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To: CyberAnt
If women want men to marry them - then they have to stop providing the status of "committed relationship".

Nope, you completely missed the important point. The way things currently work is a consequence of social economics in the current environment. What you are suggesting is that people change their behavior, which is really a platitude. You can't dictate the behavior of a specific system -- it is what it is -- and actions within a system are punished or rewarded as a function of the rules of that system.

People don't change their fundamental behavioral calculus, the environment changes and people adapt their actions to the environment as the social economics shift according to their fundamental behavioral calculus. Under the current environment the equilibrium point is to do exactly what a lot of people are doing now: committed co-habitation. Women can no more decree that things happen a certain way in a relationship by fiat than they can break the laws of thermodynamics by fiat. The system isn't governed by wishes, and the actual outcome is always something that is consistent with the rules of the system.

Woman can change the dynamics of the system by demanding marriage, but they probably won't get the result they were looking for under the current environment. The equilibrium point in that scenario is that men avoid relationships with women altogether (I'm sure the gay lobby would love that, heh). Nope, if you want men to marry women (and vice versa), you have to modify the environment so that marriage is a stable equilibrium point in the social calculus. It currently is not a stable equilibrium point and no amount of handwringing and "oughts" will change this.

299 posted on 08/13/2003 3:53:16 PM PDT by tortoise (All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
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To: tortoise
This is just tooooo analytical for me - I think it's much simpler than that!
304 posted on 08/13/2003 4:19:24 PM PDT by CyberAnt ( America - "The Greatest Nation on the Face of the Earth")
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