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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. 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.
I see this mostly as a decline of social skills. It’s not that “trad” stuff doesn’t work, in fact, it worked for thousands of years. That doesn’t mean that taking on the trappings of tradition with no social skills or status is going to work. I think there are a fair number of LARPers in orthodox communities simply because they think that joining the most trad church available will solve all their problems when most of their issues are less to do with their church and more to do with themselves. If you are a “traditional adult” you fulfill that role for yourself and learn to act like an adult in that era would be like.
To switch to women for a second, the role of a woman in a traditional family structure is: run the household and raise the kids and so on. In order to do that, you need to become the kind of person who can and will do that. You have to be able to cook a healthy meal (not just nuke a big frozen box of glorp, but an actual dish made of multiple components cooked on a stove). You need to keep a clean house now, and need to be able to handle a budget. You also need to learn to get along with other people and do so even when you don’t agree. That’s what actual traditional females are like. If you’re not that, you can call yourself traditional all day, but you aren’t, it’s kind of a LARP.
American orthodoxy is not trad in that way, however, 19th century Russian peasants did not court in any way that would be recognizable- and probably not in any way that would be approved by- modern American orthodox.
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Orthodox women are usually relatively good at cooking, compared the the average Westerner. If they're serious, they're eating a fasting diet almost a third of the time, so they're always making lentil stew and plant based regional food and whatnot. There are a lot of potlucks, including a lot of fasting potlucks, and also a surprising amount of mandatory homemade bread, for remembering, for celebrating, for certain feast days, for Communion loaves, and so on.
Orthodox families have basically average household expectations. Lower than WASP households on average, and also lower than Orthodox Jewish ones where they have to do na extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year, and keep their foods separate.
They also have basically average expectations of the woman working. The woman should probably work at some point, but preferably not while her babies are still babies. This is true of the wives of priests as well, it's kind of weird for a presbytera without young children about to simply keep house. There's a bit of drama about homeschooling being preferred, but not all the families are actually suited to it in practice, and public schooling is perhaps looked down on a bit. Most of the women work, as women have always worked, and people know that it's a fantasy that they should only work on aesthetic homesteading tasks in an era when that isn't economically valuable, and there are women and mothers who are scientists, teachers, nurses, cashiers, counselors, bankers, and so on. Most Orthodox are a bit less gender essentialist than traditional Protestants.
One of the oddities of Orthodoxy, specifically, is that while they are very serious about their liturgical tradition, they're kind of ambivalent about the kind of American traditionalism that resulted in the trad wife meme.
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