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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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I am basing this off personal experience. When speaking with the women I meet at my university as well as male friends with girlfriends, a few tings very quickly became clear to me.

  1. A majority of the single young women seem to enjoy going out a few times per month and find a new person to have sex with.
  2. The one pushing for a relationship is usually the man. And doing so too early is actually an "ick" for several women. A friends with benefits catching feelings is grounds for ending the relationship.
  3. This ties into the point above, but sleeping around even while dating is absolutely a thing. Even if she is not having sex with the guy she is seeing, she may still have friends with benefits that she is fucking until the relationship becomes official.
  4. There is absolutely an expectation that you can sleep around in your early to mid twenties and only build a family once they are done with studying and partying. It is not uncommon for women to want to extend this part of their lives and postpone family formation for as long as possible. Even those who want to be mothers are in no rush to find a man.

I don't quite understand where the idea that women have a "drive to be in a relationship" comes from. From where I am standing it does not look like young men are manipulating innocent maidens with promises of commitment when they actually just want to fuck. If anything, young women seem somewhat afraid of commitment and tend to prefer the men that are less serious, finding solace in knowing that they won't have to worry about the responsibilities of a relationship.

As far as I can tell, the exceptions from the above consist mostly of women who were in relationships since high school, and women who are largely not interested in dating and romance in the first place (too anxious, focused on studies, etc.). There are also some who clearly prefer long term relationships, but even they tend to sleep around for a bit after a breakup.

drive to be in a relationship

All the previous decades of women complaining that men won't commit to them and getting pissy at the mere suspicion of infidelity?

Men also get pissy when their girlfriends are with another man. Yet the people claiming women have an innate drive to be in a relationship usually do not claim the same for men. The normal implication is that men and women are different in this regard. Besides, if you are going to point at women wanting to be in relationships throughout history, I would point to women being unfaithful throughout history. It's not like women are only into the man they are with at any given time.

The way I see it, men and women want to have sex with people they find attractive, but get jealous when their partner has sex with someone else. The committed relationship is a social construct that enforces norms around these expectations, and lets people know their partner is not with anybody else at the cost of only being with one person at a time. But it is not instinctual. People commit infidelity all the time, and those who don't still have to control themselves in the face of temptation.