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I know the dating crisis has been done to death on this forum, but I want to talk about it perhaps from a slightly different angle than previous posters; that of the collapse of the ability to make collective decisions/sacrifices. Various self-improvement substackers seem to be populating the majority of my feed these days, and one, Get Better Soon had a post yesterday about how to attract women. Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable. This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family. But we've rapidly gone from a situation in which pretty much everyone, including the ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50% of society could expect to get married, to a world where maybe that will happen to 20% of the population, and most of those people should expect to get divorced. The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
It's not just dating, I kind of see this with everything. We used to be able to take effective collective action as a country. Things like ballooning government debt, government incompetence, rapid urban decay, and breakdown in communities are relatively new phenomena that have popped up in the last twenty to fifty years. Aurelian loves to talk about how much the civil service and government in general have decayed in the UK (and France I think) since the end of the Cold War, and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of the focus on individual outcomes. I'm not sure if he has the causality the right way round, but it seems clear to me that we can no longer really effectively do things as a society. The inability to form lasting romantic and family attachments is only part of that.
I think that most men who are in about the top 80% of male attractiveness could find a girlfriend or wife if sufficiently motivated, even without changing their income or physical appearance. I agree with @2rafa. Much of this is about motivation. Many guys are just content to do things other than seeking out women. Also, some men are holding out for the most desirable women instead of being willing to lower their standards. I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem. The more fun and personable that a man finds the average woman, the more motivated he will feel to go out and interact with women, as opposed to sitting at home. I'm sure that this goes both ways, and many women find themselves far from impressed with the average man's personality.
This. 100% this. I spent many years on dating platforms and saw hundreds and hundreds of young women who were just.... unlikable. Shallow, prideful, promiscuous, and just generally masculine. The number one lie that modern feminism has sold to women is that the male gender role is what defines success: money, strength, ambition, stubbornness, ruthless competitiveness, etc. Men had all of those and that was oppressive and if a woman wants to be successful she needs to have all of those. And women believe this and become strong independent faux-men and don't even try to be good women. To be clear, I think it's acceptable if a woman naturally inherently through her own preferences wants to be ambitious and strong and all that. But that doesn't make her an attractive dating partner, and more importantly we shouldn't have a nation-wide psy-op trying to brainwash young girls into becoming this because they were born too feminine or something. And we shouldn't lie to girls and tell them that masculinity is attractive. If we as a culture openly and honestly told young women what men actually want a lot of them would become more feminine on purpose because they like men and want to be attractive to men.
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her. But now she's not in the pool anymore. This is not a generalizable solution because there aren't enough of them to go around.
I understand wanting to marry a woman who is friendly and feminine. But docile? Not to imply anything about your sexual proclivities, but the only time I see that used as a positive descriptor of a relationship partner is when talking about sexual submissiveness. And wanting your partner to act docile in bed is different from wanting them to be docile in normal life. So I'd like to understand why you list that as a desirable trait in a life partner.
How do I respond without sounding like an asshole....?
It's a combination of things which just make life easier. The positive traits, near-synonyms but not quite, are things like being kind, generous, quiet, agreeable, un-argumentative, untroublemaking. These are almost universally positive traits unless you happen to enjoy arguments and rambunctious trouble-making and think such a person would be boring. I find them to be wonderful traits, some of which I share in common.
The riskier way of putting it, and I caveat this by saying she was already this way when I met her and not beaten or threatened into this, is that I can always get my way. In more wholesome cases this is simply her being indecisive and not having strong preferences, so when we go shopping for food she wants me to choose what we're going to cook that week. Both because she wants me to like, and so that she doesn't have to make up her mind. She'll still veto things that she doesn't like or we've already had recently, but then she wants me to think of something else. When we want to play a game she wants me to decide what we're going to play. Again, when she has a preference she'll speak up, but the majority of time she's just happy if I'm happy so I can do stuff.
In more conflicting scenarios, she's is afraid of conflict and will typically end up backing down given any level of pushback on any idea. Now, she's at a level of submissiveness that's unhealthily too far, we've been working through building her self-confidence and getting her to stand up for herself, both to me and to others. But when push comes to shove I can, at any time I choose, put my foot down and win any argument simply by insisting. Calmly and rationally, I don't have to get mad and threaten, I try really hard not to take advantage of this and only do it when I genuinely think I'm right and my decision will be best for both of us. The only real example I can think of is one time she wanted to get this giant tattoo on her back and I though it looked kind of tacky and gross, and although it's her body I was going to be the one to see it the most often, more often even than her, so I said I didn't like it and she shouldn't get it. While the argument was not pleasant for either of us, she didn't get the tattoo, and I'm still confident that was the right choice for both of us. And, importantly, it's not a recurring argument that keeps coming up with her harassing me about how I won't let her do what she wants or something.
And such scenarios are incredibly rare because we rarely argue in the first place. Because she naturally inherently wants to please me and it makes her happy when I'm happy and make decisions for us. It's just convenient and simple and easy. And she's still a person with preferences, she runs around decorating the house with flowers and animal-shaped pots and dragon figurines. But the docile is about... voluntary hierarchy. I did not ever ask to be put at the top, in charge of the household. I didn't ever even ask or attempt to be there. She does not feel comfortable or safe unless someone is above her to make the important decisions when she gets to stressed out to think clearly, and I comfortably slot into that role. Once there, having a clear and mutually acceptable hierarchy clearly established leads to a lot less ambiguity or conflict that other couples seem to have as both of them jockey for top position. You can't have a Democracy with two equal citizens: someone has to break ties.
Thank you for your in-depth reply. That makes sense.
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You are mostly talking about Big 5 trait agreeableness. There's a good Jordan Peterson lecture about it from before he became politicized. It's convenient for a person's managers, husband (if they're into that), and infants. It's more of a mixed bag for the people possessing it, as you mentioned.
Two highly agreeable people together can be quite annoying. They don't get high quality feedback about each other's preferences, and end up playing guessing games about what the other person wants. They have a bad time raising older children. I can't remember it well enough to find it, but there was a Less Wrong post about how it is actually an onerous imposition to one's host to flaccidly say that whatever they want to do is great, they're totally happy with anything, because this makes more work for the host -- maybe they don't like making a bunch of decisions.
It also encourages people to pursue harmony, intimacy, and compassion, which are real positives. I don’t endorse the “I get whatever I want thing,” but I simply can’t bond with a disagreeable person because I care deeply about fairness and I prefer to resolve conflicts in a way where everyone is heard and cared for. I believe in stating preferences openly, and finding compromise; I’m certainly not interested in docility, but in every kind of human relationship I strongly prefer cooperation and compassion, because we all need it.
I usually think of myself as rather disagreeable, but that does sound like a description an agreeable person would give of themselves. Huh.
Anyway, I would frame the attractiveness of agreeableness as being more about similarity and bonds of affection. I simply don’t like disagreeable people, not because I can’t exploit them (I don’t like exploiting anyone!) but because I feel like I’m constantly being exploited by them, if they even see me as a source of any value, which they usually don’t. I don’t like living like that. I’d rather lay cards on the table and cooperate rather than engage in games of status and one-upmanship.
It’s true that agreeable-agreeable pairings can have their own downsides, but I’ll stack them up against other personality combinations any day, particularly for intimate relationships. Especially if you couple your agreeableness with honesty and forthrightness. Maybe that’s what HEXACO honesty-humility+agreeableness looks like? I don’t know.
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As the child of two undocile people, it’s because in a two-person system with no rank or higher outside authority, such people rip each other apart the moment they have a real, serious conflict. Temperamentally neither is equipped to back down gracefully or elicit sympathy from the other, so the relationship ends up either in prolonged turf war or divorce.
That’s not to say you should be marrying a cocker-spaniel instead of a woman, just that if you find yourself a male born with an undocile temperament (many such cases!) your relationship is going to do a lot better with a laid-back girl than with a spitfire or a girlboss.
The opposite scenario is also true, but proportionally less likely for biological reasons.
On a broader case, I think this extends to a principle that we can encourage women to be assertive OR have a tradition of equal, gender-neutral gender roles, but not both.
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I was under the impression that we do, as a culture, openly and honestly tell young women what men actually want, and the problem was that it currently results in them spitting and going "fuck men then".
Well, "we as a culture" don't ever fully agree on anything. A hundred voices are screaming a hundred different things, and the truth is lost in the noise.
Some people are telling the truth, and some people are not. But these signals are not all received equaly. But collectively, the average socially acceptable advice given by the mainstream media and by middle aged women to their younger colleagues tends to be feminist nonsense. And then a lot of young men, seeking not to give good long term advice but instead to get an easy lay, are giving the advice that they want women who are easy and sleep with them immediately. And the women believe them and become "popular", but nobody wants to marry them and the men get bored and leave. This in turn causes them to doubt advice from men and listen more to the feminists.
The problem isn't quite as simple as men saying what they want and women spitting in their faces. The scenario is older men saying what they want, younger men saying what they want short term and pretending it's long term too, older women who've been burned by this spitting in the faces of both, and then younger women watching this exchange and then eventually following the older women, possibly after getting burned once or twice themselves.
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