Posted on 11/16/2013 5:37:57 AM PST by ClaytonP
One of the more common refrains in the “Where have all of the good men gone!” lament is men’s increasing unwillingness to court women the way women expect to be courted. This is almost always framed as either a great mystery or a case of weak men screwing up feminism (or both).
Examples of this concern abound, from Aunt Haley’s last three posts, to the divorced single mother who found out men weren’t willing to spend very much to court her, to the woman in Vox’s recent post lamenting that her 59 year old friend was only offered half a sandwich by a recent date. Commenter Tom H weighed in with the same concern the other day about his two 30ish career women daughters who struggle to find men who will date them without “pushing for sex”.
How did we get here?
To better understand why men are withdrawing from courtship we need to consider the roles men and women play in the process and how the sexual revolution has impacted the landscape. Men foot the searching costs in the marriage and sexual marketplace (MMP & SMP). This means bearing most of the risk of rejection and expending the bulk of the resources to facilitate the process of meeting and getting to know one another. As the ones who bear the costs of courtship, men have a strong incentive to minimize the number of women they court and the overall duration of time spent in the process. However, as the consumers of courtship, women have an incentive to draw the process out as long as possible and to receive courtship from as many men as possible.
Over the last few decades the expectation that men bear the bulk of the costs and risks of courtship has remained relatively constant, but the time period women expect to be courted has expanded dramatically.
As recently as 1980, the median age of marriage for women in the US was 22. By 2011 this was 26.5, but this signifigantly understates the nature of the change since it doesn’t account for the rapidly expanding group of 30 something women who haven’t been able to marry. A full 25% of all US White 30-34 year old women have yet to marry, and these aging would be brides are the loudest voices complaining about the lack of courtship.
The problem with women’s complaints about courtship is easier to understand if you consider the needs of the man. He needs to manage risk vs reward. When courting, there are two fundamental risks. These are the risk of wasting resources on the wrong women, and the risk of rejection harming the man’s reputation/MMV.
Risk of wasting resources on the wrong women.
There are three subcategories of resource risk:
Risk of rejection harming the man’s reputation/MMV.
This basic risk can in turn be broken down into two subcategories:
For the ladies reading who might be offended at this, I’ll frame it differently. Picture your ideal husband. Do you want him to propose to you after having been rejected by numerous other women? Of course not. You don’t want to feel like the consolation prize, and you don’t wan’t to marry a man whom other women are known to have rejected. In order to avoid this, the man you ultimately marry must be careful with how freely he expresses interest in women who aren’t signaling an interest in him.
On the question of wasting resources, do you want your future husband to divide his courtship resources between you and many other women? Or do you want all of his available courtship investment to be devoted solely to you?
What does a woman’s age have to do with courtship?
For a man who is managing the risks of courtship outlined above, the age of a woman is very important. The older a woman is, the more likely it is that she is very picky and/or not seriously looking for a husband. Older women also are less attractive from a courtship perspective because they have used up more of their most attractive/fertile years, and while their attractiveness for marriage has declined their expectations for courtship have only increased. In short, the older a woman gets the worse a bet she becomes (on average) when it comes to courting her.
There is another impact of women increasing the time period they expect courtship, and this is on men’s willingness to court younger women. Consider the 25% of current early thirties White women who still haven’t married; unless they are terminally unattractive an awful lot of courtship has almost certainly been wasted on them. They aren’t just bad bets for courtship today, but (in retrospect) they clearly were bad bets for courtship for the last 15 years. Even more telling, just shy of half of all late twenties White women have never married, which means five years ago 50% of early twenties White women were a complete and total waste of traditional courtship risk and resources. Given the direction of the trends over the last five years, the risk is even higher today.
Put simply, the extended delay of marriage by women has placed marriage minded men in a dilemma; older women are (generally speaking) known bad bets for courtship, but half of early twenties women are also poor bets for courtship. And this is before the man in question starts to consider which of the good bets for courtship (in general) would be a good bet for him personally to court.
It is also worth noting that it isn’t just in delaying marriage that women are extending the period of expected courtship. Women are also driving our divorce revolution, and even with a track record of being the worst possible courtship risk (the kind who marries and then gets unhaaaapy) they still expect to be courted all over again.
The logical adjustment by men.
There are only two logical ways men can respond to women’s extension of courtship. The first logical choice is to recognize that these women are debasing marriage, and decide to “court” for sex and not marriage. For most late teens and early twenties women, this is the only form of courtship which makes sense. This is true in even higher percentages for women in their late twenties or higher. For women looking to soak up courtship in today’s hookup culture there is another serious problem; when courting for sex it is in a man’s best interest to greatly limit the amount of resources he spends before getting sex from a woman. This allows him to cast a wide net while keeping his expenditures down. Ironically, as we have learned from Game a man’s chances of receiving sex from a woman are actually higher when practicing the skittles method of courtship (crass site warning).
But while “courting” for sex is a logical choice, it is not a moral choice, and we still do see men courting for marriage. For these men, having a fairly low age cutoff makes a great deal of sense. A woman in her late twenties who claims to be serious about traditional marriage is far less believable and attractive than a woman who indicates the same thing in her late teens or early twenties. Admittedly few women in their early twenties are believably signaling an interest in marrying soon, but this is a plus when trying to minimize spreading courtship resources around too freely. There are of course a number of other markers a man should consider when determining if a woman is a good bet for marriage, which will narrow the field down further. Making things worse for women looking to soak up “traditional” courtship, the logical strategy for traditional courtship isn’t that different than the strategy for men courting for sex; logically speaking, traditional men should keep courtship expenditure to a minimum until a woman has indicated a fairly strong interest in marrying him. Given the large numbers of women not actually interested in marrying at any given time and the opportunity cost of focusing on a non serious candidate, traditional men will do best to greatly limit their courtship efforts and expenditure until around the time of an engagement, and if they are smart they will also insist on keeping the length of the engagement as short as logistically possible.
funny!
God forbid, but should anything happen to my wife, I’m heading back over to Japan should I feel the need for another one. And my wife is American, but has her head screwed on right, down to earth, never played the BS that young women do today. We’ve been happily married for 15 years, and met in a bar (introduced through mutual friends).
At 18, a woman has at least 25 years of reproductive viability ahead of her, as well of many years of youthful energy and cuteness. At 35, not so much, plus is more likely to have some other guy's kid(s) in tow.
Which one has more reproductive value?
I really like a lot of women my age in their early sixties there are a surprisingly number of them who still have it. In fact they seem to get better with age. They may have a sag here or a bump there but they have a grace, a dignity and confident manner that they project along with a heightened femininity. But, alas they are usually taken or if they are available they are very much in demand. You just risk going all out just to find a hypercritical, contentious control freak coming into your life and that is just not worth it. When you are young dumb and full of testosterone they learn that they can lead you around by your peepee. But after that testosterone thing dies down they often find themselves out on their hienies.
The problem goes back to how children are raised. Segregating genders, and when they are integrated, working them hard with some task to prevent socialization, is turning into a disaster.
If you keep a dog separated from other dogs as a puppy, when it grows up, it will still want to mate, but it will see other dogs as “the enemy”, not of their pack. Why should children be appreciably different?
The cultural norm is segregation until age 18, then children are expected to suddenly date, find a compatible partner, get married and have children.
No way this is going to happen.
“But don’t children get socialized in school and church?” Absolutely not. They are kept busy doing other things.
There actually *isn’t any* chaperoned social situation in much of the western world for children for any significant length of time, that also discourages voluntary gender segregation, over the course of more than a decade.
This means things get extremely difficult when children get adolescent urges to exhibit mating behavior. Girls inherently know to “show off” to attract boys, and boys know they are supposed to pay attention to girls doing this, but that’s about it. They have no idea how to interact with each other, though they want to.
And then, cultural perversity and pornography makes things much, much worse. If you were to poll high school students, they would be almost certain that their peers are having sex in healthy social relationships. A total lie, which they have been propagandized with their whole lives.
The truth is that even in high school, the relatively few children who are very sexually active were likely molested by relatives as young children. Their hopes for a happy, normal sexual life have pretty well been ruined. But the vast majority are intensely neurotic about it, thinking that they are uniquely ugly and unattractive.
If society wants happy marriages that produce cared for children, it is essential that boys and girls must understand each other like brothers and sisters. They must know how to work with each other, play with each other, intellectually and emotionally communicate with each other, know the others general strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to talk to each other.
Right now, men don’t want to court women because they think they are crazy, which they often appear to be because they don’t know what behavior is attractive. Women are frightened of men because men only know how to act around other men.
One of the best icebreakers I know is for a couple to know and practice therapeutic (healing, not erotic) massage on each other. And while it is a start, it is like trying to become literate as an adult, when you missed out on your education because you were illiterate. Once you are literate, you are still unlearned, but you might be able to make up for lost time. Yet you will never be as educated as someone who started as a child.
But it just takes ONE selfish partner to initiate the divorce.
They are ruled by emotions that go all over the place and also get insulted over nothing. ENJOY!
they make the nest as well, so pick your form of crazy and go with it.
Women are valued for their attractiveness.
The problem is that neither most males nor most females are making a commitment to a JudeoChristian marriage. It's all about the material world and the meat market; what am "I" going to "get" out of marriage? Neither is thinking "how can I be the best mate and future parent, and what do I bring to a marriage, including discernment of good values in the other future parent of my children?
The latter kind of thinking was more commonplace in America before the 60s. Marriage was supposed to be forever; being a parent was an unavoidable consequence of having sex, and having a family and making sacrifices ot care for each other was the point of marriage.
Today, both men and women are looking for fun, material status and psychological therapy from their partners.
So men die first because they WANT TO? Has all this been the cause?
You lucky, lucky man.
Not married by 25?
They are humping and screwing since 16, and gone through at least a dozen sexual partners before 30. What’s the point in marriage, in such an arrangement?
It’s funny how fornication always gets a pass even here, for the sin that it is said to be.
WTF is wrong with women today?
I can only write of my experience as a man watching my Son in the dating world. Young women are taught that young men are rapists. Daddies teach their daughters that first, they must be able to take care of themselves in the world. Then, they can start dating. Dads are raising up a bunch of girls to be strong individuals who don’t need a man. Then, we wonder why we have so many young women who aren’t interested in getting married. We teach young women that in order for them to be judged a success, they have to have a 5,000 square foot house. They have to have a $50,000 luxury sedan or pickup and a $50,000 Suburban. They also have to have the cabin or vacation condo or small yacht. Unrealistic expectations. Can this guy give me these things? And God help the young man who doesn’t look like Justin Beiber.
In my humble experience, when a young woman says that she’s looking for a long-term, committed relationship, that leads to marriage, the men run like their tails are on fire. Most men in their 20’s aren’t interested in that and those in their 30’s find a woman in her early 20’s to be immature and vapid. (Too much of an age difference)
So I see a lot of whining from men on why they can’t find a ‘nice girl’... Well, the smart guys snatched them up ten years ago while you were enjoying your party.
My daughter was raised conservative with conservative values. She lasted ONE YEAR on the market before her 27 year old husband ‘wifed’ her.
Just stand outside the high school graduation ceremonies with a net.
You mean, through all those years of courting, sex wasn't involved?
Bears repeatin'!
Every watch a Hollyeird movie lately ? If a guy isn’t successful, good looking, over 6 feet tall then the character portrayed is a total stupid poor loser....
You’re dead wrong.
What you spend for anything in the area of looking good is spent on YOU. You spend nothing on the man himself. You don’t buy him dinner, you don’t spring for the many miscellaneous gifts and benefits that are commonly bestowed on you.
You don’t spend anything on the man himself in the courtship or dating relationship. That’s a fact. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
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