The tragedy of young women in 2022 is that they have been raised to be unpleasant and resentful.
"I was speaking with a young man who said that there’s no reason to get married. He’s not religious, so that’s not a tie that binds. He can get sex without marriage. There’s no social pressure on today’s young men to start a family as part of the maturing process. The young man added that there’s no reason to believe he’ll want to be with the same person for an extended period of time — and he pointed to the huge modern divorce rate.
"That last got me started thinking about what a marriage should be and why there are so many failed marriages. My thinking boiled down to two things: Niceness and biological differences. (I could easily come up with more, but this post is about those two things.)
"In the old days, there was absolutely no doubt that men and women were different. During their usually short married lives (because she died in childbirth and he died from overwork or accidents), she was dependent on him to support her during pregnancy and with young children, and he was dependent on her to continue his genetic legacy, which is a purely lizard-brain mental mandate.
"Monogamous marriage was his assurance that the children he was supporting were indeed his. That matters tremendously to men. Indeed, you only need to look to the fact that there is no more dangerous place for a young child than in a household that not only lacks that child’s biological father but that also is home to one or a series of boyfriends, none of whom have been socialized beyond their lizard brain. Many of those kids are brutally abused, often to death.
Over time — most notably after WWII when America became economically ascendant — two things happened: One, human lives ceased to be pure subsistence level existence and, two, people lived longer. That meant that people weren’t bound together by the struggle for food, the reality of babies, and the inevitability of imminent death.
"What then bound people? Well, I think that, early on, one of the things that kept relationships together was that women were raised to be nice to be around. Sure, as with all aspirational things, there was a gap between reality and aspiration, but for several decades, women were told that they were living a good life if they made a happy home with happy children. Meanwhile, their husband’s good love would occur if he were supported in his career and came home every day to a happy house filled with happy people. Again, I know the 1950s sitcoms put a gloss on this, but it was the cultural zeitgeist before the 1960s, and it was a zeitgeist that flowed naturally from the different roles and energy that men and women bring to a monogamous relationship.
"The 1960s and beyond told women, not just that they didn’t have to live that traditional role but also that the traditional role was demeaning and imprisoning. Women were taught that men weren’t their partners or the interlocking puzzle pieces of their lives, but were their enemy.". . .
