themselves, really without the male enablers being involved, so it hit men at all levels.
And privately a lot of them will tell you that they think it went too far (a lot of women will say that privately, too).
But, a lot of men, especially younger men and more “beta” men, tend to feel less threatened by #metoo, because they were already basically neutered at the workplace anyway, and they kind of like seeing the office AMOGs get defenestrated.
Never underestimate the underlying dynamic of relentless, remorseless competition among males as a prime motivator for behaviors and perspectives of men, regardless of station.
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It was the men who mandated feminism legally and culturally who made it so, because they very, very much wanted to preserve these things for their familial women (daughters, nieces, grand-daughters especially), while given them enhanced access to accumulating personal power.
And because they wanted women’s votes. “We’ll get these bills passed. You rally the rank and file to pull the levers for us, and get money for our reelection campaigns.”
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And because they wanted women’s votes.
Yes. Without the liberal white woman’s vote our nation’s politics would look entirely different.
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“The view is basically this: If you’re such a weak male that you are threatened by the power we decided to give to women, and they are beating you, out-competing you, dominating you socially and so on, that’s because you’re a weak male, and you deserve what you are getting.”
What I saw over the course of my Air Force military career, which spanned the last part of the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st century, was a subtle but pronounced shift where the females no longer had to ‘beat you, out-compete you or dominate you socially’ to move up, just be average to slightly above average (no star power) and they got elevated. It wasn’t like that when I came in, the females in the 80s and 90s, for the most part, had to prove themselves and pay their dues; the ’00’s and ‘teens, just show up, perform decently and ALL doors seemed to open for them. I know this sounds like ‘typical male thinking,’ but I could list at least a dozen instances, off the top of my head, where the female got promoted, elevated to positions beyond her capabilities and it left us all wondering, “Why? What in the hell did she do to deserve that promotion, job, etc?”
Now, there were females promoted, elevated that deserved it; however, most of them in my opinion (and others as well) showed up being and performing more ‘like a man,’ i.e. in their masculine energy, and no one really had a problem with those ladies being elevated or promoted. Some had problems with the way they came across in dealing with them on a day-to-day basis, but I think that was more about them not occurring as ‘lady like’ and too pushy, and a bit overbearing at times. We had a term for it, they were called ‘ball busters.’ And, they weren’t all necessarily butch, some were attractive; and every now and then, quite attractive. The important point, they performed the mission well and had enough people skills to get by, especially when they interacted with those higher up the chain of command.
I guess the point I’m trying to make, somewhere along the lines during those decades, it shifted beyond egalitarianism, to ‘we need to be more diverse throughout the chain-of-command;’ and that’s when the ladies no longer had to necessarily be the way I described above. They basically had to show up, not f’up, have some femininity about them, be willing to move up and THEY ALL SEEMED to be taken care of in terms of jobs, promotions, etc. In the officer’s ranks, if they were like I just described directly above, and willing to stick it out over time, it seemed like ALL of them made 0-6, Colonel–not easy to do, or shouldn’t be easy to do. Not that they were incompetent, but they occurred more along the lines as mediocre leaders and managers who had been taken care of throughout their career; and even many of the other women, wanted to work for male officers rather than those female officers. I had several females, officer and enlisted, tell me this was the case.
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the females in the 80s and 90s, for the most part, had to prove themselves and pay their dues
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I’d keep the 90s out of the timeline.
They turned out some of the worst female pilots in the 90s, because every general wanted to say he was the first to get a female fighter pilot (and/or the most female fighter pilots). That first group was a menace, and their promotions were basically assured (it would have to be something beyond the pail to get them kicked out).
Mike went to jump school (the real one, the Army one, not the Academy version) and he was made to carry a woman’s pack during a march in addition to his own because she was too small and weak.
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Here is an example:
https://blog.seattlepi.com/flyinglessons/2014/11/11/pilots-didnt-want-to-fly-with-capt-who-crash-landed-sw-flight-345/
(at the time no mainstream media published this was a female pilot)
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Just to add (since it’s a 2014 article). This was a female pilot who graduated in the 90s.
The reason she was a Captain in 2014….takes a while to make Captain.
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You’re correct in what you’re saying Liz! I was referring to the early 90s, Desert Storm era, before the draw downs and everything else that occurred in the 1990s that basically obliterated the great Cold War military and introduced the social engineering programs on such a wide scale throughout USAF that have been going on from then until now.
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@Scott:
While I agree that nothing short of the much ballyhooed “hard reset” will restore some semblance of sanity, I certainly don’t welcome it.
My husband is made of pretty tough stuff, and he’s resourceful and knowledgeable of a lot of things, but it’s been almost 30 years since he lived in an environment where he had to be in a physically defensive posture. We’ve been doing the super comfy suburban thing for a long time now. It’s been more than 30 years since he’s thrown or took a punch. Frankly, I don’t particularly want him to have to rekindle that part of himself to take care of us. Young me thought it was cool that men respected him as someone not to F* with. Older me thinks back, and it wasn’t pretty.
How many of the guys with apocalyptic fantasies have ever taken a punch? Ever planted or hunted for food? They’re not wrong that women will need the protection of any man they can find it in should things take a turn for the worse, however. Problem is that the men who can actually provide it will just have harems while the men who can’t may be even worse off than they are now.
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Supermodel Hailey Bieber attributes the success of her marriage to Justin Bieber to their shared Christian faith — see https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/hailey-baldwin-faith-marriage-justin-bieber.amp .
But the Christian image projected is a bit interesting, to say the least: https://tinyurl.com/2mncc5zy
This is more of what is coming in the future, even for those who manage to remain “Christian”. The title, and considering themselves such, but not actually living that way. Apparently, young Hailey sees no issue with the messages her modeling gig projects about sex, never mind about female role models, but, hey … at least she’s Christian, right?
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Example of being a ‘Churchian’ rather than Christian?
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Scott says:
The prepper groups I have been involved with over the past decade don’t focus on survival skills, or plans….they focus on the idea that “all the women that are gonna be begging us for food and protection.”
I did a month long backpacking trek in Adirondacks in 2017. Let me tell you something….. If it came to that, where we all had to go live off the land, or had to “head for the hills” most would die within a month. I could hold out a bit longer, but the fuel runs out. Clothes wear out. Things break. Gonna chop wood, have enough ammo to defend, and hunt, and cure meat property, and gather edible plants, and guard your camp, and defend from predators, and have enough wood, and skills for a medical emergency (snake or spider bite… a sliver that gets infected… and heavens! A broken bone out in the wilderness with ‘no where’ to go and get help, and no helicopters arriving to rescue you).
No… no…… None of that. It’s only “young women are gonna be sucking our d*cks for breadcrumbs.” Hence why I am a lone wolf, and hence I am focusing my skills on medical. A trained medic in advanced first aid will have skills that could be useful for trade or to another group. Who knows?
Very few are tough enough, most will die…. and I include myself in that. A good two months in the mountains is tops for me (and I have solid outdoor skills of high altitude camping, and backpacking, and distance hiking) and even I would need to trade, get supplies or find a group who needed my skills.
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Scott and LastMod wrote about the mentality of prepper groups,
They want to reduce the interaction into one that is transactional, which is something they can deal with. But interestingly, they’re also reverting to a default context of patriarchy.
I agree that if society ever sunk to this level, most could never hack it. They would either die or emigrate to another locale. Likewise, women wouldn’t stick around for this. They would leave if possible. And the kind of women who would stick around/survive in this environment would be the cussing, chain-smoking Russian babushka, not the flaxen-haired, sleek bodied superheroine that is depicted in popular culture and media. However, I am sure there are a few men who would thrive. After all, Americans are descended from very independent pioneers. There are a few mouthpieces of the prepper mentality who are like this, but every prepper syncopate likes to think he is one of the few. As such, the overall viewpoint of preppers is half-baked.
In this case scenario, getting head from Olga would be a minor concern.
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