Relationships and Guilt

[7Wannabe5]

There seems to be a good deal of talk in places where I find myself listening lately about how bad it is for society in general to have too many unhappy, single men in our midst. For me, this raises the question of whether women functioning within modern/post-modern societies should feel guilty if they don't want to get married? Or more functionally expressed, should women regard it as one of their social duties to get married or similar, in order to relieve society of one of the unhappy, single men who may because unhappy/single be more likely to act out in anti-social manner?

I suppose this question could be answered either from semi/Traditional perspective or Tier 2 perspective making free choice to engage in aspects of previous functional perspectives inclusive of the Traditional perspective. I suppose the emotional state associated with the second perspective would be more towards "irony-tinged-sincerity/pragmatic-systems-design" rather than "guilty/should-do-defined-duty."

[AxelHeyst]

For me, this raises the question of whether women functioning within modern/post-modern societies should feel guilty if they don't want to

No.

...should women regard it as one of their social duties to

Also no.

ETA: I also kinda feel like this is inviting the trolls in for tea...

[chenda]

Or more functionally expressed, should women regard it as one of their social duties to get married or similar, in order to relieve society of one of the unhappy, single men who may because unhappy/single be more likely to act out in anti-social manner?

No, although I do have sympathy for the unhappy single men. I think I mentioned these stats in another thread but I genuinely find it utterly astounding how different marriage rates were in the 1970s and how young people were when the got married.

[In England and Wales in 1975] over a quarter (28%) of all women were married by the age of 20, over three quarters (77%) were married by the age of 25, and more than 9 in 10 (91%) were married by the age of 30...The proportion of women who had ever married by the age of 30 first dropped below a half in 2002. It now stands at a third (1 in 3 women) – having fallen from more than 9 in 10 in 1976. And the proportion of men who had ever married by the age of 30 first dropped below a half in 1996 and now stands at just under a quarter (1 in 4 men) – a fall from more than 8 in 10 in 1976.

https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2019/04/01/marr ... -minority/

[7Wannabe5]

I also kinda feel like this is inviting the trolls in for tea...

Not my intention. Just kind of rolling on a guilt vs. shame riff inspired by reading some more Hanzi Freinacht combined with Scott Galloway (whom I generally like) take on the unhappy young men combined with just picked up a copy of Elizabeth Abbott's history of marriage by way of recommendation of her "Haiti: A Shattered Nation."

Hanzi Freinacht is also concerned with unhappy young men (or maybe young people at Level Green/Yellow), but his recommendation is more towards state supported therapy rather than marriage/relationships. Another alternative perspective might be that maybe young men really aren't that unhappy not being in relationships, and this is just another aspect of human lifespan/lifestyle being stretched out to fit. IOW, maybe 29 is just the new 19 in this regard, and once the freezing of human ovum is better mastered/accepted, the gender discrepancy will also decrease. Dunno.

OTOH, it's pretty clear to me that single men around my age (over 55) are pretty unhappy, because that's what they keep telling me, and they do have the highest suicide rate of any demographic group. So, maybe it's the influence or perspective of the unhappy old men that is more the problem to the extent that they reflect it back to the kids as valid?

@chenda:

Yes, it was an entirely different world to the extent that it seems to me that the very definition/concept of "marriage" has fairly profoundly altered over the last 50 years, but just slowly enough that it hasn't yet fully registered.

[Jean]

I don't think you should feel guilty, but you could be worried.
Men only care about society functionning because it allows them to have a happy family. Society wouldn't function without men cooperating. Otoh, women can easily be forced into all sort of arrangement if there are no men to protect their rights.

I think the guilt is there when you kinda know that, but also don't care because you know you won't be suffering the consequence in case it gets worse.

I don't think men should feel entitled to a happy family either. But it would be in everyone interest to help men be what women need them to be to feel safe about commiting with them.

[AxelHeyst]

Men aren't unhappy because they're single. They're single because, among other factors, they're unhappy. Who wants to be partnered with unhappy people? Take this system and intercede by just forcing the single rate down (by e.g. pressuring women to partner up with more of the unhappy single fellows) and you'll have... undesired outcomes. Singleness is a lag metric here, an effect of systemic macro-issues (yes it feedbacks and becomes an input, but I maintain that forcing that number lower is very much not the move here.)

Why men are unhappy isn't much of a mystery, right? For a few generations now men've been told (and observed circumstances that lend credence to the argument) that what they are, fundamentally, is poison in the well of humanity, and that the only question is are they worthy of hatred and fear (if they have power) or contempt and mockery (if they don't). A fun dynamic is that one of the things they're mocked/hated/feared for, emotional incompetence, is reinforced via socialized stigmatism of the very behaviors that would increase their emotional intelligence over time generationally (therapy, vulnerability, talking about their feelings with other men, self-reflection, etc). They're all living in very small boxes (aggression is toxic; also, don't be a pussy) that result in unhappiness, self-hatred, low self-efficacy, and deep internal uncertainty, which manifests in different ways depending on internal wiring and access to the tools necessary to work on it. The data we're seeing now is a function of the internalization of this dynamic over decades rippling through society.

It seems to me (I say this without data) that my generation of dudes, millenials, is the first to begin culturally de-stigmatizing therapy. Give it another couple generations: ships like these take a while to turn.

[IlliniDave]

The assumption here seems to be that single men are unhappy as singles but the even larger number of single women are happy in the same state? Does any epidemiological mental health data back this, or is in anecdotal? Same with whether men men are single because women don't want to marry, or because no women are interested in marrying them specifically. Those are sort of besides the point, just curious.

The answer to the first question pair is no, a woman who does not want to marry should not feel guilty about her choice, nor does she have a duty/obligation to marry.

Since men are more apt to engage in antisocial behavior regardless of their relationship status, I'd hazard a guess that single men are more likely to behave antisocially than single females, but to me it's not clear if their marital status is a driver either way. If I had to guess I'd say being single makes a male more likely to also be antisocial, but I'm not sure which of those is causal, if either are. I know a pretty good number of single men who do not behave antisocially nor do they seem particularly unhappy. I don't know any single men who behave antisocially. I know one single man who seems to be generally unhappy because of that status. Unfortunately for him that makes him try even harder to find a mate which seems to repel them.

[ertyu]

should women regard it as one of their social duties to get married or similar, in order to relieve society of one of the unhappy, single men who may because unhappy/single be more likely to act out in anti-social manner?

We praise economic self-reliance around here, and we insist it's each person's individual responsibility to make life work for them. Why is it suddenly other people's responsibility to bend themselves out of shape to make one's life work relationally? In other words, if one finds oneself unhappy and single, isn't one's social duty to get the therapy and social skills--and physical fitness--they need to become a desirable partner? To me, this is not something that depends on gender.

[7Wannabe5]

I think the guilt is there when you kinda know that, but also don't care because you know you won't be suffering the consequence in case it gets worse.

No, that isn’t my perspective. I have adult kids in their 30s, one male and one female, so I wasn’t surprised with Scott Galloway (male podcaster and very successful businessman who is same age as me, right on cusp of Boomer/GenX, “raging moderate” who frequently writes/speaks about how young men are currently suffering) comment that the members of his audience who are most concerned about current outcomes for young men are their mothers. I’m also just generally intellectually interested in relationship theory.

For a few generations now

It really hasn’t been that long. I mean that wave of feminism was nascent even in my youth, but it was far from main stream. Galloway confirms my notion that men weren’t much influenced by this line of thought in our youth, at least through late 1980s. Men my age likely didn’t receive message about how they ought to alter their behavior until some compulsory employee meeting maybe in the late 90s. I was quite surprised by how typical male behavior had altered between 1988 when I was first married and 2007 when I was divorced and dating again. In simplest terms, I was struck by the fact that men were no longer “making moves” like they did in my youth.

IOW, it is my perception that even older single men who were born too early to receive the sort of negative messaging you outlined are unhappy about the way society is currently structured. For concrete example, they often don’t like the way dating apps work for the same reason young men don’t. IOW, dating apps make older men start feeling like “women are evil when you are unwanted”, just like they do for young men, even if the old guys had personal histories of very successfully getting laid all the time in the late 70s and 80s, and also experienced little difficulty attracting marital partners, and their mid-century mothers always gave them the last piece of chicken.

Scott Galloway suggests that the lack of economic transfer from wealthy older humans to less affluent young humans is a good part of the problem, but I wonder whether something more like Technology->Economics-> Culture is to blame? So, one simple question might be, “Does our current level of technology play/pay well with aggressive tendencies?” I would say that to the extent we have become a “high tech” economy, the answer would be “Sure, not a problem.”, but to the extent that we’ve become primarily a “service” economy, the answer would be, hard “No.”

[7Wannabe5]

but the even larger number of single women are happy in the same state?

It is my understanding that looking at the statistics over the entire population may be misleading. For example, there are definitely more single women than single men in the remaining members of the Silent Generation and Older Boomers, but the opposite is true when you look at Gen Z humans currently between approximately age 13 to 30. According to Galloway, this is because the Gen Z women who want to marry have to marry older men in order to find men who are at or above their economic status ranking. So, we are breaking away from the pattern of peer marriage that existed through much of 20th century.

Galloway’s take on those closer to us in age is that for men 50 is the new 30, but for women 40 is the new 60. I think his perspective is somewhat colored by the fact that as a highly successful male, he had no difficulty dating younger attractive women until he married around age 40, and his highly successful male peer group might still be experiencing similar success at age 60. OTOH, I somewhat agree with his take that 40 is the new 60 for women in the sense that many women my age and quite a bit younger are choosing to “retire” early from marriage or similar relationships. He also describes age 40 as the age women start taking all their vacations with their female friends, and I find that this is somewhat true even for women I know who are still married. These single women are happier than their male peers, because on average they have better social connections and also lower sex drives. It’s pretty easy to just forget about sexual relationships once you are past menopause, especially if your drive wasn’t previously high enough to self-identify as strongly sexual. So, women may now spend the last 40 or even 50 years of their lives in a fairly asexual state in terms of hormones, and there is a limited amount of trouble they might be willing to go to in order to secure steady date for evening musical theater outings.

IOW, I think the problem for younger single women is more that they can’t find appropriate peer partners, but the problem for older single women is more that they no longer want to be in a significant partnership, but there is also some overlap for sure. I have read a couple pretty pathetic memoirs written by older women still semi-desperately hoping to find “the one” on the Internet dating market.

[Jean]

@7w5
My bad, the you wasn't directed at you. It was like on in french or man in german. Maybe one is used in a similar way in english?

[chenda]

I have read a couple pretty pathetic memoirs written by older women still semi-desperately hoping to find “the one” on the Internet dating market.

Yes it's a bit tragic sometimes. I think both genders would be better off approaching marriage more of a business transaction. My great-grandfather remarried a few months after his wife died suddenly, as he needed someone to look after the children whilst he was grafting all day (I don't imagine compassionate leave was much of a thing in those days) New wife had the advantage of been a likely post-menopausal window who probably appreciated the pay cheque and accommodation he provided in return for providing child care. Of course, the dating economy has radically changed in the last 100 years.

I've also noticed a significant change in social dynamic in my lifetime since the rise of online dating. In the early 00s meeting IRL was pretty much the only way to meet anyone (meeting online via nascent messenger services was very taboo and considered dangerous*) By the 2010s the rise of the likes of match.com and later tinder rendered the old social model obsolete.

*As indeed was giving your credit card details to universally dodgy online retail.

[7Wannabe5]

We praise economic self-reliance around here, and we insist it's each person's individual responsibility to make life work for them. Why is it suddenly other people's responsibility to bend themselves out of shape to make one's life work relationally? In other words, if one finds oneself unhappy and single, isn't one's social duty to get the therapy and social skills--and physical fitness--they need to become a desirable partner? To me, this is not something that depends on gender.

Yes, I agree, and to the extent that we continue to live in a liberal market economy, this is what will have to occur regardless of druthers. However, the possibility of drifting towards 20th century North Korean practice of assigning some female "citizens" the job of Comfort Woman does exist at either margin of liberalism. I hope this comment isn't construed as political; just nodding to reality that ERE itself is fairly dependent upon continued existence of fairly liberal market economy. Also, as always (or at least since I read "An Economist Walks Into a Brothel" and also made the acquaintance of a few Girlfriend Experience Escorts), and being that it is also somewhat in alignment with the also less frequently measured Natural Resources Capital, ownership of Erotic Capital is an interesting topic for me to puzzle upon.

Also, it is not at all entirely coincidental that when I went over to visit one of my grouchy old partners last night, I found that he was in a better mood than when I last visited, because he had spent the weekend with two of his old male buddies of his youth. Men seriously need close male friendships, and I don't think a girlfriend/wife or even therapy can serve as substitute. There really hasn't been a stigma assigned to men seeking therapy for at least a couple generations and/or when Tony Soprano first came on the scene. I don't think I have dated very many affluent men my age who haven't been in therapy a time or three, and the most likely somewhat angry message I might text after breaking up with a man in my personal dating pool when he attempts to woo me back would likely be something like "You need anger management therapy." followed perhaps by "Tell it to your other GF/wife." and they seem pretty damn impervious to either of these comments. I think there is a slight stigma against therapy on this forum, but that is largely because it is more expensive than running on a treadmill until you are swamped by endorphins and also less likely to provide secondary aerobic health benefits.

[7Wannabe5]

My bad, the you wasn't directed at you.

No worries, I wasn't offended. Just wanted to clarify.

I think both genders would be better off approaching marriage more of a business transaction.

Yes, I agree given maybe the addition of some level of complexity that would make it maybe more towards Systems-Level-Benefit-Corporation-Contract. However, the big open question is bound to be mission statement. I mean, I did on one occasion date a guy whose first wife was in a psychiatric facility, leaving him with 3 young children running wild on some wooded acreage he owned with only young English-impaired live-in Nanny to supervise them, because he had very challenging job running the whole IT department for a large university. It definitely felt more like a job interview for a position that was mine for the taking, and I was actually very slightly tempted, because "Challenge!" But, it is quite rare that 21st century men have such a huge pragmatic need for a partner. Although, it is quite possible to make contract with an affluent man for a position which is the equivalent of "Keep yourself pretty and arrange the dinner food delivery on the table."

By the 2010s the rise of the likes of match.com and later tinder rendered the old social model obsolete.

Yes, and my preference for the already old school Match model over more Tinder-esque models is huge. I heard or read somewhere recently that there are still a good number of higher quality daters on some of the still more like Match apps, but I haven't investigated. I think spring 2021 was the last time I opened up a dating profile and that was on an app for polyamorous humans which I would not recommend due to infiltration by the-usual-idiot-type-men looking for casual threesomes.

[IlliniDave]

It is my understanding that looking at the statistics over the entire population may be misleading. For example, there are definitely more single women than single men in the remaining members of the Silent Generation and Older Boomers, but the opposite is true when you look at Gen Z humans currently between approximately age 13 to 30. According to Galloway, this is because the Gen Z women who want to marry have to marry older men in order to find men who are at or above their economic status ranking. So, we are breaking away from the pattern of peer marriage that existed through much of 20th century.

Galloway’s take on those closer to us in age is that for men 50 is the new 30, but for women 40 is the new 60. I think his perspective is somewhat colored by the fact that as a highly successful male, he had no difficulty dating younger attractive women until he married around age 40, and his highly successful male peer group might still be experiencing similar success at age 60. OTOH, I somewhat agree with his take that 40 is the new 60 for women in the sense that many women my age and quite a bit younger are choosing to “retire” early from marriage or similar relationships. He also describes age 40 as the age women start taking all their vacations with their female friends, and I find that this is somewhat true even for women I know who are still married. These single women are happier than their male peers, because on average they have better social connections and also lower sex drives. It’s pretty easy to just forget about sexual relationships once you are past menopause, especially if your drive wasn’t previously high enough to self-identify as strongly sexual. So, women may now spend the last 40 or even 50 years of their lives in a fairly asexual state in terms of hormones, and there is a limited amount of trouble they might be willing to go to in order to secure steady date for evening musical theater outings.

IOW, I think the problem for younger single women is more that they can’t find appropriate peer partners, but the problem for older single women is more that they no longer want to be in a significant partnership, but there is also some overlap for sure. I have read a couple pretty pathetic memoirs written by older women still semi-desperately hoping to find “the one” on the Internet dating market.

That's a surprising bit of information. So it's more of a case that youngish men are single because women their age aren't interesting in partnering with them, rather than a large cohort of women who are just uninterested in partnering. If the trend is to seek older men, that's sort of going back to older "norms". I remember when I was looking into Irish genealogy coming across a stat that in the 18th century Irish women married at an average age of 16 and men at 36, in good part driven by the amount of time it took a man in that place and time to to advance in socioeconomic status to the point he could provide for a family. Different dynamics today, of course, maybe now more about social class than the economic portion of it. Maybe I should be hunting around for much younger women!

[7Wannabe5]

Different dynamics today, of course, maybe now more about social class than the economic portion of it. Maybe I should be hunting around for much younger women!

Oh, you certainly could. Based on my experience in relationships where I was the older younger woman (I was over 40 or even 50, but he was another 10 or more years older than me), there are some downsides. The first would be that it is obviously difficult to have a peer partnership relationship with somebody who isn't your age peer. The second would be that it is likely that you might be the partner who is significantly too enamored to the point of googly-eyed idiocy. The third would be that we are living in a period of rapidly increasing cultural change with generation gaps that are becoming shorter and more significant, so dating across an age gap can be very much like dating into an entirely different culture.

Many aspects of our culture, including the format of our educational system, have a tendency towards promoting the model of peer marriage/relationship. So, it can sometimes be the case that very fine-tuned signals can throw this off more than seemingly major incompatibilities. For example, the kind of music you listen to vs. the way that you vote. I semi-consciously sort white guys around my age into Boomer vs. Gen-X based on whether they like rap/hip-hop (and also sort of split the difference with punk.) It doesn't seem like a big deal until you are in the middle of sex and "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" comes up on his playlist, or he tells you that the first concert he went to was Joan Baez. Then you're like is that gray hair or dust I see down there.

Also, the pattern I have seen over and over in my peer group when women leave husbands who are older is an initial willingness to occupy the space made available in his already well-designed lifestyle, eventually followed by a suffocating need to escape. A critical scene in Miranda July's "All Fours" is when the older younger accomplished wife returns from a solo road trip to celebrate 45th birthday, she discovers that one of the very few items she has purchased to decorate the home she shares with her older accomplished husband has been removed from the spot where she placed it and is now in the boot room, clearly on its way to be minimalized out the door in a Goodwill box. Virtually this same series of events has occurred in three divorces of which I am aware in my peer group. IOW, when women attempt to solve the problem of finding a man who is "as much or more" than her as she is already approaching or at midlife herself, it is almost always the case that the "more accomplished" man is far too set in his ways to co-operatively engage in home-making in the manner of the unformed blob of a 22 year old husband you snag when you are just 20 yourself.

[IlliniDave]

Seems like maybe another case of hypernovelty outracing evolution. We're basically a biological meat machine with an evolved brain/operating system on which we can create apps (our evolutionary niche/advantage) to handle novel situations. For a long time that served very well from an evolutionary perspective. In nature. successful rearing of offspring is the prime directive. In a world that changed relatively slowly, we adopted strategies for that purpose, the apps worked reasonably well with the operating system, and the species continued. But it has gotten to a point in the last few centuries where we've begun to change our environment so rapidly both socially and technologically that the evolutionary process is orders of magnitude too slow to keep up.

I think that's the force that drives problems that occur on what you could call a demographic level. People are trying to create and run apps that the underlying operating system isn't optimized to, or maybe can't, handle. Fortunately humans have multiple procreation strategies so likely new humans will keep appearing. But the further we push our pairings away from an offspring rearing enterprise towards a quest for self-fulfillment for each of the parties (often independently) we'll probably continue to see a good chunk of the population operating sort of like zombies in that realm. They try to force themselves to be other than what their operating system-level wiring was made to support, and they get the biological equivalent of the blue screen of death on the romance front. A healthy fraction of people still manage to thrive in the present milieu but many don't. As change accelerates, hopefully that cohort won't grow. And I sometimes wonder if the underlying conflicts are too substantial for a simple "Buck up, Buttercup," or are we creating a world of such fast and profound change our own remarkable adaptation ability will fail.

A lot of those thoughts seem to fit my observation of my daughters, which is why I found it a little surprising that the premise here was youngish men struggling in the present, because I see this aspect of the present from a perspective of observing youngish females struggling to live as singles.

[Western Red Cedar]

There seems to be a good deal of talk in places where I find myself listening lately about how bad it is for society in general to have too many unhappy, single men in our midst. For me, this raises the question of whether women functioning within modern/post-modern societies should feel guilty if they don't want to get married? Or more functionally expressed, should women regard it as one of their social duties to get married or similar, in order to relieve society of one of the unhappy, single men who may because unhappy/single be more likely to act out in anti-social manner?

Any serious intellectual, of whom I would include Scott Galloway, that is talking about this certainly doesn't ascribe a moral duty or a sense of guilt in regards to the increasing numbers of single men. That is more in line with presumptions rooted deeply in the toxic manosphere.

This thread is a little alarming because it seems to combine some documented trends with general social theories and anecdotal observations. Galloway ascribes most of his talking points on the issue of males in contemporary society to Richard Reeves, who started the foundation called The American Institute for Boys and Men because he noticed there was a significant lack of research on the topic, and no specific organizations advocating on behalf of boys and men who were falling behind. It has gotten a lot of traction because anyone who is a parent can observe the emotional and developmental differences between boys and girls in the educational system.

https://aibm.org/who-we-are/richard-v-reeves/

https://aibm.org/why-we-exist/

Galloway typically makes good points in my opinion, but his communication style is a bit like a volcano. He tends to mix in a variety of issues to articulate his larger worldview. Reeves is much more measured and precise in his language, in part because the topic is a tricky one to navigate. Here is a link to some of his interviews and research:

https://richardvreeves.com

In terms of the changes in dating patterns, some of it is a result of the educational and economic stagnation among males that Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway, Jonathon Haidt, and others have been writing/talking about for years. Some of it is also simply related to technological changes, and the impacts technology has on social/cultural expectations and interactions.

I randomly read Modern Romance after finding it in a Little Free Library years ago which got me interested in the topic and touches on a lot of these issues (the rise of dating apps, paradox of choice, communication primarily via text, etc...). It made me extremely grateful to have avoided dating in the era of the smartphone.

[jacob]

In terms of the changes in dating patterns, some of it is a result of the educational and economic stagnation among males that Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway, Jonathon Haidt, and others have been writing/talking about for years. Some of it is also simply related to technological changes, and the impacts technology has on social/cultural expectations and interactions.

In all these dating threads, it's usually pretty clear whether someone got their expectations and relationship values from SD:red, blue, orange, or green. Each vMeme has a set of such values and expectations in terms of what they're looking for and what they think they need to do in order to get it: one for males and one for females. While there is some cross-over between values (e.g. female Green to male Orange and so on), such a fundamental incompatibility makes it all that harder to both hook up as well as sustain a relationship. It's not all about values but much of it is. (Of course there are anecdotal exceptions, but that doesn't help on a societal scale.)

Insofar society is educating more females to the point that more females than males now graduate college, that changes the balance for each color. In particular, the red/blue male to female ratio is changing the fastest because it happens at the tail end at the distribution. However, on the flipside you'll find similar discussions in countries in which Green females struggle to find [Green] males because fewer such have been "developed".

Using values is a more nuanced lens than simple male/female imbalances due to e.g. one-child policies.

The fact that genders drift up the spiral at different rates explain both why "dating is not like the 1980s anymore" and which parts of the demographics are struggling to find a partner. Most people are subject to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect ... "Traditional men" are looking under their streetlight for "traditional women" and not finding enough (because many of those women now spend their early twenties getting educated instead of getting pregnant). Then they complain about women in general instead of looking outside the streetlight. Of course, looking elsewhere means changing one's values and almost everybody is loath to do that even if makes it easier to find a partner.

Jordan Peterson tell the "struggling youngsters" to clean their room and stand up straight. That's a good start. My advice for the next step would be to get themselves to [community] college and study to become a nurse. This will require many of those bros to gore some holy cows [concerning their supposed manliness], but it would almost surely get them laid given the comparably superlative odds. That's not what they're gonna study though. If they're going, they'll be going along with so many other dudes into fields that promises high incomes. These fields in turn will have high male/female ratios and thus continuing lack of success will be almost guaranteed. The main problem young guys have is not that they're ignorant but that they're convinced about a truth that just ain't so.

[7Wannabe5]

But the further we push our pairings away from an offspring rearing enterprise towards a quest for self-fulfillment for each of the parties (often independently)

Yes, I think this is towards how we have been redefining the purpose of marriage without really even bothering to stop for a moment and ponder whether marriage is the appropriate construct for self-fulfillment. My mother is on a bit of a tirade ("Nobody leaves one of my daughters!" My mother's love-language being warfare.), because my youngest sister's husband chose to end their relationship by simply renting another apartment in NYC and moving out of the one they shared. They married when she was almost 40 and he was almost 50, and the marriage lasted 10 years. I keep trying to make the point that her baby-daughter was a 40 year old woman known for "bad boyfriend" style as a criminal defense attorney, not a 16 year old girl cloistered at home with her needlepoint, at the time this contract was formed. And, once lifted more towards her intellectual functioning, my mother wound down her argumentation with "Well, he is missing out on an opportunity for personal growth by not sticking to his commitment.", because this is the perhaps not entirely well-examined truism we have all settled upon at Modern/Post-Modern.

A lot of those thoughts seem to fit my observation of my daughters

Gotcha. I guess my perspective is fairly in alignment with what Scott Galloway and others are communicating, because I observe my son struggling much more than my daughter. One of his guests brought up study that indicated that in most marriages that last 30 years or more one of the spouses was initially much more enamored than the other, and I think my daughter took a significant clue from my less than entirely successful marriage to her attractive "hipster" father and chose a man who is several inches shorter and not nearly as pretty as her although otherwise near peer, and I have been significantly impressed by his efforts towards continuous improvement.

Any serious intellectual, of whom I would include Scott Galloway, that is talking about this certainly doesn't ascribe a moral duty or a sense of guilt in regards to the increasing numbers of single men. That is more in line with presumptions rooted deeply in the toxic manosphere.

Oh, absolutely. Galloway consistently indicates that, for instance, he in no way promotes policy favoring young men at the risk of fracturing young female success. The thought of "guilt" was just my own highly dysfunctional in my tertiary Fe adult-feminine-energy reaction/response due to my son not doing nearly as well as my daughter and also one of my old male partners vibing "I'm ready to die" lately. Also, related to happening upon Hanzi's notion that "guilt" is the primary emotion at Traditional and "shame" is the primary emotion at Modern, and a book review that mentioned Stefan Zweig's great interval between WW1 and WW2 novel "Beware of Pity." It's almost like cheering-up, calming-down, or stopping-from-doing-harm in relationship to the men in my life has been a part-time job for me since the age of 14. And, I am too old and tired to do it anymore. I give up. Lord of the Flies, have at it. Whatever.

Although, I suppose it is also unfair to put this on just the men in my life. I was guest teaching a group of disadvantaged, disabled (mostly autistic), three year old children the other day, and the other guest teacher (age 77) complimented me on how I wasn't "losing it" as she was while dealing with the group. I have this problem of being kind of over-civilized and/or over-feminized to the extent that it is very difficult/unlikely for me to "lose it." Definitely in the category of curse/gift.