My dating advice isn’t to find someone to date, but to find a community full of people that you would want to start families with. I joined a church group and was in it a few years before everyone started pairing off, getting married, and having kids. The women I married was not there when i started going, but I met her through one of the girls in that group.
Great article pointing out a critical point-of-failure in Western society as a whole. The other problem is 0 guarantees or protections for men that do marry, which is a massive disincentive for married life. You can practically bet it won't work out so why even try?
I find that in the West we usually flip things around. Sure women need security but it's actually the man that needs security before he can provide it. When men are categorically discriminated against in all walks of life, especially in marriage, is it any surprise that we see the marriage rate and birth rate plunge? Men always lead the trend: if there's nothing in it for him and he has no security, he's not gonna go tread water unless he's a moron. All the smart men I know don't even want marriage and kids, and it's for exactly this reason that they have no real incentives, only severe disincentives, so even when earning good money they just chad-style churn through girls because that's how the system works.
Unfortunately we can't just change this on a whim either, it'll be at least a generation of concerted effort to bring it around. effort that isn't being provided for many reasons
From p3 of the linked - only about 3% of separations end up in court, and,
"Court ordered arrangements are less likely to involve no contact between children and their father: only 3% of court orders, compared to 9% of the general separated population.
- Arrangements where children spend most of their time with their father are more common in orders made where litigation occurs (10–19%) than in the separated population generally (2%)."
That's right - most people separate more-or-less amicably without a court being involved, and when a court is involved, men are more likely to have most of the custody than women.
Men as helpless victims of evil courts and ex-wives are like the "one-quarter of all women are raped" (or whatever extreme figure it is this week) stat - it's a myth speaking to the neuroticism of certain men and women.
The men aren't refraining from getting married because they fear it'll turn bad, it's because, like the women, they're suffering from the paradox of choice - when you have so many choices, you end up choosing nothing at all. Some people spend more time browsing through possible shows on Netflix than actually watching anything. That's a factor the authour didn't mention in the article: demography. Through most of human history you lived in a village of 150-250 people, taking out the infants, the elderly, the already-married, and you were only left with half a dozen people to choose from. But living in a large industrial or digital city, you have the choice of millions of people - or at least think you do. So you end up choosing nothing.
Carrying on the marathon analogy, most people left to themselves don't choose the wrong running programme, they just don't run at all.
All very good points. The child custody thing in particular, because unlike what is commonly portrayed, in reality most parents fight about the other NOT taking the kid enough. Almost no one actively tries to get sole custody unless they're right in the beginning of the raw emotional period of a bad divorce.
It’s heartbreaking when you think of how the children would feel about one of the parents - usually their father - simply not wanting to bother with them. Even more shattering in the 3% of cases where they took legal action to not have to.
This MRA stuff is simply men seeing women using an identity of victimhood as a means of social advancement in today’s toxic culture, and trying to use the same approach. It’s pathetic.
Most of my friends growing up had divorced parents, and well more than half of them had no contact with their father at all. Like, not even a phone call on their birthdays. They just moved on and found new girlfriends and made a new family and basically stop caring that they existed. I was one of the rare kids who still had a father that was involved in my life and went back and forth between my mom's and dad's houses every other week. So yeah, this idea that there are all these dads who WANT a relationship and aren't able to get it is BS. A much larger portion just don't care enough to actually maintain involvement. I'm not saying it's never happened that a woman doesn't vindictively try to cut off a relationship in anger/spite because of a bad divorce, but it's very rare. Most single moms are desperate for a break and wish the dad would take the kids more often. I do hope that it's at least more rare for dads to pull this type of disappearing act, nowadays, than it used to be, but a few decades ago this was not unusual at all, even for previously very average, normal married middle-class guys, if a divorce happened. And yes, it hurts the kids terribly.
One of the reasons people don't realize how it often it happens is because the dads who do that are rightfully ashamed of themselves and just lie about it don't talk about it. I remember talking to my husband about this once and he said "I would never be friends with such a piece of shit who could do something like that to one of his kids." And I was like "what are you talking about, you DO have friends who have done that." I pointed out to him that he has two friends with small children who within 6 months of divorce, picked up and moved thousands of miles across the country to take up with a new girlfriend, leaving the kids with the mom, and maybe saw them once a year at Christmas after that. I was like how do you think the kids feel about that? It hadn't occurred to him that that was de facto abandonment because of course that's not how those friends describe it, to them it's just "moving on".
Insightful. I'd be interested in an article from you on this, if you're inclined to write more.
Women can certainly push men out. I've seen a pregnant friend push the father out by moving interstate etc. She herself had had a single mother - that's the arrangement she knew how to navigate, a committed relationship, not. He did follow, though, and was eventually able to be involved.
I think this can be a dynamic that plays out, where the relationship is not well-established because it's new or one of them has no personal experience of a functioning marriage and parenting, so there's a lot of back and forth where one makes more effort than the other, and in some cases one gives up.
And I think more broadly this ties in with things like the culture of bastardisation at some military college, top school etc - when you suffered something, you can say, that was horrible, I better make sure to pass that on, or you can say, that was horrible, I'm not inflicting it on others, I'm doing better.
Most of course fall somewhere in between. The Harvard Grant study guy observed that 2% of men generally were abusive, rising to 8% if they themselves were abused as children. Nasty, but - that means 92% of men who were abused do not grow up to be abusers. They may be present or absent fathers, but they're not abusers.
So people aren't passive victims of their fate. I reject that entirely, whether it's men or women talking. But in our society you gain social status from perceived victimhood.
This is a good point actually. Because on the other hand, some of the most totally committed/devoted fathers I know are men whose OWN fathers pulled a disappearing act, and they were determined to never, ever be that guy. I really hope (and suspect it's the case) that this is less likely to happen these days, if only because of social pressure for it not to happen. But I don't really know, because like I said, most men don't exactly volunteer up this information.
I should also clarify that this doesn't usually happen immediately. It's more like there's a divorce, and at first the kids see their dads on schedule, but then more and more excuses start happening where he's out of town or has to skip a week or whatever, and then after a couple years they only see him once every few months, and then by high school, they never see him at all and sometimes haven't talked to him in a year. Usually it's when these dads moved in with new girlfriends/got remarried that things dropped off big-time, unless the new woman made a big effort to be involved as a step-parent.
As far as "how common" this used to be, when I was in college I had three roommates, so four us total. Three of us had divorced parents. I was the only one of the three with equally strong/involved relationships with both parents. One had not talked to her father in ten years or received so much as a birthday card. The other was sort of in between and saw her dad every few months in high school. All of us had normal middle-class intact families until a divorce when we were in elementary school.
Lol, read your source. Not only is it narrow (it only covers Australia) but on just the 4th page a graphic shows: only 16% of cases result in equal or greater custody for fathers. Mothers receive at least majority custody in 84% of cases, with a whopping 27% being "mother's sole responsibility". Your source is not very good or comprehensive even for Australia. Perhaps the diction is different but this seems to only be talking about separation and not divorce. I can tell you that in America and the rest of the Western world the stats are very different. How can such a small percentage go to litigation for divorce, which is a legal procedure? I believe this entire comment is based on a bad faith argument of separation (a legal status in many countries like Germany, "married living separately") trying to make that the same as divorce, which is a legal proceeding by definition.
The men don't get custody because they don't seek it. When they do seek it, they usually get it. The graphic on p4 refers to the most common parenting arrangements post-separation - 97% of the time the courts are completely uninvolved in this.
When a man insists on access to his children, including sole access, and takes legal action to that effect, more often than not he gets what he wants.
"Court ordered arrangements are less likely to involve no contact between children and their father: only 3% of court orders, compared to 9% of the general separated population."
In other words, men are 3 times more likely to want to have nothing to do with their children than for courts to require them to have nothing to do with their children.
Women are predominantly the sole parents because men are lazy and walk away. Neither men nor women are the victims in this, only children.
If you want to identify as a victim, you need rainbow hair and pronouns.
Sheesh turbo autist here, drills down into a single source on a single country and already knows the thoughts in my head! I'm in the USA M8, it's different here, and you once again proved your intellectual dishonesty by not acknowledging that all the stats you mention revolve around SEPARATION, not divorce. 100% of divorces involve courts as it's a legal procedure. Maybe Australia has some bizarre way of doing things along with your covid tyranny but that's not how it works in the US, Canada, or most Western countries. Who would want to make more prisoners anyway?
The laws and procedures across the Anglosphere do not differ substantially, because they are all based on English common law - with a few exceptions. Seppos are not exceptional, as much as they like to believe otherwise.
The distinction between the overall separation and the court arrangements is important, because it shows us the difference, if any, between what people voluntarily do, and what the state imposes on people.
What people voluntarily do does not indicate discrimination or victimisation; what the state imposes does. We cannot look at the stats and come to any conclusion except that men are more likely to simply not be interested in their children than are women, and that there is no state discrimination against or victimisation of men.
>”Men always lead the trend: if there's nothing in it for him and he has no security, he's not gonna go tread water unless he's a moron. All the smart men I know don't even want marriage and kids, and it's for exactly this reason that they have no real incentives, only severe disincentives”
But there is something in it for him- wife, family, love, companionship, continuity, normal natural life.
If you think men that don’t want marriage and kids are smart, that they have no incentives, then you and they are certainly confused. Nobody said it would be easy, but giving up everything to “churn through girls” is the action of the actual moron here, not the guy who gets married anyway.
You miss the point. Proverbs 21:9: "It is better to live in a corner of a roof Than in a house shared with a contentious woman." Obviously fatherhood and family has inherent value and is a deep-seated desire in all men. Motherhood is even more important to women. But when it results in likely embittered battles in court, being continuously emasculated and being made a provider-slave to a woman that will bail the moment you fail, only to see everything you worked for fall apart for her, not your children, it loses ita lustre. The reality is that most Western women are simply unsuitable as wives and mothers. This is why mostly the unintelligent are the ones breeding creating the idiocracy, essentially. Without any barriers to women's bad behavior you get this scenario, and that's the 2000 pound elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, and the smarter men know nobody will touch it as that's "controversial". So down we go
I have read that about women on places like Substack, and there are horrible women online who seem to embody the stereotype, but it isn’t at all my experience in reality.
“being continuously emasculated and being made a provider-slave to a woman that will bail the moment you fail, only to see everything you worked for fall apart for her”
This sounds like something you read about online but never experienced.
“The reality is that most Western women are simply unsuitable as wives and mothers.”
Most? This is I think a grotesque exaggeration. Again it sounds like you aren’t basing this on actual experience but rather upon things you have read about.
“This is why mostly the unintelligent are the ones breeding creating the idiocracy, essentially.”
This sounds a little hysterical. Many people of normal and above average intelligence are having children.
“the smarter men know nobody will touch it as that's "controversial"”
I advise you to stop worrying about how smart you are and instead put the phone/laptop down and go and meet women in real life with the aim of finding a nice one to marry and have children with. It is more fun and much more meaningful than Substack despair echo chambering.
You sound like a bot, you probably are one and can therefore not even "touch grass". I live in what is one of the most stable parts of the USA for marriage and family. What I see in reality is this:
Huge numbers of divorced men that got screwed. Some of them screwed it up themselves but most didn't, evidence points to the woman being the guilty party. She still usually gets custody, alimony, child support, the works. Thankfully most of these men bounce back but they're never the same again. Divorce is unnatural yet there's literally no barrier to it. 'no fault divorce' yet the man is at fault by default. It shouldn't exist.
I once believed that divorce was typically from immature people rushing into marriage or just incompatible relationships. Meaning the divorce came early on, no more than 5 years into marriage and usually before kids. Actually the opposite is true: divorce is increasingly from mature marriages 10 years, 20 years even 30 years on. Imagine being married to a woman for decades and then she says, "beat it". Women initiate 80+% of divorce.
I also see in all the churches here, a "happy wife happy life" sentiment is pushed. Even in the best of circumstances where I am, a man is usually going to be the bad guy in any conflict and has peer pressure applied to make him conform to the woman's desires. This is particularly perverse and disgusting to me because it's not what The Bible says, but it's American culture now. The overwhelming talking points are "man up" with no attention to women's bad behavior, and only a few token words are given to women submitting to their husbands, but very guardedly, as a weak suggestion. As a result women run the show no contest, even over pastors which is strictly anti-biblical.
As long as these men are gooning and good with being cucked while having material success, they're happy enough and they know there's no alternative and no way out without going against their beliefs and manly desires. But let me tell you: all the married men look 10+ years older than they are and all the married women look 10+ years younger than they are. That's not healthy, you can tell just by looking at them who's trying hard just to stay afloat and who's winning without even trying.
That's conservative America, not liberal land. And it's awful, I don't want it. Real life observation and experience informed my decision like those smart men I referenced
I’m not a bot, I’m just an average Christian man, probably quite like you, although almost certainly spending less time online.
Your response here again sounds as if you have very little real life experience and are gathering information from things you read online. This is a dangerous way to make decisions about the world.
I am married with a wife and children. I have seen several people I know get divorced. It is, like all things in real life, complicated and multifaceted, depending in each case on the people involved and their individual circumstances.
It certainly isn’t the case that “men always get screwed” in divorce, that they have to be “gooning and cucked” in order to remain married, that married men “all look 10+ years older” due to “going against their manly desires” and that the average woman is a tyrannical narcissist cynically “running the show” as you seem to believe them to be.
Divorce is a sad thing, and it hurts the men, women and children involved. Nobody I know who has gone through it would deny that, because none of them are online stereotypes or actual idiots who got married for stupid reasons. The interesting thing is that, despite the sad decline of their marriages, I can’t think of one of them wouldn’t have done it anyway given the chance to go back in time, because marriage is a wonderful thing and the children and experience it brings are a gift, divorce or not.
Again it isn’t smart to base your opinions about the opposite sex on the kind of rage bait material you find online, or to base your expectations for marriage on a probably fictional stereotype of how you imagine life to have been like in the past. Smart men form strong relationships with women, marry, and have children. That is the Christian ideal. If you believe that is not for you then you have been fooled, it’s as simple as that.
Excellent article. Ultimately it boils down to the fact that social capital has been completely broken and to re-establish it we need to reform tribes and clans. Local clans are ultimately the way to go. Building one around a church is the easiest method in the modern era. I've seen a lot more guys in their 20s attending church in the last 5 years than in the preceding 20. There are other methods of forming tightly knit clans, but doing so requires a very hefty up-front investment on the part of the founders. Fiscally it's not reasonable for most of the people interested in forming systems like this.
One thing we nee din the west is extra-legal community organization that exists in a way where it can self-regulate. As said, strong churches and clans can form sufficient social taboos that it renders building these systems reasonable. However, it also requires a great deal of investment and forethought. We won't be able to "fix" the broken contract between the sexes. Expect to see demographic population collapse in all cultural and geographic regions incapable of switching to a new tribal social standard.
We need change, and we need it in the next 20 years. We're witnessing technological social Darwinism in action. This is a cultural bottleneck and those who make it out the other side will have, by definition, created systems for fixing the issues we're experiencing now. We need to get to work and do so quickly if we're going to build strong enough communities that our great grandchildren will exist.
Wonderfully written article on how cultures have operated in the past in propagating their religions and cultures through the natural and beautiful us/them relationship, that need not be hostile towards other groups necessarily while enforcing standards of religion, morals, and culture. While the situation is hard for people, it's on the individuals to find a group that they belong to if they want a spouse, and for families to find groups for their children in order to fulfill the duties as parents.
I appreciate that you criticized the red pill, as well as the concept of the trad wife. I also appreciate that you didn’t advocate for Christianity specifically as a crutch for necessity of religion. You ended on the high note of finding a tribe, whose values align with your own to the best of your, and its abilities and I believe that’s great. As I’ve commentated on some of my own articles, the actual state of Christianity is completely dismal, and totally unappealing for the would be tribe seeker. It’s just not looking good, and trying to funnel people into dying institutions with dying social capital (the rural hinterlands of aging people), is just bad advice. I think you laid out what the actual problems are, and the only way these things can be fixed
I don’t think it’s advantageous for the Christians to have non-believers flocking to their church for the material benefit of finding a wife. It does no favours to the religious, who desire sincerity in belief or to the irreligious, who are faking it and putting on a show for personal gain. Fortunately, this is an opportune time for starting your own communities
Tribe and train is still excellent advice. Building up yourself and your network of good men is something everyone should be doing anyway in any political environment.
I think Alan has seen some arranged marriage in an Indian context which might work out ok. Who knows- the future is far away!
But I would point out that currently, arranged marriage is only common in India and much of the Islamic world. These are places that don’t have functioning sewers or electricity.
Maybe it’s a correlation only, and true arranged marriage hasn’t been tried. But my perspective- I would totally trade off a lower fertility or marriage rate for reliable electricity.
"Find a tribe." One would think Catholicism, with its local parishes in a diocese, would form a tribe, and foster men meeting women in real life, but in fact Catholics of every age and stage are using Catholic Match online.
And those Catholic youth who are gaming in their spare time... Is there a Minecraft tribe, instead? Affinity groups for specific Youtube channels?
My dating advice isn’t to find someone to date, but to find a community full of people that you would want to start families with. I joined a church group and was in it a few years before everyone started pairing off, getting married, and having kids. The women I married was not there when i started going, but I met her through one of the girls in that group.
Great article pointing out a critical point-of-failure in Western society as a whole. The other problem is 0 guarantees or protections for men that do marry, which is a massive disincentive for married life. You can practically bet it won't work out so why even try?
I find that in the West we usually flip things around. Sure women need security but it's actually the man that needs security before he can provide it. When men are categorically discriminated against in all walks of life, especially in marriage, is it any surprise that we see the marriage rate and birth rate plunge? Men always lead the trend: if there's nothing in it for him and he has no security, he's not gonna go tread water unless he's a moron. All the smart men I know don't even want marriage and kids, and it's for exactly this reason that they have no real incentives, only severe disincentives, so even when earning good money they just chad-style churn through girls because that's how the system works.
Unfortunately we can't just change this on a whim either, it'll be at least a generation of concerted effort to bring it around. effort that isn't being provided for many reasons
From p3 of the linked - only about 3% of separations end up in court, and,
"Court ordered arrangements are less likely to involve no contact between children and their father: only 3% of court orders, compared to 9% of the general separated population.
- Arrangements where children spend most of their time with their father are more common in orders made where litigation occurs (10–19%) than in the separated population generally (2%)."
That's right - most people separate more-or-less amicably without a court being involved, and when a court is involved, men are more likely to have most of the custody than women.
Men as helpless victims of evil courts and ex-wives are like the "one-quarter of all women are raped" (or whatever extreme figure it is this week) stat - it's a myth speaking to the neuroticism of certain men and women.
The men aren't refraining from getting married because they fear it'll turn bad, it's because, like the women, they're suffering from the paradox of choice - when you have so many choices, you end up choosing nothing at all. Some people spend more time browsing through possible shows on Netflix than actually watching anything. That's a factor the authour didn't mention in the article: demography. Through most of human history you lived in a village of 150-250 people, taking out the infants, the elderly, the already-married, and you were only left with half a dozen people to choose from. But living in a large industrial or digital city, you have the choice of millions of people - or at least think you do. So you end up choosing nothing.
Carrying on the marathon analogy, most people left to themselves don't choose the wrong running programme, they just don't run at all.
https://aifs.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-06/1910_parenting_arrangements_after_separation.pdf
All very good points. The child custody thing in particular, because unlike what is commonly portrayed, in reality most parents fight about the other NOT taking the kid enough. Almost no one actively tries to get sole custody unless they're right in the beginning of the raw emotional period of a bad divorce.
It’s heartbreaking when you think of how the children would feel about one of the parents - usually their father - simply not wanting to bother with them. Even more shattering in the 3% of cases where they took legal action to not have to.
This MRA stuff is simply men seeing women using an identity of victimhood as a means of social advancement in today’s toxic culture, and trying to use the same approach. It’s pathetic.
Most of my friends growing up had divorced parents, and well more than half of them had no contact with their father at all. Like, not even a phone call on their birthdays. They just moved on and found new girlfriends and made a new family and basically stop caring that they existed. I was one of the rare kids who still had a father that was involved in my life and went back and forth between my mom's and dad's houses every other week. So yeah, this idea that there are all these dads who WANT a relationship and aren't able to get it is BS. A much larger portion just don't care enough to actually maintain involvement. I'm not saying it's never happened that a woman doesn't vindictively try to cut off a relationship in anger/spite because of a bad divorce, but it's very rare. Most single moms are desperate for a break and wish the dad would take the kids more often. I do hope that it's at least more rare for dads to pull this type of disappearing act, nowadays, than it used to be, but a few decades ago this was not unusual at all, even for previously very average, normal married middle-class guys, if a divorce happened. And yes, it hurts the kids terribly.
One of the reasons people don't realize how it often it happens is because the dads who do that are rightfully ashamed of themselves and just lie about it don't talk about it. I remember talking to my husband about this once and he said "I would never be friends with such a piece of shit who could do something like that to one of his kids." And I was like "what are you talking about, you DO have friends who have done that." I pointed out to him that he has two friends with small children who within 6 months of divorce, picked up and moved thousands of miles across the country to take up with a new girlfriend, leaving the kids with the mom, and maybe saw them once a year at Christmas after that. I was like how do you think the kids feel about that? It hadn't occurred to him that that was de facto abandonment because of course that's not how those friends describe it, to them it's just "moving on".
Insightful. I'd be interested in an article from you on this, if you're inclined to write more.
Women can certainly push men out. I've seen a pregnant friend push the father out by moving interstate etc. She herself had had a single mother - that's the arrangement she knew how to navigate, a committed relationship, not. He did follow, though, and was eventually able to be involved.
I think this can be a dynamic that plays out, where the relationship is not well-established because it's new or one of them has no personal experience of a functioning marriage and parenting, so there's a lot of back and forth where one makes more effort than the other, and in some cases one gives up.
And I think more broadly this ties in with things like the culture of bastardisation at some military college, top school etc - when you suffered something, you can say, that was horrible, I better make sure to pass that on, or you can say, that was horrible, I'm not inflicting it on others, I'm doing better.
Most of course fall somewhere in between. The Harvard Grant study guy observed that 2% of men generally were abusive, rising to 8% if they themselves were abused as children. Nasty, but - that means 92% of men who were abused do not grow up to be abusers. They may be present or absent fathers, but they're not abusers.
So people aren't passive victims of their fate. I reject that entirely, whether it's men or women talking. But in our society you gain social status from perceived victimhood.
This is a good point actually. Because on the other hand, some of the most totally committed/devoted fathers I know are men whose OWN fathers pulled a disappearing act, and they were determined to never, ever be that guy. I really hope (and suspect it's the case) that this is less likely to happen these days, if only because of social pressure for it not to happen. But I don't really know, because like I said, most men don't exactly volunteer up this information.
I should also clarify that this doesn't usually happen immediately. It's more like there's a divorce, and at first the kids see their dads on schedule, but then more and more excuses start happening where he's out of town or has to skip a week or whatever, and then after a couple years they only see him once every few months, and then by high school, they never see him at all and sometimes haven't talked to him in a year. Usually it's when these dads moved in with new girlfriends/got remarried that things dropped off big-time, unless the new woman made a big effort to be involved as a step-parent.
As far as "how common" this used to be, when I was in college I had three roommates, so four us total. Three of us had divorced parents. I was the only one of the three with equally strong/involved relationships with both parents. One had not talked to her father in ten years or received so much as a birthday card. The other was sort of in between and saw her dad every few months in high school. All of us had normal middle-class intact families until a divorce when we were in elementary school.
So true !!!
Lol, read your source. Not only is it narrow (it only covers Australia) but on just the 4th page a graphic shows: only 16% of cases result in equal or greater custody for fathers. Mothers receive at least majority custody in 84% of cases, with a whopping 27% being "mother's sole responsibility". Your source is not very good or comprehensive even for Australia. Perhaps the diction is different but this seems to only be talking about separation and not divorce. I can tell you that in America and the rest of the Western world the stats are very different. How can such a small percentage go to litigation for divorce, which is a legal procedure? I believe this entire comment is based on a bad faith argument of separation (a legal status in many countries like Germany, "married living separately") trying to make that the same as divorce, which is a legal proceeding by definition.
The men don't get custody because they don't seek it. When they do seek it, they usually get it. The graphic on p4 refers to the most common parenting arrangements post-separation - 97% of the time the courts are completely uninvolved in this.
When a man insists on access to his children, including sole access, and takes legal action to that effect, more often than not he gets what he wants.
"Court ordered arrangements are less likely to involve no contact between children and their father: only 3% of court orders, compared to 9% of the general separated population."
In other words, men are 3 times more likely to want to have nothing to do with their children than for courts to require them to have nothing to do with their children.
Women are predominantly the sole parents because men are lazy and walk away. Neither men nor women are the victims in this, only children.
If you want to identify as a victim, you need rainbow hair and pronouns.
Sheesh turbo autist here, drills down into a single source on a single country and already knows the thoughts in my head! I'm in the USA M8, it's different here, and you once again proved your intellectual dishonesty by not acknowledging that all the stats you mention revolve around SEPARATION, not divorce. 100% of divorces involve courts as it's a legal procedure. Maybe Australia has some bizarre way of doing things along with your covid tyranny but that's not how it works in the US, Canada, or most Western countries. Who would want to make more prisoners anyway?
The laws and procedures across the Anglosphere do not differ substantially, because they are all based on English common law - with a few exceptions. Seppos are not exceptional, as much as they like to believe otherwise.
The distinction between the overall separation and the court arrangements is important, because it shows us the difference, if any, between what people voluntarily do, and what the state imposes on people.
What people voluntarily do does not indicate discrimination or victimisation; what the state imposes does. We cannot look at the stats and come to any conclusion except that men are more likely to simply not be interested in their children than are women, and that there is no state discrimination against or victimisation of men.
No go clean your fedora.
>”Men always lead the trend: if there's nothing in it for him and he has no security, he's not gonna go tread water unless he's a moron. All the smart men I know don't even want marriage and kids, and it's for exactly this reason that they have no real incentives, only severe disincentives”
But there is something in it for him- wife, family, love, companionship, continuity, normal natural life.
If you think men that don’t want marriage and kids are smart, that they have no incentives, then you and they are certainly confused. Nobody said it would be easy, but giving up everything to “churn through girls” is the action of the actual moron here, not the guy who gets married anyway.
You miss the point. Proverbs 21:9: "It is better to live in a corner of a roof Than in a house shared with a contentious woman." Obviously fatherhood and family has inherent value and is a deep-seated desire in all men. Motherhood is even more important to women. But when it results in likely embittered battles in court, being continuously emasculated and being made a provider-slave to a woman that will bail the moment you fail, only to see everything you worked for fall apart for her, not your children, it loses ita lustre. The reality is that most Western women are simply unsuitable as wives and mothers. This is why mostly the unintelligent are the ones breeding creating the idiocracy, essentially. Without any barriers to women's bad behavior you get this scenario, and that's the 2000 pound elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, and the smarter men know nobody will touch it as that's "controversial". So down we go
I have read that about women on places like Substack, and there are horrible women online who seem to embody the stereotype, but it isn’t at all my experience in reality.
“being continuously emasculated and being made a provider-slave to a woman that will bail the moment you fail, only to see everything you worked for fall apart for her”
This sounds like something you read about online but never experienced.
“The reality is that most Western women are simply unsuitable as wives and mothers.”
Most? This is I think a grotesque exaggeration. Again it sounds like you aren’t basing this on actual experience but rather upon things you have read about.
“This is why mostly the unintelligent are the ones breeding creating the idiocracy, essentially.”
This sounds a little hysterical. Many people of normal and above average intelligence are having children.
“the smarter men know nobody will touch it as that's "controversial"”
I advise you to stop worrying about how smart you are and instead put the phone/laptop down and go and meet women in real life with the aim of finding a nice one to marry and have children with. It is more fun and much more meaningful than Substack despair echo chambering.
You sound like a bot, you probably are one and can therefore not even "touch grass". I live in what is one of the most stable parts of the USA for marriage and family. What I see in reality is this:
Huge numbers of divorced men that got screwed. Some of them screwed it up themselves but most didn't, evidence points to the woman being the guilty party. She still usually gets custody, alimony, child support, the works. Thankfully most of these men bounce back but they're never the same again. Divorce is unnatural yet there's literally no barrier to it. 'no fault divorce' yet the man is at fault by default. It shouldn't exist.
I once believed that divorce was typically from immature people rushing into marriage or just incompatible relationships. Meaning the divorce came early on, no more than 5 years into marriage and usually before kids. Actually the opposite is true: divorce is increasingly from mature marriages 10 years, 20 years even 30 years on. Imagine being married to a woman for decades and then she says, "beat it". Women initiate 80+% of divorce.
I also see in all the churches here, a "happy wife happy life" sentiment is pushed. Even in the best of circumstances where I am, a man is usually going to be the bad guy in any conflict and has peer pressure applied to make him conform to the woman's desires. This is particularly perverse and disgusting to me because it's not what The Bible says, but it's American culture now. The overwhelming talking points are "man up" with no attention to women's bad behavior, and only a few token words are given to women submitting to their husbands, but very guardedly, as a weak suggestion. As a result women run the show no contest, even over pastors which is strictly anti-biblical.
As long as these men are gooning and good with being cucked while having material success, they're happy enough and they know there's no alternative and no way out without going against their beliefs and manly desires. But let me tell you: all the married men look 10+ years older than they are and all the married women look 10+ years younger than they are. That's not healthy, you can tell just by looking at them who's trying hard just to stay afloat and who's winning without even trying.
That's conservative America, not liberal land. And it's awful, I don't want it. Real life observation and experience informed my decision like those smart men I referenced
I’m not a bot, I’m just an average Christian man, probably quite like you, although almost certainly spending less time online.
Your response here again sounds as if you have very little real life experience and are gathering information from things you read online. This is a dangerous way to make decisions about the world.
I am married with a wife and children. I have seen several people I know get divorced. It is, like all things in real life, complicated and multifaceted, depending in each case on the people involved and their individual circumstances.
It certainly isn’t the case that “men always get screwed” in divorce, that they have to be “gooning and cucked” in order to remain married, that married men “all look 10+ years older” due to “going against their manly desires” and that the average woman is a tyrannical narcissist cynically “running the show” as you seem to believe them to be.
Divorce is a sad thing, and it hurts the men, women and children involved. Nobody I know who has gone through it would deny that, because none of them are online stereotypes or actual idiots who got married for stupid reasons. The interesting thing is that, despite the sad decline of their marriages, I can’t think of one of them wouldn’t have done it anyway given the chance to go back in time, because marriage is a wonderful thing and the children and experience it brings are a gift, divorce or not.
Again it isn’t smart to base your opinions about the opposite sex on the kind of rage bait material you find online, or to base your expectations for marriage on a probably fictional stereotype of how you imagine life to have been like in the past. Smart men form strong relationships with women, marry, and have children. That is the Christian ideal. If you believe that is not for you then you have been fooled, it’s as simple as that.
Excellent article. Ultimately it boils down to the fact that social capital has been completely broken and to re-establish it we need to reform tribes and clans. Local clans are ultimately the way to go. Building one around a church is the easiest method in the modern era. I've seen a lot more guys in their 20s attending church in the last 5 years than in the preceding 20. There are other methods of forming tightly knit clans, but doing so requires a very hefty up-front investment on the part of the founders. Fiscally it's not reasonable for most of the people interested in forming systems like this.
One thing we nee din the west is extra-legal community organization that exists in a way where it can self-regulate. As said, strong churches and clans can form sufficient social taboos that it renders building these systems reasonable. However, it also requires a great deal of investment and forethought. We won't be able to "fix" the broken contract between the sexes. Expect to see demographic population collapse in all cultural and geographic regions incapable of switching to a new tribal social standard.
We need change, and we need it in the next 20 years. We're witnessing technological social Darwinism in action. This is a cultural bottleneck and those who make it out the other side will have, by definition, created systems for fixing the issues we're experiencing now. We need to get to work and do so quickly if we're going to build strong enough communities that our great grandchildren will exist.
Wonderfully written article on how cultures have operated in the past in propagating their religions and cultures through the natural and beautiful us/them relationship, that need not be hostile towards other groups necessarily while enforcing standards of religion, morals, and culture. While the situation is hard for people, it's on the individuals to find a group that they belong to if they want a spouse, and for families to find groups for their children in order to fulfill the duties as parents.
I appreciate that you criticized the red pill, as well as the concept of the trad wife. I also appreciate that you didn’t advocate for Christianity specifically as a crutch for necessity of religion. You ended on the high note of finding a tribe, whose values align with your own to the best of your, and its abilities and I believe that’s great. As I’ve commentated on some of my own articles, the actual state of Christianity is completely dismal, and totally unappealing for the would be tribe seeker. It’s just not looking good, and trying to funnel people into dying institutions with dying social capital (the rural hinterlands of aging people), is just bad advice. I think you laid out what the actual problems are, and the only way these things can be fixed
I don’t think it’s advantageous for the Christians to have non-believers flocking to their church for the material benefit of finding a wife. It does no favours to the religious, who desire sincerity in belief or to the irreligious, who are faking it and putting on a show for personal gain. Fortunately, this is an opportune time for starting your own communities
I quite agree with your analysis of this wonderful piece.
Tribe and train is still excellent advice. Building up yourself and your network of good men is something everyone should be doing anyway in any political environment.
I think Alan has seen some arranged marriage in an Indian context which might work out ok. Who knows- the future is far away!
But I would point out that currently, arranged marriage is only common in India and much of the Islamic world. These are places that don’t have functioning sewers or electricity.
Maybe it’s a correlation only, and true arranged marriage hasn’t been tried. But my perspective- I would totally trade off a lower fertility or marriage rate for reliable electricity.
This is unbelievably good.
"Find a tribe." One would think Catholicism, with its local parishes in a diocese, would form a tribe, and foster men meeting women in real life, but in fact Catholics of every age and stage are using Catholic Match online.
And those Catholic youth who are gaming in their spare time... Is there a Minecraft tribe, instead? Affinity groups for specific Youtube channels?