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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.
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 pairs 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.
The actual trad solution was that women were younger than their husbands. It's not hard to impress almost-literal teenagers when you're in your late twenties.
Once again, (western)trad doesn't run on 'boys rule, girls suck it up'. It runs on politically incorrect compromises where young men are the ones that usually get the short end.
I don't know the history of age gaps, but will agree that can play a role. That being said, it surely helps quite a bit if (1) that man in his 20s is a respected member of the community; and (2) that woman is discouraged from having contact with men who are far more desirable than that man in his 20s.
Sure, it runs on boys suck it up; girls suck it up. It's just that modern society sees boys sucking it up as the natural state of affairs; girls sucking it up is oppressive patriarchy.
Well, no. (Actually, I'd argue traditionalism really doesn't "run" on anything so much as it is a mostly-blind adaptation to it. But this is also coming from someone who sees [the kind of person who becomes a] traditionalist and [the kind of person who becomes a] progressive as the exact same thing, in their hearts.)
The problem here has always been economic. Before the advent of the "energy wherever we want it"- hallmark of the early 20th century- that was literal man power. There's a concept called "primary and secondary goods" that explains this pretty well- men extract primary goods (sexual dimorphism gives men an advantage in this area), women turn those primary goods into secondary goods (including children, it's worth noting). The problem, of course, is that while not having secondary goods is bad, not having primary goods is catastrophic. Sociofinancial power, then, is naturally controlled by men.
And so here's where I tap my sign: traditionalism (Abramic religions most famously) simply doesn't have an answer for when [the place men get their power from] is supplanted by technology- except for the null answer which is "turn inwards and die"[1]. And this resulted in two things:
Which is why traditionalism gave way to progressivism, and was also why the 20th century (and especially the first half) was full of alternative answers to one or both of those questions (what that answer actually was depended on the local conditions: communism is a natural fit for places with a low ratio of people to economic opportunity like Russia or China [or the entirety of the Middle Ages- equally worthless is still equal], whereas fascism is natural for places with a high ratio like 1930s Germany). Technology naturally drives this ratio down, which is part of why fascism really isn't a viable answer today while communism remains sympathetic[2].
Those questions still haven't really been resolved, because the winner of that conflict was the only remaining frontier nation (that didn't at the time, and still doesn't, have any productive way to answer this question beyond "be rich lol") that threw resources at the conflict until it vassalized basically the entire world, and if your society has a more productive answer to that question you'll just get invaded. So it goes.
[1] Now, I get that a lot of men really do like this [even some intelligent ones, on occasion]; especially since the Taliban spent 20 years providing an object lesson to the West in just how successful a strategy like that could be, and the fact the largest cities didn't even bother to resist them suggested that Taliban rule was what [the men responsible for holding up the US-led order] wanted all along. Which is a valid assumption, because the US-led order offers literally nothing to men, and if it happened in the continental US many believe that a campaign of white feathers would be ineffective.
[2] Socialism naturally occurs in populations where the variance in ability to extract that economic opportunity, and the variance in that opportunity, is low (for a variety of reasons both internal, like bad land, or external, like being a vassal state of a greater power); liberalism naturally occurs when it is high (great powers not being liberal is historically unusual).
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