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Absolutely, and this is one of the advantages of a strong family, as it has been historically. If a man knocks up a woman and doesnt do the honorable thing, the womans family has certain duties involving pitchforks and/or shotguns. But an age gap is not a good indicator of lack of commitment, I would argue both historically and currently its the inverse. Even the sour-grapes danger-haired feminists who shriek about such things couch their argument in terms of power imbalances rather than a lack of commitment.
Certainly. I've had some of those in my own family as well and have known others it's happened to. I have a non-blood relative who has been married but separated now from one of my cousin's who's been like an older sister to me all my life. When he got her pregnant a long time ago, her older brothers cornered him one day and he got the violently coerced, "Congratulations, I hear you're marrying my sister," treatment in the bathroom. We haven't seen him since his separation, but we know where he's at. He 100% knows he's a dead man walking if he shows up around our family again.
The girls in our family were always on a much shorter leash and were more controlled than the boys were, and I think it's for good reason to this very day.
The short leash and overprotective brothers thing doesn't seem to work though. It didn't work in your example your cousin still ended up a single mom and it didn't work in among the kids at my high school. The girls end up sneaking around anyway and half end up pregnant out of wedlock. The girls from middle and upper class liberal families whose brothers don't care who they date seem to have much better results. And you might say it's a class thing and sure maybe it is but still that's the half of it I can't imagine a family of respectable doctors and engineers getting together to force some disreputable boy to marry one of their relatives.
Does it work in every case? No. But it worked an overwhelming amount of the time. They're still married to this day and he walks around in fear of retribution. I don't see any logic that gives way to the notion that the situation improves further by a complete withdrawal of that attitude.
Does still married matter if they are separated and your family will beat him if he ever shows his face at Thanksgiving? That doesn't seem like a successful outcome to me. And I don't think that attitude has much effect. Middle class American young women and girls tend not to have family with that attitude and they don't get pregnant out of wedlock or indeed get pregnant much at all anymore.
A lot of lowerclass and working class young women with protective family attitudes like that do end up pregnant out of wedlock because single motherhood is excepted in their social milieu.
To us it does, yes. Catholics are prohibited from divorce. He doesn’t just not show up at the holidays, he doesn’t show up anywhere near the neighborhood. Our friends know the places he likes to go.
Per the tagline by the username. If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t. It’s worked for many people we know because that attitude meant that most of the women in our lives growing up didn’t end up as a feral, serial dater from the get go; like you find in the big cities today. Dating was a serious matter from the very beginning that was usually initiated in small ways between the parties interested but was largely handled through intermediaries.
That model was nowhere near as dysfunctional as the dynamic between people is today by a mile. It’s not even close. Almost every couple I know in my peer group that followed that system (which is to say remained obedient to their parents and peers) is happily married with kids to this very day.
Incidentally the man in question that my older cousin got with, she picked herself. Her brothers didn’t pick him for her.
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Well, the argument being couched that way merely conceals the complaint about a lack of commitment; gynosupremacists feel entitled to male commitment.
"Power imbalance" is the way they legitimize that entitlement, as the power imbalance has favored the woman in any relationship for the past 50 years or so. Compare "eat the rich" (and the people who say it); in both cases, it's just a fight over whose version of entitlement is enforced at gunpoint.
I've always adopted the approach that whether we're talking about employment, gender relations, family, interpersonal interactions, whatever it is, if you want to live and be independent of the group that's your right to do so, but you in turn receive no benefit by your lack of membership in it.
If I and other men are implicitly held to be responsible for how the men around us behave, such that it's our job to keep them in line so women feel comfortable and happy going about their business, then they're in turn obliged to follow men's rules at the end of the day. I can fully understand why a woman wouldn't like to constantly live her life in deference to men, but there's no good alternative around this. The only other way to live is by accepting the risk that your independence makes you fair game for anybody and everybody. If we have to compete and you wind up getting in a fucked up situation, you signed onto this, so don't ask me to have pity for you. Despite what others told you, you knew what you were getting yourself into. Every man understands this in his dealings with other men.
If you're complimentary to me, then I obviously owe you certain rights and privileges in virtue of our obligations to serve out the roles we carry for one another. If you're my equal then you're a competitor to me in all aspects of life and your misfortune and pain is a natural consequence of "losing" in the game of survival we're playing. The fact that you lost isn’t proof of your innocence, all it proves is that you’re weaker than me. Sorry, but that's how it is. Life is full of trade offs.
A lot of what men deal with in life they figure out through difficult experience, trial and error. Life is a catch-22 for us because if I don't go to work, I starve. For women (yes, not all of them), plenty of these choices are optional, such that you don't 'have' to work if you don't want to. Or at least has hard as a man does. Women have options where men often have no choice. So a lot of the bad choices women end up making for themselves are expressions of their desire to engage in that activity; and so they’re there by choice. So when you end up getting "burned," you aren't a "victim," you're simply an idiot.
Sorry, what exactly is the "this" here? Every man understands that they're signing up to compete and potentially get fucked up?
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