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Not going to disagree.
The 'dirty' secret is that a woman can actually "have it all," bear and raise some kids, enjoy significant amounts of leisure time, and end up with a rewarding, even high-status career if she marries well early on. A guy who can support her while she's at home raising kids, and can give her career a boost when needed, and take her on nice vacations once they're financially established solves this equation entirely.
The extended adolescence thing seems like a particularly nasty trick on women since front-loading their 'fun and games' time is the opposite of their ideal strategy. Do all the leisure stuff up front, then try to get a career going, and ONLY THEN give consideration to marriage and kids? The failure modes for this are numerous.
Of course, the risks of early marriage are significant, if they pick the wrong guy things can blow up and backfire. So its easy to get them too scared to commit to a guy unless they believe they are capable of supporting themselves if he leaves.
But their current dominant strategy hedges against the wrong risk. The pool of 'good' available men is largest in their early 20s, and then will inherently shrink along with their ability to attract said men. And there's no take-backs or do-overs if they miss that boat.
By my own personal observations, if a woman isn't in a stable relationship by approximately age 26, or isn't aggressively working to lock one down at that age, the safe bet is she probably won't get one with a higher value guy, for reasons not even related to "the wall." Its just a combination of her own heightened standards, the shrinking pool of eligible men to choose from, and the general increase in competition from younger girls for said men... AND her fading youthfulness working more against her as time passes.
Exceptions exist. Taylor Swift seems to have done well in the end, but again, the risks of waiting are more severe than they look when you're young and impressionable.
And the risk is genuine, even if it's small. Get married in early 20s, be a housewife and mother, raise the kids, support his career (so he can work those crazy long work weeks to get the promotions and not have to worry about cooking meals, clean clothes, nice house to invite the boss back to for the networking dinner parties, bringing the kids to the doctor, etc.) and then you hit your forties and he trades you in for a newer, younger model and you're left with no independent income of your own, no career, no job history or one that is long out of date, and probably custody of and responsibility for the kids (if they're not adults by then).
Pretty much what happened to Mackenzie Bezos, except the new model wasn't younger, and pretty much the majority opinion on here was "why the hell does this leech expect to extract all that money from her poor husband who grew the fortune while she did nothing" (supporting him by working when he was trying to get Amazon off the ground, then being wife, mother, and homemaker for the rest of the marriage counts as 'nothing').
You see why women would want to be sure they have financial independence?
The institute for family studies has some interesting research showing that states in the US with more alimony have a higher percentage of married women as homemakers and a higher fertility rate within marriage.
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I've always seen that.
But the new equilibrium they find themselves in has undermined that goal entirely.
Meckenzie Bezos is also not the most sympathetic case because she's throwing piles of money around at any charitable cause that she can, its functionally an admission that she doesn't need that money to maintain her lifestyle, she
Most of what I've read has indicated that this was not all that common of an occurrence, and relegated mostly to the upper classes, where a guy might have enough money to get a younger model. Middle/lower class guys hitting their 40s generally weren't finding hot young side pieces either. The lower class version of this was dad going out for cigarettes and never coming back.
I suspect it was a fear overblown by feminist rhetoric and probably caused more damage than it was worth, since the recent research I've read, which seems pretty reliable, pegs neuroticism as the personality factor most likely to result in relationship failure/divorce.
Or to put it bluntly, a partner being irrationally worried about their partner cheating on them or dumping them for a new partner is more likely to kill a relationship, than it is for the partner to actually do those things. Which doesn't mitigate the emotional impact when a partner does cheat, granted.
Turns out women have seemingly been getting more neurotic lately.
So my diagnosis is that women have been conditioned to fear being abandoned by their partner and left without support (a very rational fear in premodern times, less so now), and in that fear they're making decisions to sacrifice their fertility and sexual market value in their earlier years in hopes of gaining economic independence.
But the conditioned fear itself is contributing to them being less suitable for maintaining relationships... which means they're less likely to get a committed partner at all, on top of all the other forces working against them.
It is a point I keep coming back to. EVERY policy change in the past fifty years has favored women and their autonomy. You would EXPECT this to increase their comfort levels, and to increase their willingness to marry, since the risk of being left destitute is functionally nonexistent now. But lo and behold the exact opposite occurs. They're LESS comfortable... and LESS likely to marry. I don't know what you're supposed to do with a group who gets less satisfied the more privileges they're given.
As stated above, THEY ARE HEDGING AGAINST THE WRONG RISK. The risks associated with picking the wrong guy who abandons you in middle age (which can be mitigated!) are significantly smaller than the risks of delaying picking a partner at all.
Or so I argue.
Isn't it obvious? Take away their privileges. They will be happier, and marriage rate will go up. It's win-win.
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Which makes this look like a positive feedback loop. And what you do is you stop responding in the way that perpetuates the loop. Which is why (in a related example) I get frustrated at people suggesting more maternity leave and subsidized childcare for working women and such as a way to increase TFR; the result of that is just the opposite.
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There was supposedly a social program in Singapore called Graduate Mothers with the exact goal of promoting this strategy. It supposedly also happened to be the one policy of Lee Kuan Yew that was a failure, which says a lot about the enormity of this problem.
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From "Fertility" by The Dreaded Jim:
Eh, back in the Good Old Days, women were getting married early and still having babies into their forties. See Queen Victoria: married at twenty-one, first child nine months later, last pregnancy aged thirty-eight, widowed at forty-two. My own mother had her last child aged forty-two, and she only got married in her early thirties.
Yes, it gets harder to get pregnant the longer you put it off, but I have half a notion modern difficulty is due to prolonged use of hormonal birth control. You spend twenty years tricking your body into permanent sterility, you are not going to get it to turn on a sixpence after you decide "okay now baby" and stop the pill for six months.
Seconding this- tradcath women have babies from marriage to menopause. Lots and lots of babies with forty-something mothers. Of course these women mostly had their first baby at twentysomething.
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If you want to be a general's wife you have to marry a lieutenant.
Yep.
A good relationship should indeed accelerate both party's life trajectories. This requires taking a gamble on the other person's capabilities/potential. But its easier to realize said potential when you have a good, complementary partner backing up your efforts, and you theirs.
Discouraging early marriages is probably making younger people seriously poorer than they'd otherwise have been.
It definitely contributes to higher housing prices. Lots of single people living separately will on the margins drive prices up compared to people pairing off and sharing a space at younger ages.
Alas there is some truth to the Redpill adage that women often prefer to wait at the finish line and marry/fuck the winner.
Gets to the point that a young woman should really have some men in her life, father and brothers, ideally, who can make a judgment call on whether a given suitor has the chops to become a general someday.
This is also another consequence of the normalization of extended adolescence. Some proportion of men have always turned out to be bums and louts, everyone was aware of this, but back when people were expected to mature earlier, the matter was usually settled by the age of 25 or so. Today it's entirely possible for a single man to appear to be a good catch on the surface at the age of 25 but turn out to be a lout, a bum, an addict etc. 5-10 years later, so committing to him entails a higher risk.
Not sure I buy that this is a higher risk than before, but I do agree that its difficult for a woman to make that judgment in the critical time when she's deciding to make the commitment.
I do worry that more guys are getting sniped by superstimuli (crypto gambling, Weed & Vidya, Porn) and not even building the prerequisites for a stable life, though.
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It's true, but to be fair to women, this gamble is much higher stakes than for men. If she makes a wrong decision, the consequences for her are worse (in terms of finding a good mate to build a life with). Your last point is critical to making that kind of system work, but the culture generally makes that an uphill climb.
How so? Just from a common perspective I've seen, marriage is a much higher risk for men. If you are successful the woman might still leave you, take the kids, the house, and a huge chunk of your future income. If you are less so, she takes the kid, the car, and a huge chunk of your future income.
As a general rule, women mature earlier but also age faster. In the case of an early marriage, the woman front-loads her investment while the man back-loads it. In other words, in a functioning marriage the wife makes the most of her contribution while she's young and the man does so when he's old. In that sense, OP's assessment is correct.
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For one, men have much greater variation than women: the worst men will mess up your life more than the worst women. That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
For two, after a divorce, a man can more easily start over and find another high quality wife. A single mom with kids may find someone else, but she'll have to limit her expectations of a mate much more than the man does.
Alimony exists and is often unfair, but it does nothing to help women facing the consequences of bad partner choices: he will not pay alimony or child support, and he certainly doesn't have a house to be granted to you.
If the husband is significantly above average, the calculation changes substantially, but most women can't marry men who are significantly above average.
It used to be 75 husbands to 100 wives murdered by their spouse, way more balanced. But now women can just divorce to get their husband's estate, while upwardly mobile husbands have only the kinetic option.
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What does the math look like when you include suicides?
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Oh, so that's how sexuality works.
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