Oddbean new post about login | logout I'm at an age, where the married women tend to look and feel worse than the unmarried ones. We're physically and emotionally ground down, we're underemployed or in dead-end jobs, our physical freedom is curtailed and our social life is policed. Marriage has become a difficult sell to women because they can just believe their lying eyes and we have no upside to offer them, other than, "it would be good for your kids".
That's sad. But, gosh, I still think you're awesome and a lovely inspiration. After meeting you and your daughter, I could see how much good you've done for the world just by raising her. I hope that you can always know and feel how... Well, GOOD that is. ❤️😁🫂
Good for your kids is an extremely important point
On the other hand...
?
It is so important in so many ways to raise a family. Maybe you should appreciate more that fact, as you should, i dare to say
It's hard, takes decades, and requires great sacrifice, but conveys no status or privileges. Don't even get a tax break. 😂
It has status and priviledges. Just think a lonely person hearing the family next door singing and laughing. There is an educating story from ancient greece exactly about this. Too long to write it now, but i think you get the meaning
Unmarried women are rarely lonely. Some married women are lonely. I don't think this is a convincing argument.
Hmm, i don't know. I thought unmarried men are rarely lonely.
Bollocks, unmarried people are perpetually lonely. Even at a party surrounded by friends and fuck buddies, they’re still lonely.
Aha. Ok. So lonely by choice?
Not by choice, but rather by consequence of their choices.
Do i smell some pride on this? Can't someone just be unlucky? i like your sharp answers btw
The unlucky person is the exception. I don’t speak from pride I speak from experience by having lived in a place that values independence and wealth over family and relationships. Both the single woman and the single male feel perpetually lonely in middle age and vie for any form of attention or affection they can find, however fleeting, which reinforces their feelings of loneliness. They attempt to avoid that truth through hard work, entertainment filled evenings, drinking and drugs, large groups of friends. This continues undoubtedly until one finally finds the solution to that feeling, which is only a dedicated trust filled long term relationship, generally leading to some form of “marriage” That’s not to say the feeling of loneliness can’t arise from other situations, but the idea that unmarried men/women don’t feel lonely is total bollocks, as fleeing it is a primary motivation of their daily lives.
Interesting. Environments that value wealth over interpersonal human relationships are not healthy environments i think. I suspect that you will thrive in a different environment. One of your choice. I wish you good luck on this, if you attempt it. I mean, you are better than this environment
Playing second fiddle vs being in a true partnership. Women with the latter thrive.
Great offer though
An offer the majority of women apparently find easy to resist. Either being married needs to become a better offer or being unmarried needs to become a worse one.
The later happens too late these days. It was much worse much earlier not too long ago.
Yes, but our society is now designed to cater to unmarried women and marginalize married ones, and the trend seems to steadily intensify.
Until fiat currency collapses, that will continue. It has to. Strong families are anathema to big control measures. Strong families require strong bonds, for which strong men will die to defend. You cannot have that if you wish to control everything about everyone.
I used to think this, but I've been waiting for the currency to collapse since 1997. 😂 https://c.tenor.com/22AGfxpFxQoAAAAC/tenor.gif
It will happen. Fiat always does. 🫂❤️
Yes, but will it happen early enough to prevent the population from hitting the demographic point of no return? Do we really want to just wait around and see?
I'm not. I'm going to build myself a slice of heaven and pass it on to someone who will keep building street in gone. At that point, unless a whole battalion of troops show up with all the goodies, or a mesh-networked killbot drone squad shows up, the rest of the world can be ignored and it will be hard, but vastly better.
I read somewhere that one time in human history the population shrank to 1200 people. And yet, here we are ...
It's temporary. An artifact of increased security in societies. Men and women will rediscover marriage and children as beneficial beyond the historical reasons.
As increased physical security is largely an artifact of the population aging and the men becoming correspondingly docile and losing virility, I doubt this will change. Unless we increase mass-immigration to even-higher levels.
I’ve seen the other side of that fence. The one where the women are 35 and single, over employed with career paths to the sky. Free to do whatever they want held down by no one. Drinking out at bars in packs with all their friends, all while swiping left and right and desperate. Not just for attention, but connection and purpose, body clocks ticking and alarm bells ringing. Fucked fifty people last year, men and women, but can’t find anyone that fulfills them. all fighting over the same scraps of men discarded for good reason by another, or too impatient to build the one they want because their bodies are screaming that they’ve run out of time.
35 is almost too late, to make this decision, really. But it says a lot about how unattractive the institution of marriage has become for women, that they delay, delay, delay...
Or maybe that’s just when the lights come on at the party. There are thousands of women in New York City that have been head down grinding for that cheese and have climbed the ladder of success, only to reach a lookout and realize “oh fuck, I’m 35”
I'm out in a rural area, and the regret all runs the other way. Marry young, have kids, get divorced once the kids are older, join the party. Women who marry later are actually less likely to divorce, but they struggle to have children.
There is no perfect. Only trade-offs. No one will fulfill everything for someone who isn't truly happy with themselves. Finding this out myself the hard way
This framing is so fucked up I don't even know where to start. nostr:nevent1qqsgceehjp672gzxs7wf4h5gumsjyjxacvsuez67rh7rurx5f3xts0cpzamhxue69uhkzarvv9ejumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtczyrwkvn27gqtyxw5v660sqkhpfqyqgdgh3x6emed0qcnkmejkx0f3jqcyqqqqqqgwcxpfl
I can't imagine being single and my age today. When a woman is married, at least if she chose wisely, you have someone to lean on. You help them when they are down or struggling. They help you when you are down or struggling. Home life is more dependable because you have two helping out with everything making things less likely to fall apart if one person goes through a hard time. It isn't that marriage has nothing to give. It is that people today are always looking for something better. We live in a throw away society that throws things away, not just because they broke, but also because they are no longer new and exciting. People need to be more grateful for what they have instead of spending all of their time looking for something better.
I can't really imagine being single, but statistically-speaking, we both will eventually be so, as widows or divorcées.
My goal/plan/hope is that we are raptured together and neither of us has to lose the other. Obviously it is not guaranteed, but with what is happening in the world today, I think we've got a decent chance.
> physically and emotionally ground down. • Why is the marriage the source here? Everyone gets exhausted by their situation sometimes, but if someone says their marriage caused this, my assumption would simply be that their relationship may be unhealthy for some reason. But that isn’t a problem of marriage, that’s just what happens to unhealthy relationships of all kinds. > underemployed or in dead-end jobs. • Similarly, how is this the effect of marriage? I’ve never known any situation where someone married with a bad job was unable to fix it until they got divorced, then suddenly their job opportunities exploded, or vice versa. > physical freedom is curtailed and social life is policed. Also, in what way does marriage relate to this? Are you suggesting that without a marriage couldn’t be a problem? My take, and I hope this isn’t taken as disrespect, is that you have misunderstood the source of the problem. A normal relationship and a marriage are functionally no different at all. Getting married or divorced will neither fix nor create problems, unless the problem is *the relationship.* Marriage is a label, it doesn’t even exist. It’s like saying you live in “a house” vs living in “a home.” It’s the same building either way. If your house is rotting, calling it a home won’t fix it. If you were asking for thoughts and opinions, what you describe just sounds like an unhealthy relationship, but whether it’s label a “marriage” or not makes no difference. If the relationship, and job situation, and social life have problems, “marriage” isn’t going to make it better or worse or even meaningfully change it. Only the person themselves and/or their partner’s choices and behavior are what create those problems.
Not every house is a home. Not every relationship is a marriage. They're qualitatively different things. Namely, a marriage is a relationship you are inclined to stay in, even when it isn't fun and easy. That is, after all, why people often don't want to marry. If they were identical things, the choice to marry or not would be completely random. Marriage tends to correlate with higher fertility and increased familial responsibilities through an expanded extended family, and (for most wives) the burden of combining them with paid employment. That's why wives tend to look run-down: they have more responsibilities and work harder. They also (ironically) tend to earn higher salaries, provide more childcare, do more housework, and get less sleep, than never-married women, including single mothers. They are more-likely to be successful entrepreneurs and savers, and are more-likely to be actively involved in their communities. The idea that being a wife carries no additional responsibilities, sacrifices, labours or stresses, denies the reality that young women can readily observe around them and denigrates the greater efforts wives are exerting. Which further contributes to their stress and makes the role even less appealing. People used to understand that being a wife isn't just about having sex with some man that lives in the same house. It's a real vocation.
In my thinking, those responsibilities are tied to having a family, not a consequence of marriage per se. In that context I would certainly agree that having more responsibilities means “carrying a heavier load.” But the partnership of a marriage is meant to lighten it, not weigh it down further. In my personal opinion having a family is well worth all of that, especially looking toward the future. My framing has always been thinking about what I want to have when I’m 70. Responsibility today means a big family when I’m older where I can finally let a lot of that weight off and I won’t be alone and wishing I had made different choices or cared too much about what my job had been. Basically it seems to me like choice between living without responsibility today, and being alone without options in 30 years. Or carry those responsibilities now, and be vastly better off and have a supportive family in 30 years.
Statistical evidence across the population and in every country studied, underline my argument that wives are doing more than any other group of women. They are the closest to men in most aspects of productivity or politics, for that reason. Their marriage lessens the load of any particular responsibility, but it also expands their responsibilities far beyond the scope that unmarried women are expected to carry. They are therefore more likely to struggle under the weight of their own responsibilities, if their husband can't carry his half (death, divorce, disability, unemployment, etc.), or one of their responsibilities becomes a particularly heavy burden, by circumstances or their own personal decline/aging. Being a wife arguably has a bigger impact on a woman's entire existence, than even motherhood does, and wives are more likely to be mothers and to have more children, on average. Wives are also more-likely to care for elderly or disabled family members because marriage expands the number of such family members that they have.
It is a complicated topic and most wives pretend like it isn't a problem, but the high female divorce rate and young womens' increasing reluctance to marry, speak for themselves. It doesn't help much, to tell young women that they will benefit in 30 or 40 years because: 1) young women live in the moment and often have trouble imagining anything beyond a few years 2) they see lots of women who made the choice and then ended up alone, anyway 3) the caveat, that the effort is worth it only if the marriage is "healthy" is very discouraging, as they know so many people who have struggled with their marriages 4) a lot of them live geographically-separated from their parents, so the concept that children will "be around later" doesn't ring true to them. People have been attempting to raise the appeal to young women with big, fancy weddings and bachelorette parties, and etc. but I don't know how effective that has been and young couples are increasingly too poor for that.
The piss poor situation today I think stems from a failure of our money and culture (which also kind of follow from each other actually). It might seem hopeless, but that’s because the larger systems that demoralize entire generations are extremely hard to both see or control. So it feels like an inevitable reality, when it is actually a definable breakdown of core incentives. Not disagreeing with your points here, btw, just pointing out how few understand how those problems become so huge as to encompass an entire society and why they arise to begin with. I know to most it would sound bonkers to say, “our money caused this,” but a much deeper investigation reveals and extremely compelling story with an eerily large set of historical examples of the very same thing occurring.
Oh, I agree with that. And I don't think it's hopeless. I'm just saying that changing the way we speak about wives and marriage, in general, could have an effect of making marriage more appealing to young women. We have to frame our arguments for the audience we are addressing, and I think we have collectively failed to do that. One of the small, but effective, things we can do, is to simply openly acknowledge and clearly state that we are asking them to sacrifice personally and do something that is difficult and challenging, and that we value their willingness to adopt that burden because it is good for all of us, in aggregate, and their family and neighborhood, in particular. Tell them the truth. No more gaslighting. No more romanticism. No more decades-long search for Mr. 6/6/6. Return to the concept of marriage as a vocation.
“One of the small, but effective, things we can do, is to simply openly acknowledge and clearly state that we are asking them to sacrifice personally and do something that is difficult and challenging, and that we value their willingness to adopt that burden because it is good for all of us, in aggregate, and their family and neighborhood, in particular. Tell them the truth. No more gaslighting. No more romanticism. No more decades-long search for Mr. 6/6/6. Return to the concept of marriage as a vocation.” 1000% this 👆🏻 Our culture has come to some belief that we should want things because they are easy and we should desire no responsibility and everything is supposed to be easy and always happy. Rather than understanding the meaning and value of those things that are explicitly hard, and accept that. Our culture has been gaslighting us into believing utter nonsense about all of our choices, pretending there are no trade offs, and that the key to happiness is to escape all responsibility… when life is nothing of the sort. The secret to life (imo) is accepting and taking head on the inescapable hard things, understanding and being open to the clear trade offs we have to make, and not deluding ourselves with nonsense and fairy tales.
I also think my own religion has a very strong frame, for promoting marriage, with the idea that our marriages are a tangible way that we can learn more about the relationship between Christ and the Church. Because we can. That means that even a difficult marriage has value to us. And it means that we enter into marriage realizing that it can be difficult, so we aren't as disappointed if it doesn't end up like something out of a romantic comedy.
Less emphasis and expenditure on the wedding ceremonies. More sats written into the marriage contract.
I agree with this. Take the money and put it into a Bitcoin wallet and give it to her on the first morning, as a consummation present. Top up the wallet every anniversary.
Well, you should agree. I got this idea from one of your earlier stream of notes! GN! https://media.tenor.com/p0Wl-AklVVgAAAAC/obi-wan-well-of-course-i-know-him-hes-me.gif
capitalism is the disease that killed marriage
What do you think of Jordan Peterson's thoughts on this question? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_NNjV0s1o
He's right.
Would that be enough to make marriage attractive again to women, then?
No, too long-term. It doesn't address the immediate emotional strain of the veritable disappearance of wider male attention, the tangible loss in social status and social activities, eventual geographic relocation away from family and friends, and the economic risk of being tied to only one man's income.
don't like his arguments. for me marriage is sum of positive and negaitve. if sum is positive marriage stays if not don't see why not divorce. so that means do something every day to ensure your partner is happy. if there was a conflict do something positive next day. Math!)
I've been married for too long to think I can spend every day catering to the moods and whims of my partner. A marriage you can discharge, the minute the situation makes you unhappy, is literally worthless. Marriage exists to keep you in the situation when you are unhappy. Marriage is positive, on its own. It has value, on its own. Realizing that is part of adulting.
I don't believe that someone can give you warranty in anything. I'm not religious and I think something has value for people if other people or you put work in it. if your husband/wife gave you vow some years ago and now he/she wants divorce, who can enforce this vow? government? a person can divorce simply because it's physically possible and vows are just a mental construct. it somehow reminds me of "intrinsic" value of gold.
Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Marriage vows are public, to increase the social cost of breaking them and the social reward of keeping them. That is why wedding anniversaries are celebrated and "round" anniversaries are celebrated even bigger. Everyone knows that it's an accomplishment. An increasingly rare accomplishment, in fact.
If anything, this is the main problem. Rather than desiring marriage, itself, and being willing to compromise a bit, when looking for a husband, women are all trying to find Mr. Right and terrified of making the wrong choice and ending up worse off, than if they'd just stayed single. They shouldn't be worse off.
Men don't actually think that the time and effort of a job doesn't matter, or they wouldn't invest their own time and effort into it. Also, most mothers must work, so we don't have an either/or choice. We have to have a job, so having a family means we have 2 jobs.
What we are actually seeing, is that an increasing number of young women are giving up on sex. They are withdrawing from the dating market, not playing the field. Those playing the field are racking up wild numbers, and that leaves men with the impression that women are all sleeping around, but the market is bifurcating.
