Woman with surplus courtship

Dalrock, a manosphere traditionalist with a great love of charts and statistics and other accoutrements of SCIENCE, has managed to figure out a way to stretch “don’t be so picky, ladies, or you’ll get old and ugly and no man will ever want you” out to 1500 words.

Here are a few of them:

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.

Oh dear. We’re off to a very unpromising start here.

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.

Here’s some surveillance footage of an average American woman being courted by several men.

But now — get this — the ladies are waiting longer to marry!

Just think about what this does to the dude navigating the marriage market hoping to “maximize his Pareto efficiency,” if you know what I mean and I think you do.

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.

So watch out, ladies, because if you wait too long, guys are going to decide you’re not much of a bargain!

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.

Exactly! Because women never change their mind because they’re, you know, in a different stage of their life or anything.

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.

This reminds me of that famous joke, you know, where that woman approaches Winston Churchill at a party and says, “Sir, you are drunk.”

And he replies: “And you, Bessie, have used up your most attractive/fertile years. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still have used up your most attractive/fertile years.”

That Churchill, what a card!

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.

Are there really a lot of guys who look back on the women they dated in their twenties and think, “boy, I wasted a lot of courtship on those gals! I mean, I wasted nearly 14 courtship on Jessa alone!” (Also, who knew that the women are always the ones to blame when heterosexual couples in their twenties break up?)

They aren’t just bad bets for courtship today, but (in retrospect) they clearly were bad bets for courtship for the last 15 years. …

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.

Well, you could always marry a dude.

There are only two logical ways men can respond to women’s extension of courtship.

Wait, really? Please, please, please, let one of the ways be “marry a dude.”

The first logical choice is to recognize that these women are debasing marriage, and decide to “court” for sex and not marriage.

Damn. Anyway, sexual relationships are fine, but you are aware that there are other kinds of relationships — sorry, “courting” — besides sex and marriage, right?

Ok, we still have one more. Marry a dude. Marry a dude. Marry a dude.

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.

That’s your, er, “solution?” Marry a teenager? Or a woman at most in her early twenties?

As Dalrock knows, but doesn’t want to believe, those who marry when they’re very young are much more likely to divorce than those who marry when they’re older. For evidence, see this chart, which I found elsewhere on Dalrock’s own blog:

But hope springs eternal for modern misogynistic manospherian marriage market minded men (MMMMMMM).