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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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if the often claimed "they settle down with the beta" afterwards happens, they still get a partner.

People grow and learn important skills from relayionships. Imagine a world where most men don't have relationships in their 20s, while most women do. Outside of being a crappy experience for those men, even if those men do start to partner in their 30s, they will be developmentally stunted compared to their paired partners and will know less what they want of a partner, leading to lots of frustrations and outcries of manchildhood. That's a strictly worse world than one where people are coming into relationships on an equal footing.

And that's not considering the possibility that the quality of men in their 30s will be made lower by lack of relationships in their 20s than they otherwise would have been, either by dropping out of society or falling into the incel rabbit hole.

People grow and learn important skills from relationships

... doesn't arranged marriage / getting married quickly for children have this same problem? The main issue is still that 'poly / few men many women' isn't an accurate representation of dating for most of the population, and won't be in the future, at a guess.

doesn't arranged marriage / getting married quickly for children have this same problem?

They do, and that's a socially recognized failure mode for those mating styles.

I agree that the typical life cycle pattern for relationships is currently something like "a comparatively short period of serial dating followed by monogamy." Particularly in the lower age groups, though, the (low quality) statistics we do have suggest the beginnings of another trend. It's something society should devote resources to publicly tracking so that we at least know the state of the world.