Posted on 10/22/2002 11:24:51 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Yeah. That's it.
This guy confuses me. He's studied men's reasons for not commiting, but this statement makes me wonder how many men he actually knows.
The perfect soul mate is one who will stay out of your hair and take care of the kids and keep the house clean and not embarass you in public and keep herself trim.. They're out there, only I think they mostly live on other planets. But that doesn't mean we can't shop around for her.
Maybe it directly relates to #1?
1. They can get sex without marriage more easily than in times past
My 13 yo old daughter, on the other hand, has just discovered babies. Everyone's babies. Her teachers and church counselors are in their late teens and early twenties, are marrying and having kids. That "culture" has her infatuated with the lives of these healthy young adults (who DO wait until after marriage for sex). A year or so ago, she said she'd adopt..no way was she going to waste her athletic body on babies. Now.. she's changing.
So, if I read this correctly, my daughter and her friends are growing up, going to college, preparing themselves for lives as Mom's or careers, while my son and his buddies are going to disappoint them. They're having too much fun to get saddled down with kids.
I do think they might have left one thing out. Most of us non-committal types feel that when we say "I do", she will say "You DID!".
"A very large database in the United States contains information about several thousand sibling pairs who have been followed since 1979. To make the analysis as unambiguous as possible, I have limited my sample to brothers and sisters whose parents are in the top 75 per cent of American earners, with a family income in 1978 averaging £40,000 (in today's money).
Families living in poverty, or even close to it, have been excluded. The parents in my sample also stayed together for at least the first seven years of the younger sibling's life.
Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of 90-110 ,a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs."
The results appropriate to this discussion were:
"The differences among the siblings go far beyond income. Marriage and children offer the most vivid example. Similar proportions of siblings married, whether normal, bright or dull - but the divorce rate was markedly higher among the dull than among the normal or bright, even after taking length of marriage into account. Demographers will find it gloomily interesting that the average age at which women had their first birth was almost four years younger for the dull siblings than for the bright ones, while the number of children born to dull women averaged 1.9, half a child more than for either the normal or the bright. Most striking of all were the different illegitimacy rates. Of all the first-born children of the normals, 21% were born out of wedlock , about a third lower than the figure for the United States as a whole, presumably reflecting the advantaged backgrounds from which the sibling sample was drawn. Their bright siblings were much lower still, with less than 10% of their babies born illegitimate. Meanwhile, 45% of the first-born of the dull siblings were born outside of marriage."
Anyway, I recently divorced buddy of my from back in College and I were commiserating over a beer about ten years back. We both noticed something. In our late 30's, we found that suddenly we had women of our age group taking an "interest" in us. (Though he was divorced, I was married, wasn't happy with some things.. O.K., I was STUPID, but we won't go into that discussion. Let's just say... I was aware of women in my surroundings). Anyway, the upshot of the story is that we just laughed at all the women we knew who wouldn't give us a second glance back when we were 21, women didn't marry and "lived with" guys. They were "babe's" back then, but were now lonely in their late 30's. On the other hand, my buddy had all the gorgeous, educated young women he wanted (to date), and they were in their late 20's. (He would have been married forever, but his wife decided to relieve her teens... chased some old boyfrieds, abandoned the family, etc.. This guy was a saint.)
We concluded our discussion by laughing until we put ourselves on the floor (ok, after about 3 beers). These women we grew up with had bought the whole feminist career-free-to-be-me-garbage hook, line, and sinker, while the guys in my generation couldn't find a women who wanted to marry and raise kids. Now that these women were in their late 30's, they were panicing. They realized that they'd given away their best years to dozens of losers, and had little left to offer a "family man". What comes around goes around...
I expect that's still happening today, although, from what I see working with young teens today, young women are much more focused on a future including a family life. Which is good, since my young teenage kids face growing up in the tough world created by these left-wing-sixty-hippies.
That's pretty true biologically. Sex does drive guys emotions and motives. It's the way we're built. However, that's only half the equation. A roommate is not a wife, even if she's a very "accommodating" roommate. You can't make a "home" with a roommate. You need the defined and understood continuity that comes with marriage.
Believe it or not, the best way for a women to corral a reluctant-to-commit guy is to get him involved with kids (niece, nephews, Little League, etc.). He'll either realize what the secret ingredient to "home" is (wive+kids), and want some of that immediately, or he'll flee like a scalded dog. Which is OK, because women shouldn't date scalded dogs.
FReegards...SFS
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