GreenEggsAndJam
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User ID: 2256
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Standard caveat re replication crisis, bad science reporting, etc.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Even though you claim you didn't mean to reply to this comment, you quoted the question I asked in this comment, not in my original comment.
And it felt like a very obvious attempt at a derail, hence my lack of patience with it. I have, nonetheless, deleted my comment, and we can continue the discussion where you say you intended it to be.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Divorces being initiated by women would support the claim that it's not men who need to be convinced to be married. The benefits I was referring to was married men living longer, reporting higher life satisfaction, etc, than single men (the opposite direction was true of married women)
Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone, and in that case being married/not married is irrelevant, as not being married to the mother of the child you are claiming paternity for doesn't release you from child support payments or grant you more visitation rights.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Right, and viewing crying as a lack of self control and a lack of emotional maturity would be something I'd want to run away from. Someone who lets himself cry is strongly signalling that he does not believe crying is a lack of control and a lack of emotional maturity.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I should have specified further that not only do men remarry more, they also express a desire to remarry more. This could of course be a sour grapes type situation where women claim to not want to remarry because they're aware they'd have difficulty doing so if they wanted it.
In any case, if anyone has statistics about desire for a first marriage among men vs women it would be interesting to see numbers.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
This website (that I found via Google and don't know anything else about, so no clue re reliability) claims childless rate in Israeli Jewish women is only 6.4% (in a sample of women aged 45-60)
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/
That only gets us from 3 to 2.8 or so
But for example if 44% of women have 3 kids, 30% have 2, and the remaining non-childless have 1, we'd get reasonably close to 2.1, while still having 3 kids be the plurality most common number. (in practice I'm cheating since I'm excluding 3+, which obviously also exists although IME is pretty rare in secular circles. Whatever, it's just a general example.)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
But we see that, eg, religious women who are highly educated still have more kids. So there are clearly some things that can at least ameliorate the trend.
(I'm also not entirely convinced the problem is education qua education and not the incredibly delayed entry into adulthood. What I see a lot of is women feeling like they are finally "ready"/at a socially acceptable stage to have kids, and then starting to have kids - ie, wanting to reproduce - and continuing to want to have kids, but running out of time to have more of them. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I see this pattern incredibly frequently, where women describe badly wanting N+1 kids where N is the current number they have, and they'll iterate on this until eventually they have to give up on it because they're too old, their husband is opposed, etc. That's not "women don't want kids", its "women make decisions, especially when young, that aren't conducive to having more kids, and end up bearing the consequence via having fewer kids than they would have otherwise chosen to have")
Anyway. It's not as if we need to get back to fifties level reproduction, nudging things upwards a bit would already help.
(Actually, in that vein, what are the differences between low fertility and extremely low fertility countries? Are there any trends there?)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I agree with all of this comment and hence don't have anything useful to add, except idly wondering if pushing strongly for people to think of dating as barter, not sales, would have any positive effect on the discourse.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I mean, I assume the men and women I know who never, ever cry — my grandfather was noted as having cried a total of three times in his entire adult life, my aunts/uncles do not cry at funerals or weddings— have plenty of emotions. It's nonetheless also obvious they are uncomfortable with expressing said emotions in a lot of contexts, not just crying. The ability and willingness to cry is a symptom of being more emotionally open, not more emotionally feeling.
It's fine for you if you don't cry, it's not like it even would have been a deal breaker for me, given how used to it I already am. But that doesn't change that it's a relief to me that my husband does cry, and that I appreciate that about him.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I simply don't feel that "interesting ways to solve energy output problems from solar cells" can be described as "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing".
If you think that any contemplation of a complex problem is "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing", then sure, a total lack of desire to interact with complex problems is not well correlated with intelligence.
But if people are inclined to "live life and vibe" outside their professional fields + areas of special interest, that doesn't intrinsically reflect on their intelligence.
(I think this whole comment thread kicked off with someone dropping in to say prioritizing a smart mate is important, which I interpreted as a response to my claim that constant in-depth quality discussion turned out to not be nearly as meaningful to me as I'd imagined when I started dating. Hence my initial response resisting conflating the two. I really believe it has much more to do with personality than intelligence)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Any theories as to what would be causing this? Was this just a temporary decline? What I see around me socially is still a strong expectation of a 3 kid family (especially if you're more rural*), perhaps 2 if you're urban and too poor to afford the third (or a single mother by choice, where 2 also seemed to be the default number they all wanted).
*(The same rural/urban split seems to appear - again, by anecdotal observation only - among religious non-haredi families, where 4 or 5 is an acceptable urban amount but sad and small in a rural context. However, there's too much noise coming from
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If you want to have a larger family and "quality family life" you are more likely to move out of the city (ads for rural areas explicitly target this)
-
Zionist religious families strongly tend to be more religious the more rural they are)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Good to know, thanks. It sounded pretty horrifying to me, but I never can gauge what internet stuff about far off places is real or not...
Since I have you here anyway — Is there general expectation of/support for high levels of paternal involvement like I described?
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
So in short: you find the premise of the question inherently flawed, and if given the option to implement a policy but with the requirement that it be even-handed, would have absolutely none to suggest?
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
To me the use of the word love here is a bit abstract.
What would be causes of the love? What would be observable effects of the love? How would the two parties coordinate on knowing whether they love each other or if the word even means the same thing to both of them (or if different meanings, then a difference they can live with)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Do you enter relationships with the intent of finding a long term one, or do you expect to perhaps stumble into a long term one maybe? Is long term commitment a goal or just a possible thing that might one day happen to you?
If the latter, your strategy makes sense to me - have fun now, maybe it'll lead somewhere - but if the former, I don't get why you'd waste time on people who have none of the traits you'd want to commit to.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I think we may be in agreement.
I don't see a barter system as not a marketplace.
A barter system is "how convenient, I can provide X and you can provide Y, what a mutually profitable exchange for both of us", instead of "I can provide X units of value, you can provide Y units of value, of X is greater than Y I have lost". I agree that's a way healthier way to think of relationships, but it's still a kind of transaction, with the goal being both parties feeling they have benefited.
As for quantifiable or not, I guess my impetus for writing this question is in discussions of the "war of the sexes" I constantly get the impression of people struggling to think of the other side as a full agent in a transaction. They'll fall back on complaining that men/women are "shallow" or whatever, whereas to me it makes perfect sense to conceive it as, for example, both sides want a partner who they are sexually attracted to, women want a partner they can trust to provide adequate parental investment in offspring, men want a partner they can rely on for sexual loyalty/paternity, etc. I don't see why this needs to end up turning into an antagonistic market relationship when it could just as easily be a mutually profitable market relationship.
But then, I'm happily married. So my perspective is obviously shaped by the market having "worked" for me. I guess I am trying to understand what makes it so hard to work for others.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
The accountant is assumed to be man because he has a pregnant wife. Unless it's a lesbian whose wife conceived via sperm donor, which is not "assumption of details", it's actively violating Occam's razor.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
I would have thought so, but I get a lot of side-eye for it.
I believe you, I just also find that very strange (and sad, I guess). And if it was your friend who thought it was ugly, would you also be judged for not keeping it? Or is it only your husband's aesthetic opinions you're supposed to ignore?
To be clear, I don't wear things I actively dislike, just things I wouldn't buy for myself - e.g. I get no thrill out of activewear. I own more yoga pants than I need, purely because he has a thing for them. And hey, they're comfortable and practical, so why not? If you buy more, darling, please avoid black and capri lengths.
Oh okay that makes much more sense. (Although I personally love black and capri length 😅)
The women I know often seem anxious that, by taking on more around the house to support their husband's career, or by making sacrifices or compromises in their own aspirations in order to be with someone, they're doing something terribly retrograde.
I think with my husband and I, we simply accepted that at different points in time one or the other of us would be making the bigger sacrifices, but that overall it would balance out. It doesn't seem to me to be realistic to have a family without ever making any sacrifices. Maybe for DINKs it's possible?
In any case it feels really unhealthy to call compromise and balancing each other's needs "degrading", unless only one side is doing all the compromising. Again, I trust you're describing things accurately, it just sounds incredibly sad :(
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
There is definitely policy-level pressure to reduce c-section rates/hospitals proudly citing their low C-section rates/other things going in with the C-section rate aside from younger mothers. And lots of support for VBAC and even for VBA2C
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
It both reduces birth trauma and reduces health risks of further births — once you have a cesarean section it becomes progressively more and more dangerous to get pregnant with each subsequent c-section. (This is why some people try to have vaginal birth after c-sections)
.... In writing this comment, it occurs to me to wonder if this is an underappreciated factor in lower fertility rates in modern times. One reason Israel tries hard to avoid c-sections is because they assume it will be upsetting to mothers to have their fertility curtailed by having them. My understanding from people I know in the states is the attitude towards c-sections is much more cavalier, since it's no big deal it ends up meaning you can't have more than one kid after this. This must obviously have at least some depressing effect on birth rates...
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Specifics. What are you offering? What are you trying to receive?
If not interested in an LTR I guess the question isn't relevant, unless you want to imagine a hypothetical member of each sex and what you'd suggest them to offer and to look for.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
their urge to put makeup and nail polish on me (!) and do my hair,
I've seen girls do this to brothers, especially younger brothers, but I've never seen or heard of this being done to dads. Also don't get why you'd care, just say no. Get them one of those giant groomable barbie heads if they really want.
Do you have unusually long hair? If not, doing your hair wouldn't be appealing anyway.
Girls get plenty of opportunities to practice grooming activities with friends, and don't seem to see fathers as a particularly relevant vector for it anyway.
Can't argue with the teen drama concerns. The stereotype is that girls are much much easier before puberty, less likely to be hyperactive or violent (...I'm talking normal schoolyard violence), and then after puberty the boys hopefully already have some self control and/or people have given up on hoping for it from them, while the girls go mad on hormones for a few years and have tons of power struggles with their parents.
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
Getting rid of a dress my husband doesn't like seems obvious to me.
But wearing a dress he got me that I don't like seems a bit much. Why not just... Tell him what style you like instead? Especially because I'd assume that, for example, the concept is "you'd look hot in red lace" and then I could be like "great, gonna get myself something in red lace but {a different shade of red that doesn't clash with my skin tone/a different cut/whatever}". I mean presumably he's buying the dress to make both of us happy so why would I hide not liking it? Anything he wants I can probably find a way of accommodating that I also like.
If he wants something incredibly specific and irredeemable (I don't know, ten inch leopard print diamond studded stilettos?) Then it would need to be an inside the house only deal, I'm not wearing clothing I feel ugly and uncomfortable in outside the house, he can come up with a counteroffer.
As for the rest, he does all the same for me, I'd be a huge hypocrite to not reciprocate.
(And I do buy him clothing I think he'd look hot in, and he does either wear it or tell me it's not his taste, so I guess not being a hypocrite applies there as well. I also 100% expect him to get rid of clothing I find ugly, unless it's something with sentimental value or whatever. But basically we're obviously getting dressed with our number one target audience being each other...)
GreenEggsAndJam
1yr ago
...So, does she pick her nose in front of you?
(Fwiw my husband's ability to cry from sheer emotion is something I cherish about him, coming from a family that has all the emotional range of a shriveled peanut. He cries whenever he's feeling really deeply and just thinking about it makes my heart go all melty. He's just so emotionally well adjusted and not fucked up and repressed! I thought that kind of thing was a myth!)
Is that true? The research is that men benefit more from marriage and are much, much more likely to remarry if a marriage ends (in death or divorce). I can't find polls for first marriages/singles but I'd be curious how they relate.
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