Here’s a useful video for learning about what men think of marriage now that radical feminism has redefined it:
This comment about the video by Gaza on the Elusive Wapiti blog deserves a post of it’s own, so here it is:
One thing that Helen seems to miss is how women value and prioritize marriage and what role this plays vis a vis the male corollary.
The “story” isn’t just about men being “on strike” or even (to Helen’s credit) rationally choosing to delay and/or avoid; it must also include how women treat marriage WRT their own valuation and prioritization and life decisions (NOT merely stated desires).
There are not swarms of 25 y/o female college-grads looking for a husband with no willing men within sight. There are, however, swarms of 25 y/o/ female college-grads looking to have fun, travel, chase dreams, build careers, and explore their options.
I’ve “dated” a few of these women; most (and their social circles included) are so focused on the self-indulgence (“experience”) and the status associated with sexual conquest/power that any mention of marriage is usually as a joke (enter the “boyfriends/husbands are boring/stupid/lazy” meme); marriage is merely some distant thing to be acquired at some seemingly distant age.
Sure, over time (cue: the wall), the distant thing becomes a stated desire, but the transition from stated-desire to behavioral change and actual prioritization often takes years. I meet women well into their 30’s who still can’t alter their behaviors to demonstrate congruence with their stated desires.
But that is when we start to hear how important marriage is, how men are avoiding commitment, why men should value marriage. All bacon-wrapped in various shaming mechanisms. The women singing the “Man-up and marry me” tune are not the 25 y/o versions; they are too busy singing the “you go girl” showtunes, exactly as prescribed by the Sandberg, lean-in, [binge drinking, continuous alpha male hookups, alpha male cohabitation], [and later, jump off the carousel into a marriage to a beta provider that makes her perpetually feel that she married down compared to the alphas that she used to hookup with while drunk].
So we can plainly see how something is valued based on the prioritization of one’s choices. Most young women value marriage as an idea, as a capstone to her personal journey; an indicator of status and achievement but not as a goal in-of-itself and not as a life decision that supersedes the accumulation of personal experience, the flexing her sexual and relationship power, or the kindling her optionality.
These women desire to “hang-out” with the most attractive men they can, under any number of relationship approximations while pursuing their personal journeys and then suddenly desire to elevate commitment and marriage as something paramount, right around the same time their ability to define and opt-in/out of those indulgent relationship approximations wanes. Hmm.
After 10+ years of treating men and relationships as consumable commodities, marriage is now so valuable? So sacred that it will magically be more robust in the face of challenges, requiring more giving and less taking than those previous marital approximations, and yet because it is now a “Marriage”, it won’t be treated as merely a vehicle for the pursuit of her apparently perpetually fleeting “happiness”? Convince me.
There is a false premise at work that assumes that it is men who are devaluing marriage. Sure, there is some truth to this, but woman are messaging their own valuation of marriage as well; in real-time, often in very overt means and often at the expense of men who are still clinging to some idealistic view of marriage.
And likely those are the very men who are willing and able to be husbands at 25. The very same men who will grow to become self-sufficient 35 y/o men feeling their own blossoming optionality, harvesting their own “experiences” with the 25 y/o versions of the suddenly-marriage-minded women, while a decade of observational and experiential evidence of what women truly value buries what remains of their marital idealism.
Tl:dr
I’d consider marriage to a woman who has demonstrated through her choices, prioritization, sacrifice and delayed gratification that marriage is valuable to her and who can articulate how it would be valuable to me. [not holding breath]
What do you think? Is that something that you are seeing more of in the current generation of young, unmarried women? I have to confess, I see a lot of emphasis among Christian women on short-term missions trips and on careers, but not much planning on how to be prepared for marriage. In my experience, there is not much preparation work going on, and marriage is put off later and later. This is despite the fact that a woman’s fertility declines starting at age 27 and is pretty much dead at 35. IVF is very expensive, but has a higher risk of birth defects and and can often lead to too many embryos, some of which will then need to be aborted. Men respond to incentives, and they have certain things they are looking for out of a wife and marriage.
It would be nice if there were some wisdom being transferred from older, married women to young, unmarried women, but I don’t see it happening. What I see happening is young women, including ones raised in Christian homes, going off to college to binge drink and hookup and cohabitate, and always expressing the desire for marriage “some day”. But marriage is something you prepare for early with every decision. Some decisions are not good preparation for marriage. I get the impression that young, unmarried women think that marriage is “boring” and not the way to “make a difference”, and so in practice, they are trying other things.
Remember, the offer that a woman such as Gaza describes to a man is not the same as the offer of marriage that was made by 20-year-old women in the 1950s.
- Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.
- An expectation of regular sex.
- Legal rights to children.
- Lifetime commitment.
- That you are guaranteed a chaste bride on your wedding night.
Men liked the original version of marriage without the modern debasements. Should they feel obligated to settle for the new version of marriage which is influenced by radical feminism? I would have to be convinced. Women are kidding themselves if they think that they can do anything they want and wait as long as they want and still be as attractive to men.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
well I clearly need to get out this little rural suburb i live in cause no man out here in my age group is looking for marriage. They’re too busy with the chicks who wanna have fun
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Well, I like chicks too, and parrots especially, so I can’t blame them for liking birds more than liberal girls.
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Indeed. Many men are taking these women to their word, indulging their prioritization of experience, adventure, and optionality. We tend to get what we incentivize. But this does not negate the fact that the stated value of marriage (as a distant “some day” goal) is running threadbare when taken to the extremes.
Those men having fun are living proof of the actual priorities. But ten years down the road will they be more or less likely to believe her newfound priority of Marriage!? Will they be more or less likely to exit the funhouse when their sexual value is still on the rise? What about the 80% of men who are not having so much fun in the salad years, what values do they see being reinforced?
The way I see it, the durability of the beta male drafthorse programming has exceeded its tested crush depth. College romping has extended into a post college binge that is now extending into the egg-drying mid-life years.
Women are overplaying their hands. There will always be an ample population of men to help them experience the fun on the front-end but the question that agitates the progs and free-love 2.0 proponents is whether or not there will be enough men to marry these women when they decide they are “ready”. The shortage is already happening. Eggs are being frozen and men are quietly backing away from the table.
Marriage, however, is not dead. There are still young men and women choosing to get married and not enter into the fray. This is not being encouraged, even by the churchian types. The prioritization of the sacred female journey of experience and accomplishment is still paramount.
But some women either sense the walls closing in or they somehow escaped the indoctrination with their innate feminine drive to couple, nurture, and reproduce intact. Either way, the fact remains that if a woman truly values marriage, she will pursue it – and likely achieve it. And if she is 20-25 she will likely secure marital commitment from a better man than she might at 35.
Many of those men you see out having fun have not foreclosed the marriage option nor have they themselves devalued marriage. That is part of my original point. They are merely responding to the market – “pricing” that is set by women. So there isn’t really a ‘marriage strike’ either. There is, however, a growing population of women who believe that marriage is a a free option to be exercised at their whim. In the interim, their male counterparts gladly accept the low-cost of sex. The problem with these options is that they are not free.
Sure, may guys are enjoying all the “fun”. Why wouldn’t they respond to her signaling, especially given that for the men attractive enough to play? This affords some men a period of low-investment sexual access that conforms to their natural sexual disposition, i.e. sexual variety with minimal entanglements.
This is fine as long as you are a man deemed *attractive enough*. For the rest, the disenfranchisement of this open hypergamy and overt prioritization of sexuality and attention from top men over anything resembling courtship toward marriage is undermining the idealistic bedrock of even the most ardent betas-in-waiting.
The goodwill that was forced upon the 80% of men largely on the outside looking in on all of this, e.g. “just be yourself and someday she will notice you”, is being spent with reckless abandon in the shopping mall of narcissistic indulgence. And for what? These experiences depreciate not just this distant idea of marriage but for many women it renders her ability to bond with those future beta-husbands inert. Even the best of providers and protectors will be hard pressed to sustain the dopamine rush.
But hey, f*ck those losers, right? Guys who can’t get laid these days are obviously lame. Well yes, until those women need those men and their silly idealized romantic notions of marriage to catch them as they leap from the carousel.
In the meantime, those men are supposed to not notice 10-20 years of actual values supported through actions; they are supposed to forget the visual evidence of Instagram and Facebook and Tinder and the self-objectifying photostreams of serial mono-poly-omni, and instead take her on her word that now she is prepared to consider what she has to offer him and what values, skills, and benefits she has accrued to provide for a family, and most of all, what she is prepared to subordinate in order to invest in something greater than her self.
Except most women don’t see it that way. Their newfound desire to marry is merely an extension of their personal experience. They want to be a bride but have little to say about being a wife. They do not (nor does anyone ask them to) re-frame this new desire for marriage as an actual value system requiring consideration of what their future counterpart desires, values, has worked for over the past 20 years, etc. Or what would actually make a high-value man enter into such a lopsided and risky enterprise as Marriage 2.0
In my experience, women who have semi-professionally “dated” for 20 years are well-practiced in the art of divorce, self-indulgence, entitlement, instant gratification, and deferment of costs (willful ignorance of the trade-offs present in all of life’s choices.)
Her perpetual transformative journey (that never seems to actually transform the, ends up being useful primarily as post facto rationalization fodder for their post-wall reprioritization, e.g. “made me who I am today” that they drag out when they realize men do not value their choices and priorities in the same manner.
So its back to basics: shame men for being “commitment phobic”, selfish, superficial, obsessed with sex or sexual attractiveness, etc. Basically all of the things that were ok, as long as it was on the front-end of the journey when their own sexual peak afforded them the seat in the cherry picker.
Eventually the pretty lies converge with the grand lies of the robust anti-male programming and luckily for her most men still think there is something to this marriage idea.
That is until the reality of children and the associated bores of marital routines and the budding realization that her hubby is not the best she’s ever had erode at the already tenuous foundation of marriage 2.0 and she decides she is “not happy.” What happens next is already so cliche that to even say Eat-Pray-Love seems overly trite. But I like to say it. So there.
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Wow! Thank you for writing this, so much wisdom here.
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WK,
Glad I stumbled into your frontier. I liked EW’s work. Too bad he stepped away. I don’t often comment. Brevity is no friend of mine, so it’s probably better that I don’t. I will add you to my reading list. Cheers,
Gaza
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Thank you! I only write about these issues infrequently, sorry to say.
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lol
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Birds just wanna have fun, you.
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i really admire your passion for birds, i’m a cat person myself
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Two things; first is that “get married someday” feels like an ambition somewhere around “getting a koi pond”.
Regarding “travel”, that’s clearly code because my own mother wanted to travel, but for her that meant marrying (pretty young I might add) a man who liked travel and then traveling with him over the course of their marriage. Why does travel have to be something before you’re married? Oh. Right.
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