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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.
It’s interesting that this represents a shift to the historical norm for western societies- courtship was srs bznss for adult men who could support themselves and their families with no outside help, and a woman of indeterminate age but usually early twenties. And generally, that does seem to be the pattern- teenage dating is an artifact of postwar liberal consensus and declining like every other artifact thereof.
The idea that to court a woman you have to be an adult male with the economic means to marry her is pretty normal, actually. It’s deeply engrained in the psyche of humans domesticated by agrarianism. We should expect it to re-emerge over and over again.
The idea that the woman would spend 4-6 years in tertiary education and come into the relationship with $15-50k in debt is a pretty new innovation though. Only about 30 years old, even.
Which is why I think attacking that particular factor might bear fruit, although women will flip out about it.
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it), though, and most urban European women from the high Middle Ages until the first sexual revolution married in their twenties- post conventional college age.
It’s true that those women were generally not spending their time getting certificates in literacy, but in broad strokes it’s nothing unusual.
Right, which is to say that it seems like we're really just borrowing all the factors that put duties/obligations on the male side, whilst systematically dismantling the expectations on the women's side.
Or am I wrong that there was some system in place to confirm virginity on the wedding night during that time? I might be wrong.
In Northern Europe? Just took the girl’s word for it. There were actual incentives often granted for marrying known-not-virgins often as well- most of the high Middle Ages had an indulgence for marrying a prostitute, for example.
There was a custom of high status weddings having witnesses to their consummation. That might be what you’re thinking of. But in Northern Europe girls left the house to work as servants in early adolescence. The Mediterranean(even Christian parts) kept girls at home until marriage in their teens; this was not a Northern European custom.
I appreciate this post. Too many people view the past as something like Saudi Arabia and don't realize how much freedom and independence women had in Northern Europe historically or how late the marriage ages were there. Settling down in your 30s was just what sensible middle class people did to have a good life. Just like going to university or putting money into a 401k today. At least in Northern Europe it wasn't girls getting married at 15 to much older men.
Thé average marriage age for urban women inside the Hajnal line in Northern Europe was much younger than today; it was also not in the teens. Early-mid twenties as opposed to late twenties.
Now marriage in the teens also does not seem to have been seen as sharply negatively as it is today, either- the average age at marriage drops in American colonists, for example, and those were fine, upstanding citizens who happened to have much better economic opportunities much sooner. And while not Saudi Arabia women faced substantial legal disabilities; they worked but there was restrictions on profession, pay might be legally required to be less than male employees, they didn’t have full control of their finances, etc.
Yes I agree with all that. I probably should have been more specific. I just meant that a lot of the talk of teenage brides is not actually trad for Northern Europe.
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