Before we start, here are two articles explaining why men are supposedly not marrying. First one from a pastor. Second one from a sociologist. And this is, I think, the majority view: men are to blame for the decline of marriage, because men are stupid, weak, lazy and lacking ambition. Feminist women are great. Marriage laws are fair. Family courts are impartial. But is that all true?

Now, if you ask an actual man whether these are his reasons for not marrying, he will have a different list:

• women initiate the majority of divorces
• young women are increasingly politically leftist
• men can easily be fired for false accusations at work
• men are sentenced far more severely than women are sentenced, for the same crimes
• the Sexual Revolution encourages women to be promiscuous with the men who they find the most physically attractive
• family courts are biased against men, punishing men with alimony, child support, loss of custody, loss of visitation
• majority of student loan debt is held by women
• concerns about the moral impact of the books, music, TV shows and movies that are popular with young women

And so on.

I think if good Christian men had to pick just one factor that is deterring them from marriage, it would be no-fault divorce.

On this blog, I’ve covered several cases of the “nightmare scenario” facing men in divorce. One of those cases is the case of Rob Hoogland, which occurred in Canada.

There’s some new news about his case, reported in the London Daily:

A Canadian man, involved in a legal battle over his right to object to hormone treatment for his teenage trans child, has reportedly been jailed and denied bail for violating a gag order banning him from discussing the story.

Robert Hoogland was denied bail by the Vancouver Supreme Court on Friday and will remain in the North Fraser remand prison, according to news website the Post Millennial. He was arrested this week for contempt of court, due to his continued violation of an order restricting his speech regarding his transgender child.

I also reported on the case of an Apple senior software engineer named Ted Hudacko.

Here’s a report about him from City Journal:

Shortly after returning from a trip to New York with their two sons, Hudacko’s wife, Christine, told him that she wanted a divorce—and that their oldest son identified as transgender. During divorce proceedings, the presiding judge, Joni Hiramoto… stripped him of all custody of his trans-identified son. Hudacko was concerned about administering experimental drugs and preferred to wait and see if his son’s gender issues might resolve on their own, as usually happens in such cases. To the California judge, this confirmed his unfitness as a father.

I also reported on the case of a father from Texas named Jeff Younger, whose ex-wife wants to trans their kid.

And there a recent report about the status of his case in the New York Post:

A California judge dealt a devastating blow to a Texas father in his years-long fight to stop his ex-wife from allowing their pre-teen son, who identifies as a girl named “Luna,” to receive gender-affirming care.

Father of two Jeff Younger, 59, announced on X that he “lost all parental rights” over his twin sons after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark Juhas granted his estranged pediatrician ex-wife Anne Georgulas the authority to “castrate” his 12-year-old son James.

I blogged on all of these cases, but it’s doubtful that pastors and pro-marriage sociologists have heard of any of them. They just want men to use their strength and finances to make women happy, and they don’t care about the actual risks and costs that men are facing.

But there’s been another case in the news just in the past week, reported in The Federalist:

After raising concerns about his then-13-year-old son taking puberty blockers and starting on a path to irreversible, experimental, and life-long medical interventions to “transition” into a girl, the Colorado government stripped father Robert Cameron of all rights to protect his child.

Colorado was able to do that because the child’s mother and Cameron’s ex-wife, Nancy Drake, used Colorado’s “affirmation only” legal structure to wage a war against Cameron through the courts. Drake, who joined forces with an activist therapist, has been able to use government force to push the now-14-year-old boy into the transition interventions which, if pursued in full, have the power to sterilize, reduce brain development, and cause bone density issues, among a host of other gruesome effects.

“My child is more important to me than whatever the court system may do to me. If my child needs to be saved, it’s my job as a parent to save him, and he needs to be saved right now. He needs to be saved from predation and manipulation,” Cameron told The Federalist. “I haven’t slept well in forever because I’m afraid for my child. I also see the adults preying on this child’s innocence. This all falls under the sexualization of children that we are engaging in as a society. That’s absolutely appalling. And I’m not even talking about the medical experiments we’re doing on children.”

[…]Cameron’s primary goal is to have his son be able to wait until he is 18 to make the decision, but Drake, who appears to have trigger-happy, extraordinarily litigious lawyers behind her, need the transition to start now, no questions asked — literally.

Drake, an academic in a left-wing community in Colorado with whom Cameron shares joint custody, successfully got the state of Colorado to block Cameron’s oversight over their son’s medical treatment or even speak to him about transgenderism…

[…]Drake did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment, but within minutes of the request being sent, she threatened Cameron with calling Child Protective Services if he spoke to the media, claiming doing so means that he “intended [their son] to be harmed” and that it is “proof of child abuse.”

[…]Some weeks ago, Drake also attempted to stop Cameron’s ability to speak to pretty much anyone by requesting a gag order on top of the others already issued that would encompass “friends … anyone in our social circle … activists, and … the media,” claiming it puts their children (their son is one of two twins, the other, a girl) in “physical, medical, and psychological danger,” according to an email sent to the case arbitrator reviewed by The Federalist.

Drake threatened Cameron’s ability to have parenting time with their children at all.

Now, in every case I presented, I blame the MAN 100% for the problems he is facing. Why? Because people don’t change after you marry them. These women were terrible secular leftists before marriage, and these foolish men all chose to marry them anyway. Maybe because men tend to value youth and beauty above character. Men are responsible for marrying badly. And I have the same view when women marry badly. It’s the women’s fault.

My point is that good men who are not yet married look at these cases, and it causes them to want to decline to participate in dating and marriage. They don’t like the fact that these social workers, therapists, lawyers, judges, etc. have this VERY LOW VIEW of fatherly authority and leadership. They don’t want to be judged in a system run by man-haters. This is especially true for men who are well-educated and high earners. They don’t want to be ruined.

So, what should we think about pastors, sociologists, and feminist Christians in general, when they try to blame the decline of marriage on men? Well, an excellent question to ask them is “what reasons do conservative men who are well-educated, and financially successful have for declining the offer of “feminist” marriage?” If their answer is to blame and shame men some more, just understand that you are dealing with someone who is not interested in solving the underlying problem.

When I ask questions like this to social conservatives, even the ones who claim to be against divorce, they cannot bring themselves to take seriously the dangers of marriage for men. Instead, they try to make it seem that a man taking these risks is “brave” and “strong”. When I ask them if they shoe was on the other foot, and it was women who were facing these same risks, should she marry? And they say “Of course not. That’s unfair!”

Why is there this double standard? Could it be because even in the Christian church, there is a double standard that asserts that Christianity is really about making women happy, no matter what, and that men are expendable for this purpose? I’m not saying that the Bible teaches this. But I’ve found this view of Christianity to be extremely popular, and not just among egalitarians, but among complementarians, too. Especially the ones who redefine “male headship” to mean “servant leadership”. That really turns men off of marriage, because it makes them think that Christianity is being run by the ex-wives in these stories, and there is no support for male leadership at all.

I remember when Apple, Google and Amazon banned the Parler app because it was being used by conservatives to share conservative views online. Today, we’re seeing that leftist domestic terrorists are using social media apps to communicate, but these companies don’t seem concerned about that. Why is there a double standard? Why are conservatives censored, but not leftists?

Well, here’s an interesting story from Daily Wire:

Google has committed to allowing all creators who were kicked off YouTube — over so-called political speech “violations” — the chance to return to the platform. And according to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, “THAT’S NOT ALL.”

The tech giant sent a letter to Jordan and the Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, but the letter also included several statements from YouTube, admitting, among other things, to pressure from the former President Joe Biden’s administration to censor certain political statements.

In the rest of the article, it notes that conservatives were censored for their conservative viewpoints – not because they had violated any specific policy.

Another article from Daily Wire notes:

Creators banned under this regime include Dan Bongino and Sebastian Gorka, both of whom now serve in the Trump administration.

Now, back to that point I made about Big Tech companies censoring the Parler app, because it was for conservatives. What do you think would happen if leftist domestic terrorists were using an app to assist them in their domestic terrorism? Would Apple and Google censor that app?

The Federalist explains:

In a chilling social media post, FBI Director Kash Patel described how Wednesday’s sniper at a Dallas ICE facility gathered intelligence online for the ambush that left one ICE detainee dead and two seriously injured. Authorities say suspected killer Joshua Jahn, 29, committed suicide after the ambush.

[…]While retracing Jahn’s movements and writings, the FBI found he reviewed a document that listed Dallas DHS locations, and he “searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents.” Marcos Charles, the ICE executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations, confirmed the gunman utilized these apps to carry out the attack.

So, will the same big tech companies that banned Parler also ban these anti-government, anti-law-enforcement apps?

Of course not:

The Federalist sent emails to the media relations teams at the Google and Apple app stores. These teams are made up of people who are paid full-time wages to answer questions from the media. And the question The Federalist asked seemed like a real softball: Will the app store remove apps that track ICE or law enforcement?

[…]But at the time of publication both companies had refused to commit to suspending ICE-tracking apps.

Do you think they will ban these apps, or do you think they will let their allies on the left continue to use them to commit violence against law enforcement? What would you do with Big Tech censors? I don’t think they would be changing a thing if the Democrats had won in 2024. They’re only sorry now, because they got caught. Not because they care about free speech.

Sometimes, when I raise the fact that women initiate 69% of divorces, I get the response that this number is men’s fault. For example, pro-marriage Christian feminists and sociologists will say “it’s because men are less emotionally intelligent, they don’t meet the needs of women”. If that’s true, then we should expect that lesbian relationships will be the most committed. Are they?

Here’s a study from August 2022, published in the Journal of Family History.

The abstract says:

The trends in marriage and divorce among male and female same-sex couples in urban and rural Norway were compared to different-sex marriages. Norway legalized same-sex living in 1993 and marriage in 2009. Cohorts from 1993 to 2018 were included. The 2009 gender-neutral marriage law appears to have had minimal impact on the rate of same-sex unions and divorces. Moreover, divorce risks are highest in female same-sex marriages, whereas male same-sex marriages have the same divorce risk levels as different-sex marriages. The divorce risk is declining for same-sex marriages in urban areas, while the opposite is observed in rural areas.

And down in the results section, we have this:

Female same-sex marriages had the highest total divorce rate throughout the period, followed by male same-sex marriages. The highest total divorce rate was observed among female same-sex marriages formed in 2003, with 59.1% divorced before 2018.

Now, some people will say, but this is just one country. Yes, but it’s a same-sex marriage affirming country. They’ve had same-sex unions since 1993, and same-sex marriage since 2009. So critics can’t blame disapproval of LGBT for these numbers. And this study agrees with previous studies.

Now, let’s make a comment about this.

I think this data suggests a wonderful question for men to use in the course of vetting a candidate wife for marriage. Just casually mention the study, and then ask her “what do you think the explanation for this is?”

There will be one group of women who say “that’s easy. women are very emotional, and that causes them to have more difficulty keeping to their commitments. It’s something that men should test for. Men should choose women who have a habit of taking on tough tasks, and seeing them through to the end. And maintaining their relationship obligations with difficult or demanding family members, friends, elderly pets, etc.” That’s the right answer. I like women who do STEM degrees and work hard jobs in the competitive private sector, they tend to be good at sticking with tough situations and engineer solutions, instead of quitting.

But there’s another group that will reply “these numbers are the result of external forces that are conspiring against women to make them fail. It’s all the fault of insufficient resources, or social disapproval, or sexism, or the males in their lives.” That’s the wrong answer. I avoid women who do easy degrees like English, psychology, etc. They tend to go straight to a safe unionized job teaching children in the public school monopoly. That’s not good training for commitment-keeping. It shows that they like to do easy things. Marriage is hard work. Don’t pick a wife who likes fun and thrills. Pick a wife who engineers solutions to problems.

I do understand that women expect high quality communication and emotional intelligence in their relationships. To those women, I would just say, you need to choose better men. You need to know up front what marriage is about in the long-run, and you need to choose the things that you really need for the long run.

I wrote this post to try to help men avoid disasters when making their relationship choices. The best we can do as men is to take responsibility for our own choices. That means not letting ourselves be carried away by emotions. We have to test by asking questions. And even better than listening to an answer, is looking at the actions. Always look for women who keep their commitments when it goes against their self-interest. They are out there. Pick one.