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).
His obsession with beaches suggests that to me. It’s not that we don’t like beaches here, but I mean, they’re always there if you want them and they’re not really that exciting in the grand scheme of things. (We usually just hit the beach when it gets to 110 or so because it’s at least 20 degrees cooler there.) Next he’s going to tell us he has year passes to Disneyland.
One piece of advice neither of my grandmothers gave me, however, was “Settle for some schmuck you don’t actually love, because QUALITY! And being a SPINSTER after 25 is a fate worse than death!”
Also, the grandma who brought me sherry and told me, in essence, to never mind what some dude thought? Did it when I was over 25.
They were both married for more than 50 years apiece, BTW. In her case, over 60.
It’s the html hive mind, out to get us!
Tap water? Tap water is bad now? I missed that bit.
I don’t know about Cali, but Melbourne tap water is the best. It’s something I miss when I go away. (Never drink the water in Portland, Vic – it’s artesian. Eugh!)
“Next he’s going to tell us he has year passes to Disneyland.”
My friend (whos an older gentleman with a young daughter) goes to disneyland all the time ’cause he lives in Florida and his wife’s a doctor. I’ve never been, but I’ve always wondered how that doesn’t get boring eventually.
Also, my granny told me to avoid men who always seem to be angry at women and to pick the boy who made me happy over the boy who anyone else thought I should go out with. Taking that advice has indeed served me well.
@ katz
Yeah, beaches really aren’t all that impressive when you’re never more than a short walk or drive away from one. Plus if a woman really wants to live on the beach she can find a place there herself, one where she doesn’t have to live with a screeching ragemonkey.
I would go to the beach more often, but the closest beach is at Half Moon Bay, and that place is frigid every time I go there.
After seeing the beaches in Thailand it’s kind of comical to see Mikey boast about living on the beach in LA. Up in Northern California they can be really pretty in a craggy, dramatic, windswept kind of way, but as pretty as Bodega Bay is I wouldn’t want to live there, much less swim in the water.
@Bina I am told that Disneyland is amazing. A friend of mine is always scraping together the dollars to go… again. It’s honestly kinda weird and cute to hear her geek out about it, as she is not at all an effusive person in general. Whatever they are doing is clearly good at bringing in the repeat business.
Beaches are indeed not that exciting after awhile. I lived in Hawaii for awhile as a teenager and after the initial two week rush of “omg sand/big water/80 degrees! this is amazing!!!” wore off, we went like, once a month… if there was nothing good on TV and Mom was issuing chores. Hedonic adaptation, I guess.
oops, I meant cups, not Bina!
I go to bed now
I’ll put beaches on our bucket list 🙂
^_^
Also, in case anyone is in doubt, swimming in Bay Area waters is fucking cold. Seriously, I tried swimming at a beach in Capitola (close to Santa Cruz) and I could barely even swim properly because I felt like my muscles themselves were freezing.
The only beaches I’ve ever really likes are the ones in UAE and Laguna Beach down south of here. La Jolla Beach was also fabulous because BABY SEALS.
Tap water: My father grew up in the Idaho panhandle, and their tap water came directly from delicious mountain streams. Seriously, best water I’ve ever tasted, bar none. Gorgeous area too; shame about the Aryan Nation types who’ve moved in.
Tap water in many parts of Scotland comes directly from the Highlands. Doesn’t a lot of LA’s water come from up here? In which case the tap water should be fine to drink, though not as tasty as in Scotland/Idaho/anywhere else it’s coming straight from the hills.
(Worst water I’ve had – London. Even in tea it tastes awful. Worst water according to my dad – Shanghai.)
Mikey, your client list is people who pay you to do things. Your degree doesn’t come with a factory fresh supermodel who will magically never age. Your lease doesn’t promise you hot and cold running babes. And all the money in the world won’t buy you one minute’s peace and security in another person’s love.
Because if women are only as faithful as our options (which is egregious bullshit, btw) then there will always be a better option than a bitter petty man who holds women in contempt. You can never rest easy because at any minute a guy with a shinier car and a fancier house could come along and why the hell should anyone settle for you?
I mean, yeah, love and shared hobbies and in jokes and trust… oh wait. You don’t believe women will choose those over cash money. So, you have to keep pushing and watching every minute in case some other player has more.
You must be a blast at parties, dude.
Not gonna lie, our tap water here is kinda gross. A lot of people use water filters. But that doesn’t mean drinking the tap water is a sign of abject poverty. Hell, I’m drinking tap water out of a chipped mug right now. Because both are perfectly good.
Also wondering where in LA one could feasibly fish for food.
The tap water here in San Jose is terrible. Whenever we pour tap water into a water-filtering container (Brita in our case) it’s very common for green stuff to collect at the bottom of the container. Maybe it’s just an issue with our plumbing, but in any case it’s really terrible.
Green stuff in filter – deteriorating copper pipes, maybe? That’s all I can think of. Don’t get that in my water filter up here though.
Oh gods yes, London tap water. Tasted like someone had boiled glue in it. I can’t remember if it was worse than Portland water or on a par with it, but it was disgusting.
I love this. Not just in the direct answer to Mikey McWhinerson, but the wording: peace and security in another person’s love.
Oraclenine: Spot on. And I love “hot and cold running babes.”
That makes a lot of sense.
To clarify, it’s not like we literally get green sludge; it’s just that it accumulates very quickly in the container to the point that it looks like someone used a green marker on parts of the glass. It’s weird.
Katz- I think he thinks he’s gonna grow up to be Hugh Hefner. and (1) euwww and (2) yeah, dude, no. Not gonna happen.
Who gets to break it to him that eventually he’s gonna get old too? Imagine if he ever heard what the pretty young women in the ladies room at the club think of old guys who hit on them. (And to plenty of 23 year olds he’s already old.)
My wife got married in her early twenties, to what I suppose could be described as the British equivalent of her high school sweetheart. It was a total disaster pretty much from the get-go – she acknowledged later that she’d made the classic mistake of thinking “OK, this relationship is trundling along and isn’t very exciting, but hey, maybe if we get married it’ll magically turn out all right?”. Well, it didn’t, and thankfully there weren’t any kids, which meant that she could extricate herself from it about fourteen months later with no serious repercussions aside from taking a hit on her share of their house.
And then she spent the next ten years riding the old cock carousel – she reckons she had about forty to fifty partners over this period, and I don’t see any reason to dispute this.
Because one of the things that was most fundamentally wrong with her first marriage was that she had a high sex drive and her husband didn’t.
And then she got married at 35, to me. Which makes me the “loser” in Mikey’s scenario.
Only it didn’t work out that way. Because the crucial thing that Mikey’s theorizing doesn’t seem to take into account is that my wife not only has a high sex drive, she’s extremely intelligent and has a razor-sharp wit (I guarantee that Mikey wouldn’t last ten milliseconds with her, and that she’d be doing mocking impressions of him to this day if they ever met). And during her dating years she was never able to square that particular circle – the men who were bright, witty and entertaining were not particularly good in bed (by her increasingly adventurous standards), while the ones who were good in bed weren’t especially good for anything else.
And I was the first person to tick both boxes.
And because she’d finally found someone who could match her physical needs and her emotional/intellectual/entertainment needs (and who also earned enough to make starting a family a viable proposition), we got married – and next year our marriage will pass the milestone of being fully ten times longer than her previous one, so the signs are that she got it right this time.
But that really shouldn’t be a surprise. A highly intelligent and self-aware woman in her mid-thirties is going to be far more certain about what she wants, and correspondingly less inclined to compromise. And I suspect this is why they’re marrying later, because despite the best efforts of Mikey, Dalrock et al, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s the sensible thing to do.
And what’s particularly amusing about Mikey’s rants is that pretty much every single one of his recommendations would have made things worse for us.
Oh, and we own our own home, and while it isn’t right on the beach (we used to live half a block away from the beach, but the seagulls drove us inland with their squawking and habit of strewing rubbish all over the road and crapping on our car), it’s only a short walk to the sea. And very nice it is too.
So what exactly are we doing wrong?
We drink rain water here. It tastes like nothing at all. It’s pretty great.
And plenty of broke uni students date other broke uni students. If you were missing out when you were at uni Mickey, it’s not because you had no money. My guess is that you were as much a stuck up, holier-than-thou, woman-hating prig as you are now.
Funniest lurk! 🙂 A few thoughts:
1. Yes, yes Mickey.
Just remember, it doesn’t have to be true to make you feel better.
You’re not too bright are you sweetie? Never mind, keep trying, at this rate you’ll be able to count all the way up to potato.
2. Loving Kitteh’s new avatar. Gosh ::fans self::
3. Where did sexy pirates come in? I missed that, poor lurking form I know.
Last time we talked about sexy stuff it was teapots, now it’s pirates?
Okay, something, something…oo arr, give me a good Jolly Rogering…no, erm…maybe something about shivering me timbers? Too obvious, and can a woman even have timbers?
4. Existential question: If all Boobzers are SPINSTERS, do I exist? 37, married to a very successful games developer, but comments on MBs/is a feminist. Perhaps, perhaps it IS all just a dream. Aw man, I’m plugged into the matrix aren’t I? So do I swallow the orangy/red pill and if so where do the lions and Sean Connery come into it?
4. Sushi. Was this a euphemism? Okay…phwoar, what a lovely California roll…that wasabi looks HOT!
5. If you are ever unfortunate enough to come to Nottingham, don’t drink the water.
6. Is it true Ayn Rand made her poor husband wear bells on his slippers? ::Shrugs:: (See what I did there?)
Hmmm, insomnia, not that dissimilar to LSD.
Mikey really needs to grow the fuck up.
So, a rich lawyer with prime housing ON THE BEACH, dating a hot 20-something, and still incredibly miserable and whining about not getting his “Princess Bride.”
I seriously doubt Mikey has money or a law degree. Lawyers have to complete several years of postgraduate study. Mikey seems to think dropping celebrity names constitutes actual evidence of some kind of point he’s proving. Lawyers understand things like logical arguments and evidence. Mikey does not. It’s also perfectly obvious he has no confidence. Egotistical, but no real confidence. Confident people don’t do things like repeatedly spout off about their (imaginary) LA beach-front accomadations or salary.
These are not the actions of a happy or confident person.
“100000% correct.” Cause if your going to pull random stats out your ass, you might as well make it as ridiculous a number as possible.
Just an FYI, Mikey: “Allot” means to “assign as a share or portion.”
A real lawyer would know that.
http://i.word.com/idictionary/allot