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Notes -
Trouble in Paradise
A guilty hobby of mine is to follow up with the trad dating scene. Not so much the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' style, but in a more terminally online way where various trad talking heads air out their honest opinions on substack or X that then turn out to be dirty laundry to the opposite sex.
A part of the draw to this is the fact that outside of explicit gender warriors, a lot of the online right has ceded ground to the idea that traditionalism is the way to fight against the modern gender war. We need forgiveness and to look at the broader picture. 'The opposite sex can not be your adversary', 'we are in an age of strife and suffering' and so on.
That sounds good on paper. What are things like in practice?
A Dating Crisis in the Orthodox Church? A Woman's Perspective.
tl;dr: A Church going Orthodox woman voices a complaint as old as time: The men aren't good enough. They need to step up.
Let's see the results:
Now... This all feels awfully familiar. Hanging a cross over our problems didn't make any of them go away. People who flock to a place that promises solution to their issues, usually have issues to be solved! It's clear that Traditionalism does not neutralize ordinary mating-market dynamics.
Yeah. But great men and women don't need a church to get together, though. That's kind of baked into what makes them great. They also meet and make families living as radical left/liberal/progressives, for example.
It feels as if the Traditionalist sphere did not have many solutions to any problems. The initial thrust of 'we must rally behind the cause!' similar to other slogans like 'workers of the world unite!' sound good to those who buy into the group pathology, who implicitly believe that we could solve every issue if everyone was but sufficiently devoted to the cause. But there's a seeming lack of realism to what the problems actually are and how one can solve them outside of a faith based cultural revolution, which the author of the article proposes:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!
The contradiction here seems clear enough. People who have their stuff together don't need any of this. Confident, socially adept well put together men with good jobs and a vision for the future, as desired by the author, are not going to spend their time wallowing around an Orthodox commune filled with incels being bossed around by babushkas. It's just ridiculous to expect successful well adjusted people to saddle themselves with such things in the modern world. Same goes for well put together women that know how to attract men. The real world operates on a 9-5.
Now, that might definitely be to our overall detriment, but I'd argue that you need to create a community out of your strongest. A key issue with modernity is a lack of real world communities, of course. But a community of needy weaklings is largely what the church has become and it has not made it stronger. And more pertinently, real world communities fall apart in modernity for a variety of reasons. Saying that they would be good to have, which is most likely true, isn't doing much to solve that problem.
This entire thing feels like a giant knot of contradictions and conflicting interests. Much like... nay, exactly like the old gender war. There's a reason why the 'Based Pastors' are doling out "weird" repackaged Red Pill material to try and meet the needs of young men. There's a reason why this woman is regurgitating utopian communalism and anti-red pill platitudes. Both might very well be correct in their observations. But it's clear they are not seeing eye to eye.
26+ is too old for a first-time marriage. In general, they should not be on their second marriage unless their husband died, which is extremely rare these days, so women over 26 marrying should not be an issue in a traditional parish.
The women who are young enough to marry for the first time should seek men between 4 and 10 years older than themselves. Statistics show this produces the best reproductive outcomes and this is what most human societies of the past practiced. That the first item on their complaint list is immaturity tells me they are not doing this.
In other words, the solution is to double-down on traditionalism. A thin gloss of God and chastity is not enough, small age gap, 27 year old bride marriages are simply not traditional. Therefore, they do not work.
Assuming this is correct (and I don't necessarily disagree with you) one can ask why this woman is posting her grievances publicly in the first place. A more traditional approach, if she has some issue to raise, would be to voice it to her husband, father, or other male guardian and let him decide what to do with it.
The wisdom of this approach is evident when looking at this woman's article. It would be better for her to be silent than to publicize this kind of drivel. Because the real problem is not that the highly desirable men she wants are foolishly passing her by in favor of women who are younger; or from more patriarchical cultures; or whatever. Nor is the problem that the mass of recent male converts are autistic losers who just need to take a shower.
The real problem, of course, is the female hypergamy instinct. For the most part, average women are simply not attracted to average men. The bitter truth is that in world where everyone follows traditionalism and pair off monogamously at a young age, a lot of women are going to be disappointed.
To be sure, this issue can be ameliorated by (1) giving men a special path to obtain social status; (2) discouraging women from having contact with the sort of highly desirable men who trigger their hypergamy instincts; and (3) award social status to men and women who get married and stay married. But you can bet that this woman, who is basically just another flavor of feminist, would not be happy about (1) opportunities widely available to men but not women; (2) being discouraged from exposure to popular media and casual dating; or (3) women who failed to marry early being treated as second-class citizens (of course I doubt she has any objection to treating single men as second-class citizens).
I think that in general there is a problem with supposedly traditional women who want to dictate the terms of their traditionalism. Fundamentally, they are no different from feminists who want to be highly paid professionals while still expecting men to pay for first dates.
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It's taking longer and longer for people to launch due to the amount of time in university/finding a graduate job etcetera for most white collar roles. Especially if you're looking to be in position to setup house and make a beeline towards child-rearing. The relationship dynamic of previous eras also had women essentially being unable to operate as solo agents in the world which meant that 'has a job and doesn't beat me' would frequently be enough especially when coupled with no birth control. It's way easier to be a single female circa 2026 so there's less automatic pressure to couple off.
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In the UK the only time the average age at which women married was below 24 was very briefly when the baby boomers came of age, 26 was actually quite close to the average from the 16th century onwards. Or is 1500s England not traditional enough?
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