What's the point in dating in today's society

[ConfusedLucy]

It does make it a lot harder for a woman to find someone who is marriage material. I’m not saying that there are no non-graduate men worth marrying but I think relationships are harder when you come from very different backgrounds and have different aspirations.

 

[Xantippe]

Zzyzx Road,

–Self-respect and good boundaries are not a unique discovery of the manosphere. In fact, what’s unique about the manosphere is the belief that men ought to have self-respect and boundaries (“frame”) while women are being “rebellious” or “feminist” if they do. Whereas, the truth is that both are important for everybody. In fact, it’s really not hard to find mainstream books that say so. Take, for example, the book “Boundaries in Marriage.”
–It is a bit of a mystery how manosphereans think that young women without self-respect or good boundaries are going to be able to stay chaste. Women who have a hard time saying no to men are not going to stay chaste very long.
–With regard to “being yourself”–have you ever noticed how many married men in the manosphere sound stressed out and overburdened? The manosphere tells them that they need to be somebody else and managing their wife with a whip and chair 24/7, which is just not realistic in the long term. I agree that a lot of people need to work on being a better version of themselves, but in the end, that does boil down to “being yourself.” It’s impossible to fake being somebody else for decades, or if you do, it’s a special kind of hell. If you can’t ever relax and be yourself with somebody, don’t marry them.
–For outside-the-manosphere marriage and child advice, I recommend the following books: Boundaries in Marriage, John Gottman, Don’t Shoot the Dog, Transforming the Difficult Child, The Explosive Child, and How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids (Transforming the Difficult Child and John Gottman are slower reads–the rest of them can be gotten through very quickly). Note that manosphere advice is rarely at all helpful with regard to children, and specifically with regard to small children. You can read the manosphere for years and never figure out how to spend the day with a 2-year-old or how to effectively deal with a school age special needs child. I’m rereading The Explosive Child right now and realizing that it has a lot of application to spousal relationships. I feel like manosphereans could learn a lot from Greene’s Plan A, Plan B, Plan C method. Plan A is “you’re going to do what I say RIGHT NOW,” Plan C is capitulating in the face of opposition and Plan B is collaborative problem solving through empathy, flexibility, and working until both sides’ needs are heard and met.
–How long have you been following the Red Pill, and how many years are you going to give it before you either give up or on finding a wife or realize that you have to adjust your strategy? If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.
–I’m glad you’ve heard of Gottman. Now, read a whole book.
–Respect toward wives is also important. In fact, 1 Peter 3 says so. “7 Likewise you husbands, live considerately with your wives, bestowing honor on the woman as the weaker sex, since you are joint heirs of the grace of life, in order that your prayers may not be hindered.” Disrespect to a wife reads as lack of love. Contrary to what you may hear, respect and love are very closely intertwined. Love is respectful, and respect is loving.

 

[Xantippe]

I don’t know what’s going to happen after another decade of women outnumbering men by close to a 3-2 margin at the college level. I do know from experience that women tend not to want to marry down, today they mostly aren’t, but what happens in 10 years?

There aren’t a lot of “good jobs” for women that don’t require at least a bachelor’s degree.

The classic “good jobs” for women are in education and healthcare. Those jobs have solid pay, stability, and good benefits, but you can’t walk into one with just a high school diploma.

Compare and contrast the most common occupations for men and the most common occupations for women.

https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/most_common_occupations_for_women.htm

The #1 occupation for women is “elementary and middle school teachers” and the #2 is “registered nurses” while the top occupation for men (and this is by a wide margin) is “driver/sales workers and truck drivers” and the #2 is “managers, all others.” The occupation lists are very, very different. The #1 job for men isn’t even in the top 25 for women, and “managers, all others” is #6 for women.

 

[DarkLight]

A few points I’ve seen:

(1) A guy announcing he’s a nice guy is a big red flag to a lot of women. Unfortunately many of us have run into men who are “nice” right up until they’re not getting their way, and then turn nasty. A good Catholic girl is probably going to run into even more of them, if she is at all careful of her purity.

(2) “Nice” 'is the bare minimum. It can’t be the only thing you’ve got going for you, and it’ll never outweigh other major negatives (like whiny). Self-respect is good, being interesting is good. Having realistic plans for your life is good.

(3) Our modern Christian culture sometimes feeds the idea that nice means the lack of any sexual tension or excitement. Let’s be honest, we really don’t want you to act exactly like we’re your sister. There’s something between “won’t take no for an answer” and “doesn’t show any sexual interest at all.”

(4) Equality really is possible. Too many people act like they either have to be in charge or they have to let their partner do so. It’s not either-or.

 

[Xantippe]

Here’s the “Grimes Test”:

Do You Pass The Grimes Test? - Paging Dr. NerdLove

To summarize it, Grimes is a 50 foot tall Japanese monster who (we’re told) doesn’t do a lot of bad things. He’s nice, he’s got a job, he doesn’t creep, he doesn’t stalk, he has a pleasant personality, etc. The punchline is, “So what do you have going for you that Grimes doesn’t?”

Or, as I’ve said before, “Catholic and fogs a mirror” is not enough for a good match.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

With regard to “being yourself”–have you ever noticed how many married men in the manosphere sound stressed out and overburdened? The manosphere tells them that they need to be somebody else and managing their wife with a whip and chair 24/7, which is just not realistic in the long term. I agree that a lot of people need to work on being a better version of themselves, but in the end, that does boil down to “being yourself.” It’s impossible to fake being somebody else for decades, or if you do, it’s a special kind of hell. If you can’t ever relax and be yourself with somebody, don’t marry them.

You apparently think that a man learning to assert himself constitutes the chair and whip. Good to know where you come from.

If the original version of “yourself” constantly gets put in the friendzone, you’re the one who has to change, no one else is going to change for you. If the original version of “yourself” cannot command respect from a date let alone future wife, you’re the one who has to change, no woman can be counted on to change for you. If the original version of “yourself” constantly gets walked all over in life, you’re the one who has to change, no one will magically start showing you respect until you’ve earned it. If the original version of “yourself” gets called “doughy” or “flabby”, you’re the one who has to change, there are no magic pills for that. I had to change what “being yourself” was to me or I was never going to get anywhere. No if’s or but’s about that, period.

Main reason men are stressed over this is that big constructive changes like I had to do are HARD work, especially when a man has go it alone with no male-only spaces available to him. They require initiative and discipline, many men don’t have that. Plus it doesn’t help that the positive changes often go unappreciated by the spouse, girlfriend, children, parents, co-workers, managers, etc. This is an aspect of manhood that women often do not appreciate. Nor do they appreciate the competitive “iron sharpens iron” aspects of association among men aimed at improving ourselves. Why do you think our culture insists on invading or else eradicating male-only spaces? Some were bad, no doubt, but some were good too yet they’ve been lumped in with the bad.

How long have you been following the Red Pill, and how many years are you going to give it before you either give up or on finding a wife or realize that you have to adjust your strategy? If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.

I got no results before. I get better results since.

to be continued …

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

continue from above:

I’m glad you’ve heard of Gottman.

I read the entire book. Among other things, it was very helpful understanding the role of contempt and respect on the part of a woman and understanding what I have to do to avoid the one and keep the other.

Now, read a whole book.

More snark. Nice touch, that. You should lose it, it detracts from your points.

If a woman cannot show respect to her husband, there is no working relationship anymore, they’re just roommates. I’ve seen this play out so often among people I know that I have to ask myself, who do I believe? Popular contemporary writings … or my lyin’ eyes? Can a man act in ways to lose that respect? He sure can and then it’s on him. But if a woman stops respecting a man who doesn’t deserve her disrespect, that’s on her and that is the part our culture nearly always avoids mentioning.

Gottman wrote that if he had to rely on just one factor out of all the factors he cited to predict an eventual divorce or not, he would pick contempt. Hence my most important criteria for vetting a potential wife: is she showing respect to the men in her life? Can I get that respect from her? Is she showing contempt for any men in her life? Why?

Since you quoted a Bible verse, let me give you back a few:
Proverbs 21:9, “It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman.”
Proverbs 21:19, “It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman.”
Proverbs 27:15, “A constant dripping on a day of steady rain and a contentious woman are alike;”

Women should never be silent, but they do need to watch how they say it and act it as much as men do. I do not want to find myself on the roof or in the desert.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

There aren’t a lot of “good jobs” for women that don’t require at least a bachelor’s degree.

This is a very good point. Made without snark, thank you.

For too long, trades were denigrated, shop classes disappeared from middle schools and high schools, everyone got steered toward college whether they were capable or not. Hence the student loan crisis. Trades for men needs to get more culture-wide respect then more college graduate women might be ok with marrying a tradesman instead of thinking they’re marrying down and “settling”.

I’m in a trades-related occupation though I have a college degree so I see this first hand.

 

[edwest211]

The old “If they’re home schooled they lack social skills” nonsense. What about the jock who plays football in high school and college and spends way too much time practicing? Or those on a scholarship?

No, home school parents could match up their kids with other parents in real life. If you have a devoted Catholic family, the more they are involved in raising devoted Catholic kids. Some home school families are making financial ‘do without’ sacrifices to home school. To raise their kids the right way. There are networks of such families out there. God knows who runs a lot of online dating sites.

So dating, Christian dating, which is pleasing to God, is very, very important. Not let’s live together, have no kids and spend our money on whatever. Dating is about finding someone who you enjoy spending time with, who lives a good, faithful life, to earn trust, and if both parties are willing, get married and have kids. That’s how a real functional society works. Not ‘get by’ living and hooking up. That’s led to an STD Epidemic in the US.

The faithful have to ignore what many are doing. They don’t have to live like “today’s society.” They have to work at being good Christians regardless of what others are doing.

 

[therese1998]

1. Then don’t date. Find someone willing to enter into an arranged marriage, stay single or become a priest. Maybe your feelings of hopelessness/despair are a calling you to a vocation outside of a romantic love match. For what it’s worth, I met my husband through an online dating site. He’s devout and we’re married 15 years, happily. I know of several other couples who met through online dating sites or blind dates or some other type of “arranged” meeting. It is far from impossible. It does, however, take some serious self-introspection as to what you are called to, what you must have/can compromise on and what exactly would make someone a good mate for you. Marriages are work…no matter how easy or hard is was for you to meet.
2. Statistically speaking, homeschooled children/adults are no more likely to have a socialization disorder than someone within the general population

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573486.pdf

Not to mention the effects of NOT being exposed to the bullying that is rampant, violent and virtually ubiquitous in today’s academic environments.

1. If you look around and see no one who is suitable for dating, do you assume that’s the situation everywhere…you’re sphere of influence drives the world? C’mon! Think a little harder; think outside the box, give it some gas. Nobody achieves anything by “woe is me; I may as well not even try”. If you don’t find someone, the worst you’ll end up is back in the same place…and single is not the worst place you can end up…for sure. But, if you WANT to date/marry/etc then you may just achieve something great for yourself if you push a little harder.

It’s really about how much it matters to you. Good luck!

 

[Irishmom2]

Again, just because a man is single does not mean they are being called to the priesthood. It is not a last resort occupation/vocation.

 

[therese1998]

Not sure about anyone else, but in no way did I mean that the priesthood is a “last resort”; sorry if it appeared that way.

Being in the priesthood is a sacred calling, not a last option. The fact that some priests will have started out considering a marriage vocation and then realized their vocation was rather to the priesthood doesn’t mean that it was a last resort.

In fact, I would say that anyone who chooses the priesthood as a last resort is not going to find themselves well suited to it!

 

[Xantippe]

In answer to Zzyzx I:

–I have read Dalrock et al a lot, and even the model Red Pill husbands seem to be generally unhappy about how they need to live in order to follow their system. They get stressed out from feeling they need to alpha all the time, when it doesn’t come naturally to them. Nobody can spend their whole life pretending to be somebody they’re not, and feel happy about it. The reason I say “chair and whip” is that that’s obviously how these guys feel about their marriages. They clearly believe that if they relax for a moment, their wife is going to pounce and start gnawing on them. It’s not a very attractive model–no wonder they’re always saying that it’s better not to get married. I wouldn’t want that for myself, either! Fortunately, the happily married people I know don’t have to do that stuff. People in good marriages are much more relaxed.
–About the friendzone–we only marry one person. Hence, it’s totally OK if the vast majority of people we meet are not interested in us romantically. I agree that it’s not great to waste your time panting for a person that doesn’t care about you that way–but doesn’t that happen to every young person at some point, often repeatedly? I had huge multi-year crushes as a young woman. It wasn’t that these guys were putting me in the “friendzone,” it was that we weren’t a good match. Not that there wasn’t also some room for personal improvement on my part, but even if I had been better looking/more personable, we wouldn’t have had a lot in common.
–How do you feel about “female only” spaces? I’ve never heard a good word about them in the manosphere.
–There is no Mrs. Zzyzx Road yet. How many years of your life are you going to give the Red Pill before you accept the fact that they’ve given you all the good things they can give you, and you are now in the land of diminishing returns?

 

[edwest211]

The primary thing is to be able to enjoy each other’s company no matter what you’re doing. Having similar points of view and beliefs, followed by “If we get married, what are you expecting?” Just be honest. I knew too many women who wanted their lives to change, to be better, or feel better or different. Or women who are married for a short time and get bored. What were you expecting? No matter who does it: someone has to cook and clean, do the laundry, take out the trash, etc. That’s real life.

Casual sex is not the answer. Finding someone who loves you, faults and all, and who you love, faults and all, is a good thing. Not serial cohabitation.

 

[Xantippe]

More snark. Nice touch, that. You should lose it, it detracts from your points.

If a woman cannot show respect to her husband, there is no working relationship anymore, they’re just roommates. I’ve seen this play out so often among people I know that I have to ask myself, who do I believe? Popular contemporary writings … or my lyin’ eyes? Can a man act in ways to lose that respect? He sure can and then it’s on him. But if a woman stops respecting a man who doesn’t deserve her disrespect, that’s on her and that is the part our culture nearly always avoids mentioning.

Gottman wrote that if he had to rely on just one factor out of all the factors he cited to predict an eventual divorce or not, he would pick contempt. Hence my most important criteria for vetting a potential wife: is she showing respect to the men in her life? Can I get that respect from her? Is she showing contempt for any men in her life? Why?

Since you quoted a Bible verse, let me give you back a few:

Proverbs 21:9, “It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman.”

Proverbs 21:19, “It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman.”

Proverbs 27:15, “A constant dripping on a day of steady rain and a contentious woman are alike;”

Women should never be silent, but they do need to watch how they say it and act it as much as men do. I do not want to find myself on the roof or in the desert.

What else did you get from Gottman about how couples should handle disagreements?

There’s some very good stuff there, and I don’t think you’ve yet developed a workable model of how to deal with marital disagreements, or at least I haven’t heard one from you.

With regard to respect, I’ve actually walked through this myself, in that at some point my husband just stopped treating me with respect (we were going through a rough patch with our youngest being a high-need toddler and our family resources being stretched very thin). It was not a nice experience. With some thought and reading (including Gottman!), I was able to understand what was going on and explain to my husband that he needed to stop doing some bad stuff he was doing–picking fights with me over nothing, being negative, micromanaging me, and operating on the assumption that whatever minor choices I was making must be mistaken. But by the time we bottomed out, I was ground to powder.

We recovered from that, but one thing I learned from that is that respect is very important to me, and that it can’t just be a one-way street. There has to be mutual respect, just like there has to be mutual love.

All of this stuff has to be a two-way street–and that’s not what you get in the manosphere. In the manosphere, it’s respect for him, and dirt for her to eat.

Speaking of your contentious biblical women, I would say that it’s a question of what you guys call “frame.” If you have “frame,” you don’t yammer and yammer. You say what you have to say and then stop. Contentiousness is actually a sign of powerlessness–or at least a sign that the person feels that they have no other access to power.

 

[Zzyzx_Road]

What I’ve gotten out of Gottman and many other sources is that responsibilities, duties and obligations in marriage flow in BOTH directions, not just from me to her. It is my duty and obligation to provide an active listening ear to her. It is my duty and obligation to distinguish between disagreement, disrespect and drama, and to act accordingly. And more on my end … The important question when I vet a potential spouse is: what duties and obligations does she think she will have toward me? Our culture doesn’t like to address that, instead it celebrates women who talk with snark, who cut down men, who walk away from families; it encourages them to do so. That said, I get that there do exist many women who don’t follow that cultural programming, bravo for them. Given the divorce rate of the last 40 years, they’re fewer than they used to be, but they’re still out there.

 

[Xantippe]

For too long, trades were denigrated, shop classes disappeared from middle schools and high schools, everyone got steered toward college whether they were capable or not. Hence the student loan crisis. Trades for men needs to get more culture-wide respect then more college graduate women might be ok with marrying a tradesman instead of thinking they’re marrying down and “settling”.

Do these men and women actually have much in common?

I’m not going to fault people for not wanting to date people that they don’t find interesting.

 

[edwest211]

No-Fault Divorce was created out of thin air. Why go through the bother of working things out when (and I’m not talking about abuse), you can get out easier? I saw classified ads like this in a major Detroit newspaper in the 1980s: “No kids? $75 and you’re out. Call 1-800-DIVORCE.” That was it. “It got too easy.” Recently, I saw a billboard in a poor part of town showing a woman and telling the reader how to get a “do it yourself divorce.”

Good idea? No.

 

[Xantippe]

What I’ve gotten out of Gottman and many other sources is that responsibilities, duties and obligations in marriage flow in BOTH directions, not just from me to her. It is my duty and obligation to provide an active listening ear to her. It is my duty and obligation to distinguish between disagreement, disrespect and drama, and to act accordingly. And more on my end … The important question when I vet a potential spouse is: what duties and obligations does she think she will have toward me? Our culture doesn’t like to address that, instead it celebrates women who talk with snark, who cut down men, who walk away from families; it encourages them to do so. That said, I get that there do exist many women who don’t follow that cultural programming, bravo for them. Given the divorce rate of the last 40 years, they’re fewer than they used to be, but they’re still out there.

Do you have any examples of good marriages in real life aside from your parents?

Because it sounds like your peer group is kind of terrible.

I just don’t identify with the picture you paint–in my peer group, women are extremely dutiful, and divorce is a scandal.

Speaking of “disrespect and drama”–I would strongly suggest reading “The Explosive Child.” Greene makes some very interesting points with regard to parental inflexibility and black-and-white thinking contributing to volatile behavior from an equally inflexible black-and-white child. It occurs to me that one spouse’s inflexibility can contribute to volatility from the other inflexible spouse.

Note that I’m not talking about capitulation. I mean saying, “I want X and you want Y–how do we figure out how to both get some or all of what we want?” That’s something you never hear in the manosphere. In those parts, marriage is supposed to be winner-take-all, with either the husband getting his way all the time, or the wife getting her way all the time, when with just a little bit more time and thought, it is often possible to make everybody happy.

Edited to add: Dave Ramsey (the personal finance guy) has a very good collaborative model for couples to make financial decisions together. He has absolutely no tolerance for either spouse being a financial Lone Ranger. He believes that both spouses need to come to the table, make an agreement they both can live with, stick to it, and make a new agreement every month. He’s also very big on the need for both spouses to act like grownups.

I think everybody who is engaged ought to do Dave Ramsey’s course with their fiance.

 

[Xantippe]

If a woman cannot show respect to her husband, there is no working relationship anymore, they’re just roommates. I’ve seen this play out so often among people I know that I have to ask myself, who do I believe? Popular contemporary writings … or my lyin’ eyes? Can a man act in ways to lose that respect? He sure can and then it’s on him. But if a woman stops respecting a man who doesn’t deserve her disrespect, that’s on her and that is the part our culture nearly always avoids mentioning.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I grew up seeing my dad be very disrespectful to my mom. My parents obviously loved each other, but my dad was often critical or disrespectful of my mom in front of us kids. It undermined her to us, and (looking back) I see that it made her job a lot harder that her husband made her tween and teen daughters think that she was an idiot.

My dad even once mentioned something from a coworker that he agreed with: “You can yell at your wife because you can’t yell at your boss.” Looking back, I think that was a terrible thing to think or say, but I worshiped my dad when I was a kid and idolized him even as a young adult, which meant that I didn’t see anything wrong with yelling at my husband when I was mad at him, because that’s what my dad did. (My mom occasionally yelled back, but she normally just kept her mouth shut–as I now realize, she grew up in a home with an extremely abusive father. So my mom was very meek and scared of my dad’s anger and often tried to hide bad news from him, even though my dad’s bark was worse than his bite–but perhaps because my mom grew up in an abusive home, she tiptoed around him like crazy.)

You may wonder, why didn’t I follow my mom’s role instead? Well, I didn’t idolize her.

When I was getting married to my husband, my dad told me, “Be nice to him!” Now that I’m older and have put all the pieces together, I kind of want to go back in time and say, “What exactly did you model to me, dad? What do you think I learned from listening to you and mom?” (I think that they actually did better behind the scenes when we kids weren’t around, but all of the disagreements I heard were very high conflict and disrespectful.)

And my mom in turn was physically abusive to me and my sister in our tweens and teens because she had a lot of trouble dealing with us at that age (and no doubt was taking out some of her frustrations on us). She’d chase us around walloping us with a wooden spoon or spatula until they broke.

I realize now that none of this was an awesome preparation for learning to be a good wife or mother, but at the time, I had no idea how dysfunctional all of this was, because it was all I knew.

So let’s just say that I don’t really buy the idea that everything was hunky dory until 1973, when women suddenly (out of the blue) started getting disrespectful to their husbands for no particular reason.

tldr; A husband’s disrespect for his wife can also nuke their working relationship.