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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. Archived link.
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. 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 in an attempt at finding men who meet modern standards. Both might very well be correct in their observations. But it's clear they are not seeing eye to eye.
Edit:
I said I was not into this topic for the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' dynamic, but I wanted to see why the article got deleted. Turns out our author deleted the article and much of her online presence after it was alleged that she was sending men nudes. Well... I guess she can now better focus on praying for a husband.
There is a certain subtext to the incel thing, in general, which includes a lot of online rightists and people drawn to these movements but also obviously various other groups.
Once a young man knows he is actually attractive to women he mostly wants to play the field, at least for a while.
This is a big difference to young women and I think is something gender warriors on the ‘male’ side often don’t acknowledge. Most much maligned 20-25 year old women would, if a man who was attractive, charismatic, good to them, etc came along, be willing to marry him. If that moment of “I should have sowed my wild oats” comes for women it tends to happen much, much later, in an Eat Pray Love kind of way, after a divorce or bereavement in midlife or a husband who loses interest or something. The number of women in their early or mid 20s I know who were really all about maximizing the amount of casual sex they had with random men is miniscule.
By contrast, once a young man knows he’s attractive enough to sleep with a sizeable number of young women, he usually wants to do so and becomes unwilling to settle down until he’s ’done’ or feels pressure of age or expectation or really wants kids. The exceptions are high school relationships where he never plays the field, situations in which the man ‘settles down’ but cheats the whole time, men who fucked around a lot in high school and college and so have had their fill by their early twenties, and the very and genuinely religious. And, of course, extremely socially anxious men, but they’re not going to approach women anyway.
If a hot 23 year old man suddenly finds himself in a situation where he can (a) marry young to an attractive woman, and be monogamous for the rest of his life or (b) hook up with plenty of attractive women for 7-10 years, he is almost always going to pick option (b). This is also why I made the point last week that men who suddenly become hot in their late 20s or 30s (or 40s) are more likely to cheat because they suddenly find themselves invited to a party they’ve always wanted to attend but never got the invite to.
Hookups are exhausting, genuinely inefficient, and disgusting, even for gigachad. Would it not be so that a smart man realizes there's 100x more sex in a marriage?
Source
Even if you’re a man who likes casual sex with a variety of partners, surely you’d prefer to have like a new fwb every few months as opposed to having one night stand after one stand night? It takes time for two people to get into a good rhythm and learn what feels go for each other, and you’re unlikely to have great sex if you’re doing it with a different person each time.
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