Posted on 11/16/2013 5:37:57 AM PST by ClaytonP
One of the more common refrains in the “Where have all of the good men gone!” lament is men’s increasing unwillingness to court women the way women expect to be courted. This is almost always framed as either a great mystery or a case of weak men screwing up feminism (or both).
Examples of this concern abound, from Aunt Haley’s last three posts, to the divorced single mother who found out men weren’t willing to spend very much to court her, to the woman in Vox’s recent post lamenting that her 59 year old friend was only offered half a sandwich by a recent date. Commenter Tom H weighed in with the same concern the other day about his two 30ish career women daughters who struggle to find men who will date them without “pushing for sex”.
How did we get here?
To better understand why men are withdrawing from courtship we need to consider the roles men and women play in the process and how the sexual revolution has impacted the landscape. 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. 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.
Over the last few decades the expectation that men bear the bulk of the costs and risks of courtship has remained relatively constant, but the time period women expect to be courted has expanded dramatically.
As recently as 1980, the median age of marriage for women in the US was 22. By 2011 this was 26.5, but this signifigantly understates the nature of the change since it doesn’t account for the rapidly expanding group of 30 something women who haven’t been able to marry. A full 25% of all US White 30-34 year old women have yet to marry, and these aging would be brides are the loudest voices complaining about the lack of courtship.
The problem with women’s complaints about courtship is easier to understand if you consider the needs of the man. 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.
Risk of wasting resources on the wrong women.
There are three subcategories of resource risk:
Risk of rejection harming the man’s reputation/MMV.
This basic risk can in turn be broken down into two subcategories:
For the ladies reading who might be offended at this, I’ll frame it differently. Picture your ideal husband. Do you want him to propose to you after having been rejected by numerous other women? Of course not. You don’t want to feel like the consolation prize, and you don’t wan’t to marry a man whom other women are known to have rejected. In order to avoid this, the man you ultimately marry must be careful with how freely he expresses interest in women who aren’t signaling an interest in him.
On the question of wasting resources, do you want your future husband to divide his courtship resources between you and many other women? Or do you want all of his available courtship investment to be devoted solely to you?
What does a woman’s age have to do with courtship?
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. 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. In short, the older a woman gets the worse a bet she becomes (on average) when it comes to courting her.
There is another impact of women increasing the time period they expect courtship, and this is on men’s willingness to court younger women. 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. They aren’t just bad bets for courtship today, but (in retrospect) they clearly were bad bets for courtship for the last 15 years. Even more telling, just shy of half of all late twenties White women have never married, which means five years ago 50% of early twenties White women were a complete and total waste of traditional courtship risk and resources. Given the direction of the trends over the last five years, the risk is even higher today.
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. And this is before the man in question starts to consider which of the good bets for courtship (in general) would be a good bet for him personally to court.
It is also worth noting that it isn’t just in delaying marriage that women are extending the period of expected courtship. Women are also driving our divorce revolution, and even with a track record of being the worst possible courtship risk (the kind who marries and then gets unhaaaapy) they still expect to be courted all over again.
The logical adjustment by men.
There are only two logical ways men can respond to women’s extension of courtship. The first logical choice is to recognize that these women are debasing marriage, and decide to “court” for sex and not marriage. For most late teens and early twenties women, this is the only form of courtship which makes sense. This is true in even higher percentages for women in their late twenties or higher. For women looking to soak up courtship in today’s hookup culture there is another serious problem; when courting for sex it is in a man’s best interest to greatly limit the amount of resources he spends before getting sex from a woman. This allows him to cast a wide net while keeping his expenditures down. Ironically, as we have learned from Game a man’s chances of receiving sex from a woman are actually higher when practicing the skittles method of courtship (crass site warning).
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. A woman in her late twenties who claims to be serious about traditional marriage is far less believable and attractive than a woman who indicates the same thing in her late teens or early twenties. Admittedly few women in their early twenties are believably signaling an interest in marrying soon, but this is a plus when trying to minimize spreading courtship resources around too freely. There are of course a number of other markers a man should consider when determining if a woman is a good bet for marriage, which will narrow the field down further. Making things worse for women looking to soak up “traditional” courtship, the logical strategy for traditional courtship isn’t that different than the strategy for men courting for sex; logically speaking, traditional men should keep courtship expenditure to a minimum until a woman has indicated a fairly strong interest in marrying him. Given the large numbers of women not actually interested in marrying at any given time and the opportunity cost of focusing on a non serious candidate, traditional men will do best to greatly limit their courtship efforts and expenditure until around the time of an engagement, and if they are smart they will also insist on keeping the length of the engagement as short as logistically possible.
fortunately for me, I found a great Christian girl when I was 18 and she 17. We got married a year and a day after we met. 24 years later we’re still married. I credit Christ and the fact that we immediately moved overseas to for the first couple of years to grow up together. We had very little meddling from family and old friends.
That being said, I have seen countless friends wind up divorced. The common denominator in each divorce is selfishness, on one side or both. Either way, selfishness will destroy a relationship like nothing else. If the person you are dating shows a pattern of selfish behavior or selfish attitudes about anything, RUN. If you see a pattern of expectation of quid pro quo, RUN.
It's a fun process. At least it was.
And the transmission in your bathtub!
I’ll stick with being single and having peace and serenity in my living space.
__________________________________________
Seriesly - One can choose to be either lonely or extremely annoyed.
He tried online dating. He said 50% of the women put 50 Shades of Grey as their favorite book. He said he instantly ruled them out.
WTF is wrong with women today?
Did you know that it takes a large blank wall to design a large fractal antenna array with aluminum foil and tape?
But the bandwidth of the antenna is amazing.
It looks sorta like modern art. ;)
/johnny
I’m in my early ‘50s, and have always been single. While I occasionally contemplate what it would be like to be married, to this day I’ve been on a total of two dates. I’m simply not “into” being in a relationship.
Alone doesn't have to equal lonely.
/johnny
And man’s best friend is a dog.
Put your dog and your girlfriend/wife in the trunk of your car. Come back an hour later. Who’s happy to see you...?
Hahaha...that was funny, CC.
And I can offer no answers to the above..It’s way too long of a story. ;-)
Right there. Not even a pre-nump can spare a guy in this day when all the woman has to do is get a pro-bono lawyer who works "the law" and it costs the guy $20,000.00 in court to defend himself.(meanwhile the pro-bono writes off his/her time and gets a very handy savings at tax time). Family court is evil and made more evil by the "no-fault".
Serious minded American men see the trend and choose to not invest resources in "catching" something
The average man isn't qualified to de-program sociopaths, but he can avoid them easily enough as long as the big head does the thinking. :)
Here is one perspective: http://www.mgtow.com/
I look hopelessly on this current young generation. Watching my stepson and the types of women he’s been with has been exasperating. Today’s young women may expect men to court them, but the caliber of “woman” has really degraded as well.
No wonder these young guys expect sex when so many are just total ho-bags (thank you so much modern popular culture!).
Todays women are driven to satisfy their maternal instincts and then park their kids with some third person while they go off to do whatever they want while the kids grow up practically motherless or viewing the man in their life as some lower class of life.
We could head of bunch of these problems at the pass if we only practiced bundling like they did in colonial America!
What is ‘bundling’ you ask?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_%28tradition%29
Bundling, or tarrying, was the traditional practice of wrapping one person in a bed accompanied by another, usually as a part of courting behavior. The tradition is thought to have originated either in the Netherlands or in the British Isles and later became common in Colonial America,[1][2] especially in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. When used for courtship, the aim was to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse.
Traditionally, participants were adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of a girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl’s parents and expected to talk to one another through the night. The practice was limited to the winter and sometimes the use of a bundling board, placed between the boy and girl, ensured that no sexual conduct would take place.
By word of mouth from Victorian times: In Buckinghamshire (England) it is understood the practice involved each of the young people being put into a sack, or bag, which was tied closed at their neck. They were then allowed to sleep together, each in their own sack. They could cuddle one another, but that was as far as they could go. The practice was not limited to the time of the year and was not uncommon during the 19th century. No doubt this was also practiced in other counties in England.
In colonial America bundling was condemned by Jonathan Edwards and other preachers.[3]
The practice of bundling continued in the early United States, where in the case of a scarcity of beds, travelers were occasionally permitted to bundle with locals. This seemingly strange practice allowed extra money to be made by renting out half a bed. Hotels rented rooms for the night, shared by many occupants, and sharing a bed entailed an additional fee.
As late as the mid-19th century, there are indications that bundling was still practiced in New England, although its popularity was waning. The court case of Graham v. Smith, 1 Edm.Sel.Cas. 267 (N.Y. 1846), initially argued before Judge Edmunds in the Orange Circuit Court of New York, concerned the seduction of a 19-year-old woman. Testimony in the case established that bundling was a common practice in certain rural social circles at the time. By the 20th century, bundling as a practice seemed to have died out almost everywhere, with only isolated references to it occurring in Amish Pennsylvania.[4]
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