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I think this is leaving out another viable life path that satisfies all the criteria you're ascribing to women:
Have a kid with a man who has proven wealth/means, then demonstrate his paternity or marry him. Then have a court of law require him to pay for the child's upbringing until age 18. If married then you can get some alimony too out of the divorce. And a bonus there is you can then find another man who might be willing to pitch in some support too and 'double dip'. For some reason the term 'divorce' doesn't appear anywhere in your original post.
And from the man's perspective, either of those is probably a worst case scenario.
Either the man is a cad who doesn't WANT to support kids and is now tied to them for years on end.
Or it was a man who really wanted to have a family for the long term, would have supported them anyway, and yet gets them ripped away on the say of the woman he trusted, with no real recourse.
Woman gets her support and control, man gets...
And we're seeing the emergence of a strange additional option as well:
Pop out a billionaire's kid on the downlow and he pays a very generous amount to keep you and the child in comfort even if he's not particularly involved, as long as he thinks it is actually his kid. I won't pretend this path is all that common, though.
This really goes AGAINST your point here, though:
The 'reproduction thing' seems to come easiest to men who are the least trustworthy, most ruthless, most wealthy, and generally most 'aggressive' about what they want. Yes, some of them can ACT like they're trustworthy, but only as a means to get what they want. And this works about as well as being 'actually' trustworthy.
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark. You'll accept a woman you believe is committed to you, do EVERYTHING you can to prove your commitment, and she can still leave on a comparative whim and hang support obligations around your neck on the way out.
The game theory here is not favorable to being the guy who truly commits, when the risk is the woman has no reciprocal investment and can defect at will, and 'retaliating' against her is legally forbidden.
In short, I think you're arguing as though women shoulder most of the risks in the current romantic equation.
When there's a serious argument that it works the opposite way. Society is built around protecting women from any and all threats.
This includes the threat of homelessness and poverty. Men, generally, foot the bill for all this protection, and yet are also forced to pay out to the particular woman who defects from them on top of that.
And so the man is risking HUGE sums of his personal wealth (bought by his own time, efforts, sweat, etc.) to TRY to keep the woman around.
And men have to offer some extreme value ON TOP of that protection (because the protection is provided as a baseline by society) to acquire a woman's commitment, and even then he has no recourse if she decides she doesn't want to stay anymore. And if he married her, she gets to siphon off resources from him to support herself and her kids ANYWAY.
Leaving out this side of the equation makes your overall argument here more dubious, in my opinion.
(and I will surely admit that women DO risk being severely injured or killed by their partner, but this is strongly mediated by factors that she can also control).
Ha yeah. A good instance of "Should you reverse any advice you hear?"
The struggling young man who finds it plausible that he needs to be more trustworthy to attract women instead needs to dial his perceived trustworthiness down and "toxic masculinity" way up—and to see as examples, "am I fighting for a spot no one wants??!!" or "somewhat cute, non-threatening appearance" from the "guy who likes you but you're not quite attracted to him starterpack."
The modal trustworthy husband and father of two gets deadbedroom'd and is invisible to other women when he's not wearing his wedding ring; a husband and father of two who murders his wife and daughters gets love letters in prison:
Must be bro's elite trustworthiness.
Yup.
I happen to think being trustworthy will in fact help you find a good woman.
But it won't hope you attract women in general.
Which is a necessary step in most cases.
I've realized that the 'cheat code' is buying a motorcycle and getting ostentatious tattoos and at least one (1) subversive piercing. Nips, large gauges in the ears, Prince Albert, I think even nose piercings 'work' for guys these days. Its an old, OLD trick but it still works if you're willing to at least LARP the part.
This signals enough riskiness to get the initial interest going.
Meanwhile, if you're good looking AND you work as hard as you can to be perceived as 'safe' and 'reliable' you're effectively squandering that natural advantage, and you're more likely going to be defected against when she realizes there are no consequences for doing so, you won't even raise your voice to yell at her.
I watched it happen to a buddy of mine. He was the literal pinnacle of 'ideal' hubby. Successful (heir to a large regional chain of interior decor stores, pulling down six figs), charming and witty, even though he's not an Adonis, popular among his friends, takes the wife on trips, indulges her whims, but also makes sure he has time for his own (nerdy) hobbies. Not a pushover, but would never dream of striking or upsetting her. Marries a very mid but definitely cute wife. They have an expensive fairy-tale wedding, honeymoon, etc. etc.
And three years into the marriage, for no reason that I can even decipher, she just up and leaves him, he tries counseling, gives it every single try for reconciliation, and no dice. THANKFULLY it ended up being an 'uncontested' divorce with no kids (despite him being VERY CLEAR up front that he wanted kids, remember that family business he's got).
In an 'ideal' world this should never happen, he played everything 'by the rules.' And still lost.
A good woman, of course, won't do this, but if you're a safe, 'boring' type of guy then you won't have your choice of woman to even try and zero in on the 'good' ones.
If you choose a couple stats to max out, trustworthy probably shouldn't be one of them.
In recent years, I've wondered if this will soon come full circle and being tattoo-less and piercing-less (especially the former) will become the rebellious and subversive thing to do, given their overall saturation and their increasing association with numale-adjacent caricatures. In the MMA realm, for example, I've seen Costa*, Dricus, the Russian Muslim fighters, etc. get confused praise (in the unironically "wtf I love [x]?"-type sentiment) for being tattooless in a sport where tattoos are commonplace, like a "fuck you" to mainstream Western trends and a greater signal of confidence to not hide behind ink. Although if you're a famous MMA fighter, your stats (tattoos or not) are already high.
* Costa actually has at least one tattoo, but it's hard to see so people think of him as tattooless. He's tattooless-passing, I suppose.
The mainstream rejoinder would be that your buddy must had been No True Trustworthy Husband or his wife would never have left him—that he must had become lazy or neglectful after marriage-trapping her, was financially or emotionally abusive behind the scenes, or thought of her as a broodmare for the family business. He's not entitled to her as his wife and she's free to change her mind about children and the marriage after the wedding; YTA for having such a potentially abusive man-child with his nerdy hobbies and faMiLy bUsInEsS as your "buddy."
Yep. But I spent a lot of time hanging out with him in a variety of circumstances and I have not gotten an INKLING that he was anything other than what he presents himself as. Never heard a whisper of an accusation of abuse.
If there was ever a paradigm of the "non-toxic" masculinity that feminists proclaim they want (I know, I know), he was it.
The biggest critique you could level against him is that he is a bit of a manchild when it came to hobbies. But he had his life completely in order otherwise, he was REALLY GOOD at his hobbies (Magic: The Gathering is one of them) and perhaps most importantly: his wife was into nerdy hobbies too!
While they were married his wife went and got her Master's Degree, so I could have ascribed their split to her getting 'overeducated' compared to him. But shortly thereafter Bro went and got his MBA so he was matching her beat for beat.
Learning what happened to them soured my last bit of optimism for forming relationships in the current era. She was a 6 at best, raised in a traditional family, had a relatively low body count (i.e. they met while she was in college, around age 21, so she hadn't had that much time to sleep around), she was a sorority girl (and not the blonde bimbo stereotype), he had tons of money, was willing to spend it on her, no red flags, and while they were together they pretty much presented as having everything they wanted. And it wasn't enough to make it even 4 years into a marriage (they dated for about 2.5 before they got engaged).
My one theory is that she watched a few of her friends go through breakups and complain about their men and got incepted with the idea that either she could do better if she left him (i.e. she married too early) or that he was going to become an abusive monster at some point and she better get out before then.
Sounds like it's a college/no-kids problem to me. Why didn't she want kids with this super financially stable, nice guy? She mustn't have really loved him. Expensive wedding is also a bad sign. Obviously you know more about this matter.
Sometimes you just roll a bad woman, I think she wasn't the right class for him. There's a certain kind of highly educated woman who just wouldn't divorce a nice guy like that due to how unseemly it would be, who acts rationally (aside from more politics/feels stuff), who's well-off but doesn't need an expensive wedding. There are gradations in the upper middleclass where you find such women. On the other hand, these are the kind who'd never settle with anyone with an MBA, the kind who looks down on investment bankers for being too stupid and greedy since everyone in the social circle is assumed to be rich. Rare, perhaps vanished breed.
Problem is she presented mostly green flags.
A lot of anxiety lurking under the surface, but she carried herself well, was active in her Sorority, held down a job, had a decent education background, and close family too.
I spent a lot of time with both of them over Covid times since it was very hard to socialize otherwise and we lived close to each other. I would have judged her as a woman with a "good head on her shoulders" and generally "responsible." Slightly antisocial but was not unpleasant to be around.
She's pushing 30 now, and I have it on very good authority that she spends most of her evenings playing MMOs and other video games, no social life to speak of. Its very much a damn shame. Just never gained maturity?
Its not clear what she was 'fleeing' from in the marriage, other than perhaps the ultimate expectation that they would have kids and raise 'em together.
(Absurd simplification) Oh, so she's [platonically] transgender, got [by that definition] gay married, and it just didn't work out.
She might have been running from (or in this case, devoured by) that thing.
It's very hard to describe what that thing is. People call it "anxiety", but that's just a symptom (or how it manifests) and not the actual problem. I am, related to, and know a higher-than-average number of people like this.
I legitimately think it's related to sociopathy in the sense that predicting and manipulating human outcomes is important, and a skill that we have, but whereas sociopathy typically manifests itself as "I don't care lol, just be as destructive as possible" this is "I actually care a great deal about positive outcomes (and will create them whenever possible) and have an absurdly internal locus of control (and start malfunctioning when this is disrupted for no good reason- these people tend to be political contrarians for that reason too), but the prediction software that returns answers for how other people will react to me is failing to come up with the correct answer".
In technical fields, people call this "burnout". The symptoms are the same and what causes it is... also the same- software people will recognize this as that thing that happens that makes you far more tired than usual if you make no progress on a particular problem for a long time (configuration problems and poor documentation tend to trigger this).
That thing is what happens when that burnout generalizes to human beings when you have that defect that makes you see human beings as indistinguishable from other systems more generally. Everyone else has instincts to deal with this, or doesn't deal with it as hard because the volume is turned down, but we don't.
I don't have a solution for that thing other than "find other people who are also afflicted with [or understand/have a lot of trust in people who exhibit] that thing, then stick close to them". That is likely no longer an option in this case.
I think I know what you're talking about, and I, too, have seen it more often than I'd like.
People get some deep sense of unease or a feeling of 'impending doom' that doesn't seem to be caused by any one factor in their life. They feel tired and 'stuck' and feel like IF ONLY they could figure out what the cause was they could finally break through and be happy.
And so they start to assume its because of their job, or their location, or their significant other. SOMETHING that is omnipresent in their life, just as the feelings are.
Couple it with some existential "What am I doing with my life/where am I going?" angst.
I saw something similar with me Ex. She would pick up a new hobby or distraction or obsession and, like clockwork, abandon it without hesitation at about the six month mark.
Any given thing she took up, unless external factors forced the issue, she'd eventually just stop doing it when it became too stressful or difficult and she would then zero in on a new thing to try.
And of course eventually ditched me, too.
Tend to agree that it manifests in people who have an internal locus of control, but very bad model of other people. They THINK they can enact the changes that need to happen, and they aren't really considering the impact on others when they do it.
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