If you ask the winners in a system whether it’s well designed, you will probably get a very different answer than you will from the losers. In other words, if you told King Arthur, “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” you can be certain he’d disagree.
John, Very good article! In my Reagan Admin days and later running for Congress, I studied some of what our Founders read. One statement attributed to Caesar addressing the Senate as "men of Rome," has him adding, "but how can I call you men, for you do not build families as men do." That's a historical perspectives to the dilemma you articulate as Rome did continue to grow. Do you see family failure as long term, maybe permeant anent America, or an aberration soon righted by God and nature? America's movement into Socialism seems to abet our decline as it disincentivizes ambition and family formation. Thoughts?
RE standards of beauty: Yes. I've heard women express frustration and disappointment that they are not as pretty as the girls on the magazine covers. But bear in mind, those girls don't really look like that either. Before they took that picture, she had a team of people fixing her hair and applying makeup. Then they set up the surroundings and the lighting just right, and she posed carefully to give the best possible view. They took a hundred pictures and picket out the one where she looked the best. And then they photoshopped it.
Technology tends to multiply things. You can go a lot faster in a car than you can walk. You can do arithmetic much faster with a calculator than with paper and pencil. Etc.
This also applies to dating websites. Before the Internet, most people found potential mates in their home town. By the time you eliminated those who were too young or too old for you, who were already married, and who were too different from you in religion, social class, life style, whatever, you might have a dozen serous candidates. So in his life a young man might approach 3 or 4 women and be rejected before he found one who would have him. And a young woman might be approached by 3 or 4 men before she found one she would accept. Men might have found it frustrating to be rejected by several women, but it wasn't that big a deal. Women might have struggled to sort through multiple suitors, but it wasn't that big a deal.
With the Internet, a woman might be approached by hundreds, sometimes thousands of men. No matter how nice she wants to be and how fair she wants to be, she can't possibly seriously consider them all. She has no practical choice but to reject 90+% of them with no more than a few minutes of consideration. Meanwhile, a man has to approach hundreds or thousands of women before he will find one who responds to him positively. Or who responds to him at all. I saw some statistics not long ago from one dating site that said that the average woman on their site only responds to 4% of messages that she receives. Not that there's a 4% chance that a woman a man writes to will eventually marry him, or even go on a date with him, but only 4% that she will reply to him at all.
" Meanwhile, in 2020, the average age of marriage was 32. That’s up from 21 in 1960. So, Americans are getting married less often, getting married later, and getting divorced at a much higher clip than they used to decades ago." says John.
This doesn't follow at all. There are three assertions and several claims implied in this sentence, so it's entirely possible that there are some truths here and there in the mix. That "so," however, is plain false. The premise does not support any of the claims, made or implied.
A person might marry at 17 in 1960 and again as a widower in 2021 at 78. Meanwhile his daughters might get married at 25 in, say, 1980 and 1985 and divorce in 2000. That would give us an average age of marriage increasing from 17 to almost 49, nobody getting married more than once a year, and a huge decline in divorces over the past 20 years.
The man just writes stuff and thinks that what's written must be true.
My own impression is that divorce was a threat to American family structure in the early 1950s, when so many perhaps rushed post-WWII marriages collapsed. Today it is well accepted, understood to be a great improvement over forced permanent unions, and part of our variegated culture.
It is also my impression that our current cultural norm, of gay pairings, couples very normally living together unmarried, and huge declines in "illegitimacy," i.e. out of wedlock births, is stable and much healthier than the rigid norms of more "traditional" or perhaps reactionary cultures.
I don't have the numbers to prove this, nor can I imagine any numbers which *would* prove it. It's just my impression. My only claim is that I'm not trying to sell you my impressions on the basis of a lousy, incompetent, dishonest syllogism.
The dating environment can become toxic right from the very start. In order to "hook up" two people have to date. In order to date, some form of communication has to occur to arrange the get together. Many men are very hesitant to initiate that communication for fear of having it misinterpreted by the female, either deliberately or out of stupidity, as sexual harassment. Every male out there above 15 knows what happens when you get hit with the big SH. Productive, high earning men can lose their job and never recover (don't think that "word" doesn't get around through the female networks). These days, initiating communication with a female is akin to dancing with Cobras. I have a 27 year old son who is good looking, a high earner, stable job, has his own house...very happy being single. "If you really need a woman, there are lots for rent."
John, Very good article! In my Reagan Admin days and later running for Congress, I studied some of what our Founders read. One statement attributed to Caesar addressing the Senate as "men of Rome," has him adding, "but how can I call you men, for you do not build families as men do." That's a historical perspectives to the dilemma you articulate as Rome did continue to grow. Do you see family failure as long term, maybe permeant anent America, or an aberration soon righted by God and nature? America's movement into Socialism seems to abet our decline as it disincentivizes ambition and family formation. Thoughts?
RE standards of beauty: Yes. I've heard women express frustration and disappointment that they are not as pretty as the girls on the magazine covers. But bear in mind, those girls don't really look like that either. Before they took that picture, she had a team of people fixing her hair and applying makeup. Then they set up the surroundings and the lighting just right, and she posed carefully to give the best possible view. They took a hundred pictures and picket out the one where she looked the best. And then they photoshopped it.
Technology tends to multiply things. You can go a lot faster in a car than you can walk. You can do arithmetic much faster with a calculator than with paper and pencil. Etc.
This also applies to dating websites. Before the Internet, most people found potential mates in their home town. By the time you eliminated those who were too young or too old for you, who were already married, and who were too different from you in religion, social class, life style, whatever, you might have a dozen serous candidates. So in his life a young man might approach 3 or 4 women and be rejected before he found one who would have him. And a young woman might be approached by 3 or 4 men before she found one she would accept. Men might have found it frustrating to be rejected by several women, but it wasn't that big a deal. Women might have struggled to sort through multiple suitors, but it wasn't that big a deal.
With the Internet, a woman might be approached by hundreds, sometimes thousands of men. No matter how nice she wants to be and how fair she wants to be, she can't possibly seriously consider them all. She has no practical choice but to reject 90+% of them with no more than a few minutes of consideration. Meanwhile, a man has to approach hundreds or thousands of women before he will find one who responds to him positively. Or who responds to him at all. I saw some statistics not long ago from one dating site that said that the average woman on their site only responds to 4% of messages that she receives. Not that there's a 4% chance that a woman a man writes to will eventually marry him, or even go on a date with him, but only 4% that she will reply to him at all.
" Meanwhile, in 2020, the average age of marriage was 32. That’s up from 21 in 1960. So, Americans are getting married less often, getting married later, and getting divorced at a much higher clip than they used to decades ago." says John.
This doesn't follow at all. There are three assertions and several claims implied in this sentence, so it's entirely possible that there are some truths here and there in the mix. That "so," however, is plain false. The premise does not support any of the claims, made or implied.
A person might marry at 17 in 1960 and again as a widower in 2021 at 78. Meanwhile his daughters might get married at 25 in, say, 1980 and 1985 and divorce in 2000. That would give us an average age of marriage increasing from 17 to almost 49, nobody getting married more than once a year, and a huge decline in divorces over the past 20 years.
The man just writes stuff and thinks that what's written must be true.
My own impression is that divorce was a threat to American family structure in the early 1950s, when so many perhaps rushed post-WWII marriages collapsed. Today it is well accepted, understood to be a great improvement over forced permanent unions, and part of our variegated culture.
It is also my impression that our current cultural norm, of gay pairings, couples very normally living together unmarried, and huge declines in "illegitimacy," i.e. out of wedlock births, is stable and much healthier than the rigid norms of more "traditional" or perhaps reactionary cultures.
I don't have the numbers to prove this, nor can I imagine any numbers which *would* prove it. It's just my impression. My only claim is that I'm not trying to sell you my impressions on the basis of a lousy, incompetent, dishonest syllogism.
The dating environment can become toxic right from the very start. In order to "hook up" two people have to date. In order to date, some form of communication has to occur to arrange the get together. Many men are very hesitant to initiate that communication for fear of having it misinterpreted by the female, either deliberately or out of stupidity, as sexual harassment. Every male out there above 15 knows what happens when you get hit with the big SH. Productive, high earning men can lose their job and never recover (don't think that "word" doesn't get around through the female networks). These days, initiating communication with a female is akin to dancing with Cobras. I have a 27 year old son who is good looking, a high earner, stable job, has his own house...very happy being single. "If you really need a woman, there are lots for rent."