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).
Bingo. I know that at that age (and well beyond it, too), I was not only not looking for a husband, I was actively trying to discourage all marriage talk because I was not ready for that, and because any guy who brought it up was one I was at best ambivalent about. Marry that “nice” drunk I dated on and off (mostly off, due to his drinking problem), from ages 19 through 24? I’d sooner be shot! And at 18, my worst nightmare was that my parents would try to marry me off to an older man. Luckily, arranged marriages are long out of fashion among Germans.
Nope, there’s no sense telling a young woman that her biggest priority should be finding a husband. If she hasn’t found herself first, the marriage is doomed to failure, and any kids resulting from that union are going to grow up really fucking miserable. Not to mention plagued by poor behavioral modelling on both sides.
@ Cupisnique
Hey sexy… Gravatar 🙂
I never said to fear aging by itself. It’s pointless to fear the inevitable. Rather you she be aware you have a window of oppurtunities to get it right, assuming you want marriage, children in a nuclear family environment, and someone to grow old with who remembers the girl you were at 26 when you are 76.
Or you can ignore male reality, pretend it doesn’t exist, or become an angry lesbian. It’s up to you.
You stated you had long term boyfriend and used to phrase – when I get around to marrying his sexy ass or something to that effect. Well dear, if he has not proposed by now, this is a problem for you. You will need to issue several subliminal hints or an ultimatum .
Again this is for women who want a monogamous relationship with the same man. If your a whore, or a degenerate swinger or some kind of sick individual this advice does not apply to you and you have no business getting married on the first place (I’m just saying).
If he uses up your youth and you end up as live ins breaking up at 31 – you my dear are fucked. You have lost your entire investment and are now starting from scratch with a severely reduced sexual market value courting quality men in your age bracket who are openly or secretly looking at 26 year olds.
You may say, I’m 26, age is just a number and besides 5 years is not much. This is correct if your 19 and starting over at 24. But from a biological, male visual perspective there is a world of difference between 26 and 31. As a matter of fact unless you take extremely good care of yourself you will look like a different person to most men but not in the same way as from 19 to 24. At 31 you are now past or passing your expiration date. It’s kind of like a jug of milk. It expires in 30 days but some milk expires a little eariler or later you just never know exactly when.
In any instance Its ultimately up to you to select the right man. The burden is 100% on your shoulders. You are the gatekeeper and its ultimately you who will bear the lonlness pain regret and pity that comes with becoming an unmarried SPINSTER.
Your chances of marriage statistically diminish with every passing year you allow this guy to use your youth providing you with no contractural security of marriage in return.
In the end you will have nobody to blame but you.
@ Cassandra kitty
No. It’s a visual representation of what you and every other women on this site sounds like when confronted with reality.
Bingo. I guess it’s because Mikey and his kind stagnate from about, oh, age two, that they can’t fathom someone changing as they mature, and needing different things from life. People are generally barely adults at 20, and have so much to do in every respect – yet it never ceases to amaze misogynists that a woman at 30, or 25, is probably not the same as she was at 20, and may well come to realise that she and her partner are just not compatible anymore.
Ah, but you see, that’s part of why you keep telling them that no man will want them after they turn 30, so that they’ll be too scared to dump your abusive predatory ass.
Of course if the “you are nothing without a man” brainwashing hasn’t worked, the response to that threat might be “Good!”
Interestingly, it’s my man who experiences a strong emotional impact as a result of being without a partner. I don’t particularly like being single or living alone and I felt very isolated and marginalised by it. I didn’t feel my worth as a person was any less though. In contrast, this poor man felt completely worthless when he wasn’t the centre of some woman’s universe. Raised by a single mom without a dad. This guy doesn’t know how to exist without a woman fawning over him and his sense of self-worth goes in the shitter when one chooses to direct her time and energy and attention elsewhere. He’s working on it. Super smart guy so he understands the problem and what he needs to do to fix it. He needs to be secure with himself so his entire sense of worth isn’t dependent on the woman giving him attention and can’t be shattered so easily. It’s devastating, the effect the way he was reared is having on him in adulthood though.
Cassandra — thanks, and yeah, I am my own worst enemy (mostly, my father is a terrible waste of oxygen after all)
Kitteh — it’s certainly extra complicated currently! Ze’ll be graduating in the spring, no idea of residency and if it isn’t in the ‘Burgh then I have no date to pecunium’s wedding because my pharm student will be moving.
And I maintain that if my options are marrying someone as rageful and manipulative as Mickey or being alone with my fish, my fish are faaaaaaaaarrrrr more interesting. And I know they can’t understand me, so being ignored isn’t nearly as frustrating! (Puff seems to enjoy the attention, even if from his view I’m just looking at him and wiggling my fingers — I have far more satisfying relationships with my fishies than Mickey seems to have with anyone, including himself)
Off off topic — I hate this weather, and this isn’t the New England if you don’t like the weather wait 15 min, this is windy snowy ick.
Why do they always come here and try (unsuccessfully) to make “WELL ALL THE MISOGYNISTS WILL GO THEIR OWN WAY” sound like a threat? Men going their own way ‘punishes’ women in much the same way as getting the silent treatment from a 5 year old ‘punishes’ their older sibling. Are you going to hold your breath until you die, too? No, not that! No, stop!
Mike, we spinster harpies fully support getting as many men as possible to “take the red pill” and all the sartorial trappings that usually follow. So few people in this life are kind enough to provide visual warning that talking to them induces migraine with aura, gut cramps, and possible death. MRA : Trilby :: Frog : Neon skin.
I’ve never understood why people like Michael keep falling back on “statistics” in an attempt to “prove” something or other.
(There’s a guy called Eric who hangs around misogynist blogs who does the same thing – and, hilariously, once admitted that he barely talked to women and certainly doesn’t know any well enough to discuss relationship issues with, which shows how much credence I’m going to place on his analyses!)
Who cares if there’s a statistical possibility that couples in the demographic groups inhabited by my wife and myself might divorce? Whether or not it happens to us is entirely our decision – we’ll do it if the marriage irretrievably breaks down, not because statistics suggest that it’s fashionable.
In fact, of the couples we know well, hardly any have had serious marital difficulties – totting the stats up in my head now, I can think of one actual divorce (he was cheating on her) and two marital wobbles serious enough for them to seek advice from friends, but they got over it. Other than that, everything appears to be rock solid, and I know my own marriage is.
And what do all these marriages have in common? Every single person involved was (at the absolute youngest) in their late twenties when they got married, most were well into their thirties, and one was past forty.
Anecdata, obviously, but it’s interesting that my own real-world experience does tend to run completely counter to Michael’s advice as to what we should be doing. Not that that’s a complaint, mind.
That’s one of the many hilarious things about Mikey’s spiel. What’s one of the stats most strongly tied to divorce? Early age at marriage.
Judgey McJudgeypants has such a focus on marriage. It’s almost like alternative relationship arrangements don’t exist.
Part of that is a religious thing with him, I think. I’m surprised he hasn’t threatened us with Hell yet, he’s tried everything else.
So there are married SPINSTERs? How does that work?
Oh, aad Mikey, if a young woman marries a revolting specimen of humanity like you, she will be the one who will bear the loneliness, pain, regret and pity that comes with being, well, married to a revolting specimen of humanity like you.
I know which one I’d choose.
LOL, now he’s reached the NO U stage of his tantrum. And perving on cupisnique again. Imaginary girlfriend not in the mood tonight, Mikey?
A sentence only Mikey could write!
Hey, remember that song, “When a men loves a women?”
Anyway, Mikey, you never gave me your thoughts on the 40 year old woman I know who broke up with her Wall Street boyfriend when she was in her mid-30s even though he adored her and wanted to marry her and wasn’t actually a bad guy, but she just couldn’t se herself with him for the rest of her life. Anyhoo, so a year or two later she met an actor (like, a real working actor, has been on HBO, network shows, etc) just a couple of years older than her and now they have a baby together and live in manhattan.
I mean, the dude is charming and handsome and funny and smart and considerate and a good dad, and, well, way more of a catch than you are, Mikey. Like a LOT more of a catch.
I mean, if he wanted to, he could be dating 23 year olds HB8.347623s. Yet he isn’t. Why might that be, Mikey? Do you have any idea?
Good Grief, Is this douche canoe going to float on for eternity?
(Yes, I say Good Grief. Don’t judge.)
Men often date women young than them. Fascinating. Younger women usually have a bigger dating pool then middle aged women. Not a news flash.
That, however, doesn’t explain how your tortured mixture of desire and repulsion at sexually active 20-something women became the basis of your world view. Seriously, feminism, birth control and young women’s sexual perfidy aren’t the main forces shaping our world today. You may find that ~hp8 under 30 trophy wife of your dreams, but that isn’t going to change how your contemptuous derision and palpable anger towards women is, shall we say, off-putting. Do you discuss this topic with dates? How do you bring it up? Does your lecture about husband hunting and SPINSTERS involve spittle and barely contained rage or do you pour on the charm and romance?
These are rhetorical questions and I don’t really care. At all.
Oh, this is just blissful. Don’t ever change, Mikey, we love you just the way you are. Albeit from a very long distance with no actual physical contact at any point.
But how do you define “whore” or “degenerate swinger”? My wife spent her late twenties catching up on all the sexytimes she missed out on when she was married in her early twenties. She had every intention of getting married in her thirties, and indeed did so. But presumably before she met me she’d have been firmly in your degenerate swinging whore category?
“Uses up your youth”? I know someone who’s just turned eighty who said that he didn’t even feel middle-aged until he hit sixty, and even now he’s not quite ready to call himself properly elderly. By contrast, I also know someone who pretty much hit middle age at 21, thanks to a very unfortunate upbringing by priggish, buttoned-up ultra-conservative parents. To a very large extent, how old you come across is as much a reflection of your outlook and personality as it is of your biological age.
Take the two of us, for instance. Assuming I’m remembering this correctly, you’re in your early thirties. I’m not quite half as old again, but near enough. And yet if you were to line our posts up side by side and ask people to guess which was the older writer, do you really think they’d pick me? You sound like someone’s dad. I really am someone’s dad, but I genuinely don’t think it shows. Or at least not that much.
Everyone has an expiration date, but for me it’s the date that they actually die. So yes, I did – sadly – know someone whose expiration date was 31, but fortunately this isn’t especially common.
In all other respects, your argument says infinitely more about you, your innate bigotry, your obsessive objectification of women and your generally repulsive worldview. Most of my closest female friends are past thirty (unsurprisingly, since I’m nearer fifty). I haven’t been in the dating game for a decade, but if this situation was to change, I wouldn’t have any shortage of people to hang out with, and with whom I’d enjoy hanging out, and with whom I might be able to strike up someone deeper. I wouldn’t wonder for a single millisecond if they were past their “expiration date” because my mind simply doesn’t work like that. And I’m just as much a biological male as you are.
On the subject of the whole “visual perspective” thing, this is also where you and I differ. Your assessment of women seems to be entirely about looks and perceived “hotness”. Mine is about whether we can sustain a decent two-way conversation for more than five minutes. Because that’s what actually matters when it comes to laying the foundations of a lasting relationship, and it’s one of the reasons why people who get married young often end up regretting it.
Not only is this completely absurd, in your case it’s utterly self-defeating. Are you saying that all you need to do is sit back and wait to be “selected”? Good luck with that one.
What’s with this “use your youth” crap? I didn’t meet my wife till I was 34 – did I rant and rave about someone “using her youth”? Of course not: we both firmly agree that if we’d met even five years earlier it would probably have been a complete non-starter as we weren’t yet in the right mindset. When I met her, I was actively looking for a long-term partner, as was she. And we got married for the sake of the kids, not for “contractual security” in general. Not least because our fluctuating incomes mean that we take turns being the main breadwinner (it’s currently her by some distance), so we both benefit equally from the arrangement.
I’m sure all the SPINSTERS of this parish will listen to your wise words, and take heed. Or possibly not.
And Mikey channels Dear Abby.
You don’t know whether said boyfried has proposed or not. If he has not, it isn’t “a problem”. And recommending “subliminal hints or an ultimatum” – yep, ‘cos in Mikey-world, she couldn’t possibly propose to him or have a grown-up conversation about it. Nope, Mikey believes passive-aggression and underhand manipulation is the way to go.
Mikey, you are so slimy, I feel I need to wash my hands now.
Big assumption there, matey. Tied up with the assumption that the person you meet at age 26 is actually someone with whom you want to grow old. It’s misandry to assume men are interchangable, you know.
Yep, cos that’s the only alternative to marraige by age 26 – become a SPINSTER or an “angry lesbian”. ‘cos all lesbians are angry, always. And noone ever marries happily after thae age of 26. doesn’t happen, nope, no way. Because Mikey says so.
Michael,
You wouldn’t know reality if it bit you on your sad sack, sexist ass.
Mikey is just a gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he? I’m hoping for a big reveal at the end when it turns out this was all a brilliant piece of performance art.
In the mean time, my favourite Mikey-ism is still
Mike is right – he is a NiceGuyTM. If he fancies a woman, poses as her friend and she is having sex with other men, then damnit, it’s terrible if she doesn’t have sex with him.
While we’re all thinking that Kaylene is showing excellent judgement.
…frankly, given the choice between Mikey’s “male reality” and being an angry lesbian… I’d pick angry lesbian every time. It sounds a hell of a lot more fun.
I’m too lazy to check if it’s happened more than twice, but my favourite bit is still that the defense, “It’s not because they ignored me in highschool / college / etc.”
Is eventually followed by, “… But they ignored me!”
If Qwerty is Michael, this will be the best thread ever.