Replies

A society where the alpha males cannot really be identifed until they are almost 40 years old presents an enormous challenge to women. Time was, they could just look for the brutes at 15 or 16, and the same guys would still be king of the hill thirty years later. Now some nerd like Bill Gates, who probably couldn't get a date except with Mary Louise Girthwaist, turns out the billionaire... while the guy who was captain of the football team is now a meter reader for the gas company.

That's one contributing factor to the divorce phenomenon. Successful men in their 40's and 50's get to trade up to "trophy wives".

The flip side is that women in their 30's increasingly decide that their current hubby's career is going nowhere, so might as well dump him while she's still good-looking enough to have a shot at being somebody else's trophy wife next time around

That's one contributing factor to the divorce phenomenon. Successful men in their 40's and 50's get to trade up to "trophy wives". The flip side is that women in their 30's increasingly decide that their current hubby's career is going nowhere, so might as well dump him while she's still good-looking enough to have a shot at being somebody else's trophy wife next time around

I hadn't really thought about it, but now that I think about it, this happens a LOT.

This is actually an argument for getting married later, e.g. 30+, so that both parties can more accurately project the kind of person they've actually married. It is trite and a (good) generalization, but status matters to both men and women in some fashion, and this plays into the marriage calculus. What a person is doing at 20 these days has almost no bearing on what a person will be doing at 30, and hazarding a guess at that age as to marriagability based on this fact may yield unpredictable results.

Heh. I'm sure all those women who dissed me when I was 20 because I was dirt poor and working my ass off at a crappy job would've had a completely different attitude if they met me at 30. I didn't change but my status did dramatically, which completely changed the playing field for me. I define "trophy wife" a bit differently than they probably expect though, and I can't stand status whores.

Of course, living way below my means and projecting myself as someone of modest resources helps keep a lot of the useless wife candidates at bay.

Successful men in their 40's and 50's get to trade up to "trophy wives"... The flip side is that women in their 30's increasingly decide that their current hubby's career is going nowhere, so might as well dump him while she's still good-looking enough to have a shot at being somebody else's trophy wife next time around

That's why divorce is societal cancer, and why letting it out of the bottle, as we did, has to destroy the place.

The most sexually powerful people are young, fertile women and middle-aged, successful men. From a purely lizard-brain reproductive-programming standpoint, those two groups are magnets for each other.

But if you let them actually get at each other, they will wreck marriages and friendships to do it... throwing off two huge pools of people who don't have much use for each other: young men and middle-aged women.

Instead of "practically everybody" having a relatively decent life, we end up with one group in some sort of hormonal bliss while everybody else spends fifteen or twenty years in the ditch. That is not a Good Thing.

Our scheme to prevent this, while still letting divorce out of the bottle, was to strip the middle-aged successful men of their money on their way out the door, so they could not leave this huge pool of middle-aged women with no money. Lawyers, not economists, though that one up, because the economists would have seen coming a rash of asset-stripping divorces that had nothing to do with "him" walking out the door. We now have that happening to the point that young men see it coming and avoid marriage entirely. It's just one damned Unintended Consequence after another. And it'll just keep getting worse. The right answer is to put divorce back in the bottle. And that won't happen now as long as women have the vote; it's too good a deal for them.