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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34401 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Monogamous men in long-term relationships aren't doin too hot

A recent post by Aella goes over some statistics on marriage and relationships with a focus on the male perspective. The results are... pretty awful. It's a well-known fact that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, 70% of which are initiated by women, and that family courts are heavily biased against men. This makes marriage an inherently risky proposition, as people are putting a substantial chunk of their life on the line on what amounts to coinflip odds.

So what about the men who pass that check and remain married? Is it all sunshine and rainbows for all of them? Well, obviously not, as there are common tropes of bitter old couples who argue with each other over tons of small things, and of couples where the passion has long since dissipated but they remain together out of convenience. What proportion of marriages are unfulfilling like this? There hasn't been much research or data on this but Aella reveals that the answer is, unfortunately, most of them.

On the question of "Are you satisfied with your sex life?", men are indeed quite satisfied if they're in relationships that are less than a year old, but the rate of agreement drops precipitously as the relationship progresses. By the time the relationship is 6-8 years old, men flip to being net-unsatisfied with their sex life. It continues getting worse and worse over time, although at a slower rate. For relationships that are 12+ years old, ~53% of men report being unsatisfied with their sex life compared to 41% who are satisfied. More than twice as many men report being severely unsatisfied (13.7%) compared to the number who are strongly satisfied (6%). An unsatisfying sex life has a strong negative correlation with overall relationship satisfaction, and a strong positive correlation to agreeing with statements like ”My partner doesn't excite me” (r=0.47), ”My relationship causes me grief or sorrow” (r=0.44), ”In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea” (r=0.42), and ”My partner judges me” (r=0.31). It also often leads to cheating. By the time relationships are 22 years old, over 40% of men self-report cheating at least once, while over 20% of women report the same.

So for men, opting for marriage seems like an exceedingly bad option because they not only have to pass the 50/50 on whether the marriage collapses into a divorce, but then they also need to hope their relationship remains net-satisfying in the long run when only around 40% do. Modern relationships age like milk and doing the math on the two probabilities (0.5 * 0.4 = 0.2) means marriage only has about a 20% chance of being satisfying in the long-term. To be fair, relationships in history also had to deal with one or both sides becoming unsatisfied, but the lust-focus of modern marriages make them particularly susceptible to problems compared to the more contractual marriages of history.

men are indeed quite satisfied if they're in relationships that are less than a year old

That's the least surprising piece of info I've heard in a while.

Cole_Phelps_doubt.png

In this case and on this particular topic, perhaps more so than any other case in this thread, I feel the need to say "consider the source". This is an obviously a biased sample being presented by someone who by her own admission is pushing an agenda where that agenda is "monogamy is bad". I recognize that there is a school of rationalist thinking where the source of a piece of information doesn't matter, only the true/false value of the information matters, but I think this is folly.

True statements can still be used to deceive.

In this case I think it needs to be pointed out that we are not actually talking about "Monogamous men in long-term relationships" we're talking about "self-identified men who associate with this particular prostitute". The charitable interpretation of this post is that guys are seeking out this prostitute do so in large part because they're not getting it at home. In reply to which I can practically feel my 19th century ancestors reading over my shoulder from beyond the grave, rolling their eyes, and replying "well no shit".

Don’t buy that in its own. You need to compare to the opposite. What’s the sex satisfaction of 40 year old single men?

Aella spam might be what drives me outta here. The mods need to give us word filters.

Minimize the thread and move on. At a glance you will know of it needs the minus button or not.

To be fair, relationships in history

In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.

In short, humans weren't meant for ultra-long relationships. That's a very recent phenomenon. Couples that have 40+ year relationships are extremely rare for good reasons. Typically, the man either has a very low libido or he is seeing prostitutes or has mistresses on the side. Or he has simply learned to suppress his desires to an unnatural extent and come to terms with it.

I don't know why our culture promotes the insane idea that marriages should last forever. It's actively harmful.

  • -24

In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.

This is a misunderstanding of fat tailed distributions. The mean (can't find the median) life expectancy was even worse, but this is because child mortality <5yo approached 30%. I can't find the adult mortality rate in India then (that is, the chances of dying between 15-60) but generally in history those who escaped early childood had a reasonable shot at gray hairs.

However, from evolution's perspective, it's true that the psychology of the female past the early 40s is likely pretty irrelevant. She has raised any offspring past the critical period. Maybe there is some selection effect from her acting as a wise grandmother.

Male psychology, though, remains important until old age. The male "mid life crisis" coincides with his wife's menopause, so you could infer evopsych is working specifically against lifelong monogamy.

EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing

EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing

That's a good thing. If there are five different comments pointing out the same basic, fundamental error that completely invalidates someone's conclusion, that's a sign that this person really messed up in their reasoning. It's like Twitter ratios but in Motte form.

I'll be the even more obnoxious pedant here and point out that the pedants are also wrong.

Mortality rates in the past were much higher at every age. It's not like people who survived past 5 years old went on have modern life spans. There were lots of things to trip them up. Look at the biographies of people in the pre-modern age and its littered with people who died in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.. Very few reached 80 years of age which is the expectation of people living today in the first world who don't have obvious health or lifestyle issues.

Perhaps a person who lived to 5 might have a 50% chance of living to 50 or 60. But certainly not to 70 or 80.

As I recall from the history of great thinkers (so generally people shielded from accidental death or the extravagant diets of the aristocracy) quite a lot died in their 60s. I remember this, because it's around that age when quite a fewer "healthy-living" older people I know would have died if not for modern medicine. For example, my father was never notably ill until he was in his mid-60s.

I hate to be a still more obnoxious pedant, but I don't see anyone here claiming anything about living to the age of 70 or 80. Rather, they have said things like:

Life expectancy at marrying age was usually a lot higher [than 36], even if short by today's standards.

Or

Given relatively young ages at first marriage (often early 20s for eg medieval English peasants), a marriage of 30-40 years was not a bizarre outcome.

That's not true. Average lifespan was low for most of human history due to high infant mortality rates. Life expectancy at marrying age was usually a lot higher, even if short by today's standards. Most people who married stayed married for the long haul.

This isn't the right approach to analyzing median life expectancy, because it overlooks the substantially higher rate of child mortality. In India in 1945, your life expectancy would be much higher than 36 if you survived your first three years of life. Child mortality pulls the mean life expectancy down, but also the median as well.

Upper class elderly are not at all a recent phenomenon. As one toy example, modern US Supreme Court Justices don't live significantly longer lives on average than Supreme Court Justices in the early 1800s.

By the time the relationship is 6-8 years old, men flip to being net-unsatisfied with their sex life.

This sounds like a rediscovery of the seven year itch. I think that people do tend to become dissatisfied after a while in any situation as novelty and excitement wears off. I don't know if men have it particularly worse, married women also seem to be unhappy.

In fact, everyone seems to be unhappy. So unless the cure is polyamory or just having affairs, I don't know what will make people happier about "I'm stuck with only one person to have sex with, and it's not as exciting as it used to be, and I wish I could be grazing on that greener grass on the other side of the fence".

"Show me a hot woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of fucking her."

Things will get tired. What you can imagine you can have will always be greater than what you can actually procure. One has to just live with that fact and begin de-prioritizing sexual variety.

There was about a two-year period in which I was with a woman who was into bringing other people into bed, but I knew it had a built-in but fuzzy expiration date. Kind of dysfunctional and couldn't go on for long.

I think that people do tend to become dissatisfied after a while in any situation as novelty and excitement wears off.

I can understand twenty-somethings in their first long-term relationship having second thoughts, and wondering if they can do better. I can also agree that novelty and excitement inevitably wears off, but I don't see how that necessarily implies dissatisfaction.

I don't know what will make people happier about "I'm stuck with only one person to have sex with, and it's not as exciting as it used to be, and I wish I could be grazing on that greener grass on the other side of the fence".

Shame? Mockery? Psy-ops equal to in strength but opposite in direction to the current ones, which would glorify sticking through tough times, instead of chasing butterflies in your stomach?

I do think as you get older, the range of possibilities shuts down. When you're in your 40s and 50s, there's now a lot of paths you never took and will never get to take, a lot of choices and responsibilities you have made and taken upon yourself. You're getting older, and the range of your future is narrowing bit by bit (another thirty years of life is now less ahead than behind you, much different than being in your 20s). Everyone begins to wonder "Is that it? Is this all I have? Could I have done better? Could I do better?"

Having a fling is one way of reassuring yourself that you're still desirable and capable of spontaneity. 'Familiarity breeds contempt' is a saying for a reason, we get used to what we have and don't find it interesting or valuable anymore, because we expect to have it. Now, if you imbibed the modern notion that "being in love" is the only reason for going into and staying in a relationship, then finding "but I don't feel like I am in love" may persuade you to break things by having a fling or deciding you will leave your spouse and take up with newer version. The views of duty and sticking with something and that indeed change is inevitable and we must deal with that are less popular, because they are so restrictive. Why can't I have it all, what is the good of being someone living in the modern age with all the choices my ancestors could never have, if I'm going to be stuck with "just like your grandparents, you are going to find that the pink fizzy excitement wears off and you are living a companionate relationship instead of one of high passion and excitement every day".

What would psy-ops opposite in direction to the current ones even look like? Divorce makes for easy TV because it's dramatic and I think that's an underrated factor in current psy-ops.

Something like the Stark family in GoT, but with less tragedy is the first thing that comes to my mind.

A recent post by Aella goes over some statistics on marriage and relationships with a focus on the male perspective. The results are... pretty awful. It's a well-known fact that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, 70% of which are initiated by women, and that family courts are heavily biased against men. This makes marriage an inherently risky proposition, as people are putting a substantial chunk of their life on the line on what amounts to coinflip odds.

This does not surprise me at all, although divorce stats are skewed by serial offenders. Also not surprising it's initiated by women given the financial asymmetry at play. For a divorce to be initiated likely means the relationship had gone to shit well before then, so the 50% figure is probably way higher when you include relationships that are bad but not yet terminated in divorce.

Also not surprising it's initiated by women given the financial asymmetry at play

I feel like this is a factor, but I also feel like female sexuality tends to be a lot more 100-0/disgust-driven.

Male disinterest is likely to just fade into apathy in a longer term situation, whilst in my meandering experience women tend to be a whole more driven by 'The Ick' & active aversion of a previous partner when they've finally flipped the switch.

I read your post and was left with the assumption that you were referring to population-level statistics, not a straw poll. The one is pretty emphatically not the other, and pretending it is renders the rest of the discussion moot, in my view.

Why should we believe that any of these statistics hold up at a population level?

Aella has a response to these types of questions here. I don't know how you'd ever get population-level statistics on these types of questions without going through the task of asking every single person.

The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data, not throw away all conclusions totally because they're politically inconvenient (which is what a lot of political partisans like to do). The problem is that research is very thin on these types of questions, so oftentimes there's not a lot of counterdata to respond with. In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".

Well, for one, the statistics I've seen for divorce is that there is a very large class difference. My first result of a Google search was this that says overall only 30% of middle and upper class couples get divorced, 41% of the working class, and 46% of the poor (which also disagree with 50% overall).

Result #3 says the overall divorce rate is 44%. It also notes many professions (including SW devs) have a divorce rate around 20%.

Aella's readers are a very non-representative sample. Perhaps not quite as non-representative as the lobby of a divorce lawyer, but not too much worse, IMO, and yes, selling very skewed data as representative data is worse than NO data, IMO.

In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".

If it makes us draw a false conclusion then yes, it is most certainly worse than no data.

No hedging of the claim seems to be occurring, it isn't "my followers" after all, and the blatant motte and bailey here probably has pushed me out of suspicion and into hostility as it concerns Aella.

The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data,

No it's not. Getting better quality data will cost a lot of money. People have no obligation to spend their hard earned cash, in order to prove a TikTok poll wrong.

Why the criticism of TikTok as a sample source? I'd imagine it's actually less vulnerable to sampling bias than Twitter, being that it's stupidly-popular. Now, granted, I'd use it more as a finger on the pulse of what's popular with the younger demographics, but still.

Why the criticism of TikTok as a sample source? I'd imagine it's actually less vulnerable to sampling bias than Twitter

Damning by faint praise?

Again, it's not perfectly representative of the world or even America, but I'd sure as shit say that something like TikTok or Tumblr can be valuable as a social weathervane. After all, a lot of the social justice stuff was incubated on Tumblr, and look where we are now.

I certainly don't mean that whoever responds has to do/fund the survey themselves, just that they should cite some form of data done by someone else.

Why? What if there isn't any other data done by someone else, the data in question can still be bad and be proven wrong.

How can you prove it wrong if you don't have data?

I mean you can point out the methodology is faulty, in this case the data.

So what you would be doing is finding errors in it's reasoning, the conclusion may be true on its own, doesn't matter.

that is fair, thanks.

Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is extremely fascinating.

If a “fat acceptance” movement, morbidly obese female tik toker were to ask her audience “to those of you who are living unhealthy skinny lifestyles deprived of food and joy, do you enjoy your joyless horrible boring life?”, and then if the overweight audience responded with “no we hate being skinny being fat is much better!” Would this be a topic of discussion here? I mean other than yo ridicule it?

How many happily married men with consistently growing families down at my local SSPX parish do you think have ever heard of Aella? Do you think my wife’s parents, very clearly happily married for 50 years and still constantly getting annoyingly drunk and cringing us out by acting like horny teenagers have ever heard of Aella?

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Lets take it a step further: the poll describes her customers. Perhaps the conclusion is that obsessively following around a prostitute, reading the things she writes, and integrating her understanding of the world into your own, is bad for building healthy relationships. So maybe a recommendation could be: stop reading this e-girls marketing materials, its ruining your marriage in service of her.

A couple months ago, you got dinged for posting a low-effort sneer.

This one is... well, you used a lot more words this time, but it's basically the same post.

I don't know why Aella is your trigger, but whatever, clearly you really don't like her. You are certainly free to criticize her and her polling methodology. But "I think she's a stupid whore, why are you simps talking about her?" is just telling people you don't like the topic of conversation and you want them to stop.

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

FWIW, I didn't think this was a low-effort sneer, and I thought it was very much relevant and on-topic for what the person brought up. It's the core criticism.

Is it basically the same post, though? Same target, still kind of derogatory, but this time it looks like he's actually making arguments.

If I read it correctly, his argument is as follows:

  1. A decent amount of Aella's following is probably due to sex appeal

  2. People who are following people due to sex appeal are probably in worse marriages on average

  3. The people in the polls probably disproportionately consist of people following Aella

  4. Conclusion: the people in Aella's polls probably have worse marriages than average

And then (the step further)

  1. It seems plausible that consuming Aella's content might hurt marriages

  2. The people in her survey seem in kind of a worse state than one would expect

  3. Maybe stay a little further away from Aella if you want a healthy marriage

(Okay, this was presented significantly less after the manner of a syllogism than the first)

This second part seems less well supported, and since it follows the data the opposite way from the first set, it might be hard to disambiguate effects (how can we tell the direction of causation here? How do we even know that there is a difference, aside from anecdata and a priori sorts of things?).

It wasn't exactly the most courteous way of saying things, but there was definitely more substance to this than in the linked post (well, the directly linked one. His further reply had more depth, but wasn't quite saying the same things as this post, if I'm reading it rightly).

FWIW I agree with you

Well, hold on a second: I obviously disagree with this person, their methodology, and even the conclusion from what are in my opinion poorly constructed polling.

But: is it in an insult to call her a whore? Isn't that...her job?

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

This thread, as well as the phenomenon of people it rat-spaces developing this much of a blindspot is incredibly interesting to me, whic is probably why I've responded to both things with similar criticism.

Ymeshukeut or however you spell his username is obviously very critical of any criticism of the 2020 election and has been since when we were still on /r/ssc. Do you make mod posts telling him to just avoid the topic? If not why not?

I was previously "dinged" for being overly concise, so I expanded my point substantially. I understand that you disagree with the conclusion, but I don't think it's fair to imply that it is unacceptable to be critical of this person and her polls.

Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is what you appear to object to. I can restate it as: "a person who sells a product is losing access to the product and has switched to writing about why fans of her product are anti-fans of other products", but that seems...unnecessarily vague.

But: is it in an insult to call her a whore?

Well yeah, that is why you called her a whore. If calling her a whore was not insulting then you would have found some other word.

I think there's the significant point that the job of person making a poll on sexual satisfaction with partners is offering sexual satisfaction as a non-partner. Yes, maybe he could have used another word, but the point was (primarily) to draw attention to that.

This is part of why I think this discussion is interesting, and want to see it happening despite amadans wishes.

This is not an accurate statement of my wishes. I did not shut down the discussion. You are the one who appeared to be trying to shut down the discussion.

You're also free to start a thread about the etymology and ethics of "whore."

What you're not free to do is try to derail the thread every time Aella comes up with a rant about how you don't understand why people are giving the whore attention.

The poll is biased. It is biased due to the profession and stated motivations of the person who conducted the poll, and her audience.

How on EARTH is this not relevant to the discussion?

Discussion about the use of the word “whore” wasnt started by me. The crux of my post was talking about bias and selection. You and the person my deleted post replied to wanted to get into some semantics argument about words.

Maybe start throwing vague threats about what is “allowed” (or perhaps who is allowed criticism) at “goodguy”, or tell him to break his desire to discuss semantics into another thread. I’m trying to talk about polling bias here.

I didn't mod you for calling her a whore. She is a public figure and we don't really have a rule against insulting public figures. On the other hand, we'd prefer people comment more substantively than "This public figure I don't like is a retard/incel/whore." But that in itself wouldn't be modded. It certainly set the tone for your comment, though, which is basically to dunk on your outgroup.

Ymeshukeut or however you spell his username is obviously very critical of any criticism of the 2020 election and has been since when we were still on /r/ssc. Do you make mod posts telling him to just avoid the topic? If not why not?

Because he's not telling other people that it's a stupid topic and only loser simps are still talking about it.

but I don't think it's fair to imply that it is unacceptable to be critical of this person and her polls.

I just said in the post you are replying to that you can criticize her and her polls.

Isn't she a sex worker/former sex worker, though? Whore is a bit of a strong word, but "whorelord" is on her Twitter profile.

I don't have anything against this person, but I guess her following is mostly based on the fact that she's literate and pretty and a libertarian?

Pretty? Lmao she's not even very attractive.

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Setting aside the negative tone and adjectives about this character in the first paragraph, I have to agree on this. Don't understand what's the deal with this Aella person, first time I heard about her was here and then watched a recent podcast. My impression is, this is just a regular girl that escorts and do polls on twitter. Why people care so much. I can't find any other reason than 'simping'.

A lot of women in highly visible positions seem to be very much aligned with the progressive Zeitgeist in regarding rationalist adjacent spaces as *-ists. Aella seems to be an oddity in this regard. I am pretty sure if any other woman even makes a superficial attempt [1] at hearing out rationalist positions, she will build up a similar following of simps.

[1] By superficial attempt I do not mean to say anything about Aella. I don't follow her and don't know anything about her.

She's simply a semi-famous figure in the rationalist community. Even here she's revered a bit, with a moderator describing her as "friend-of-the-motte", despite her never having commented on /r/TheMotte or even registered on here as far as I'm aware. I don't even know of any evidence that she even knows of the existence of this place. Then there are people like Scott Alexander, who describes her as a "national treasure", and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who brags that he can satisfy her because he's immortal.

If I had to wager a guess, she got her notoriety from doing a ton of provocative Twitter polls, because the easiest way to get engagement is to get negative engagement. It's why PETA is infamous and behaves the way they do.

I'm pretty sure she got her notoriety from certain photos with lawn gnomes.

The polling--and the SSC comments, and the pingbacks from other rationalist figures--came later.

Correct. She was the gnome-fucker on reddit before she was anything else.

I'm still not sure why she would be called friend of the motte. That just seems like consensus building. "This is a person we all know and love." Not exactly.

You're right, she was on the podcast. The Bailey Podcast E012: Polyamory (Feat. Aella).

I'll take it. That's close enough for my book.

I honestly took calling her a "friend of the motte" as a joke. At least half a joke. She's brought up a lot, but she's a polarizing figure.

It's an applause light. "Oh cool, I've been told that she's a friend of The Motte! That means she should be trustworthy!" It'd make sense to place her in as much a positive light as possible, because the very next thing in the post is the author attacking the arguments of Aella's debate opponent.

Some of us were raised in a time when a regular girl would never escort, and never ever do polls on twitter.

Maybe being sexually unsatisfied is just normal? Maybe there’s no reason to expect otherwise?

What baseline are we comparing against here? If you polled men in rural England in the 1500s and asked them “Are you satisfied with your sex life?” what sort of responses would you have gotten?

The "statistics" are a straw poll, not a valid sampling of the population as a whole. There's no reason to presume that they are a valid discription of general outcomes.

Seeing things like these almost makes me feel sorry for westerners, ... almost.

My personal upbringing taught me to always treat all women with great respect/guard their honour. I was never interested in sleeping around for instance. Shortly after I entered university one of my fellow countrymen who was a few years above me told me that the Western women around me were for having fun with and were not suitable for marriage. He told me that when I was ready for marriage I should bring over a sweet girl from back home. At the time I found the statement to be offensive towards women and was somewhat indignant, for surely (or so I thought) these women were just like those back home but without a strong social norms to guide them and in the end they all wanted the same thing, but over the years with experience I have come to see the wisdom in his words. Western women really aren't worth much more than having fun with.

The problem here isn't women as a whole, but women infested with western brain rot specifically. And Western men played a big part in letting their society get to such a point.

If that’s the case why are men of your culture such inveterate users of prostitutes?

Care to proactively provide evidence for this inflammatory claim? You have the relevant stats to share?

First I am hearing of this, I would love to see a source showing high prevalence of prostitution. Ideally for high class people back home (our lower classes may as well be a different species to us) but I'll accept general data from anywhere around the world.

There are 3 million prostitutes in India - presumably someone is visiting them.

3 million?

This here says only 600k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_statistics_by_country which is 1/6 of the per capita rate of the US.

Newspapers from India…

https://www.firstpost.com/india/supreme-court-recognises-prostitution-as-profession-what-does-this-mean-for-sex-workers-10726011.html/amp

“While some estimate that there are around 8,00,000 sex workers in India, the actual number could be as high as 20 lakh across the country.”

The Western media like NYTimes says 3 million.

I'm sorry but a "traditional" culture/woman won't save you from a dead bedroom. Evidence? I am from one of those cultures and every kid (other young adults like me) more or less unanimously aggress that their parents never have sex.

The only thing that will save you is if both partners are of solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health.

It's one of those things that sounds good but doesn't work, if there is little mutual want for sex in the beginning like many socially enforced marriages, what hope is there to be sex years down the line?

Given the sizes of families in those traditional cultures, I can guarantee you that married people do in fact have sex in them.

every kid (other young adults like me) more or less unanimously aggress that their parents never have sex.

Were all of you found under cabbage leaves, then? 🤣 I think children - even young adults - may not realise when their parents are having sex. It probably does decline as people get older, but not as much as young people think.

Think of Hamlet in the play - he can't understand why his mother would want to marry his uncle out of reasons of sexual desire, because she's old now, she should be beyond that kind of urge:

You cannot call it love; for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,

And waits upon the judgment: and what judgment

Would step from this to this?

…O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardor gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn

And reason panders will.

I was created in a lab.

My parents seriously don't have sex, but they got other problems so that confounds it. But parents not having sex or there being absolutely no signs of it ever happening seems to be common if not universal belief around me, at least some of that should points to a trend I suppose. Very speculative but no one is really out there counting sex frequency by nationality so sentiments on the ground serves as the closest proxy I can get.

My parents managed to have four kids even though circumstances would appear to have made it very difficult for them to get the opportunities to do so, for various reasons 😁 So I do take "I don't see any signs of my parents sleeping together" with a grain of salt; it depends how old the parents are, how old the kids, etc. As you get older there will be a reduction in libido and a feeling that "yeah I could get wild in bed or I could read my book then have a good night's sleep" and people choosing the book and sleep.

no one is really out there counting sex frequency by nationality

Yes they are. https://www.statista.com/statistics/245194/most-sexually-active-countries-worldwide/

I don't know the veracity of this data but it came up on the first page of google.

120+ times a year?? Yeah, I strongly doubt the veracity that people are out there having sex at a rate of roughly once every 3 days, that too people in relationships where I suppose a majority of the sex would come from.

Your parents are either outliers or are keeping it quiet. Hat tip. Most parents keep it quiet.

Well sure, if I was really trying to draw conclusions I’d look for multiple sources of hard to fake data(marketing data from condom companies and percentage of arrests for prostitution, for example) and try to make it robust enough that the confounders cancel out. But equally clearly there is (probably quite low quality) data out there on sex frequency by nationality.

The only thing that will save you is if both partners are of solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health.

Fair, but western culture significantly reduces the probability someone is of "solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health."

We're often so bombarded with claims of faux xenophobia that when the real thing pops up upon reading you're like ' wait, what? '

As if Chinese, African, and South American subcultures are just ripe with mentally & physically healthy people.

Maybe your small part of the world is doing groovy, or has yet to succumb to the soda, pop & burger bombardment, but that's from a lack of access or (as it reads) you being in the tippy top of your people's (whichever that may be) class hierarchy.

Source?

See how rates of mental health issues are significantly higher in the west than elsewhere. And before you say this is due to underreporting elsewhere notice the dose effect relationship between mental illness and how close you are to the "centre" of it all, e.g. see how liberals are more mentally ill than conservatives, women are more mentally ill than men, see here: https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-liberal-women-under-30-mental-health-condition , urban dwellers are more mentally ill than rurals, people now are more mentally ill than people 10 years ago, people in the Anglosphere are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere, people outside the anoglosphere who speak English are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere who don't etc. (see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-with-mental-or-substance-disorders-by-sex for a graph of mental illness rates for a chart that uses multiple sources/regressions to correct for underdiagnosis). We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.

"centre" of it all

Centre of what? The West? Why is that progressive people in Anglophone cities?

Also, the liberal/conservative and male/female differences in neuroticism are cross-cultural, as far as I know.

We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.

Why not? These reference classes are also correlated with the medicalisation of mental illness... But then again, medicalisation could be due to a dose-response relationship between progressivism and mental illness! Causality of mental illness is VERY complicated and opaque.

Centre of what? The West? Why is that progressive people in Anglophone cities?

Because Anglos absolutely dominate the culture of other western countries. When was the last time you were forced to conform with some bizzare non-Anglo idea?

These reference classes are also correlated with the medicalisation of mental illness

Non-anglos speaking English correlate with medicalization of mental illness more than non-anglos not speaking English?

Because Anglos absolutely dominate the culture of other western countries. When was the last time you were forced to conform with some bizzare non-Anglo idea?

Critical theory and postmodernism are products of France and Germany, and I work in academia, so probably some time today.

However, it's true that Anglos have cultural dominance of progressive media (not so much e.g. what happens in churches) and I think that the fundamental point you are making is conceivable, but nonetheless speculative.

Non-anglos speaking English correlate with medicalization of mental illness more than non-anglos not speaking English?

But your hypothesis is not "speaking English causes mental illness", but rather "being exposed to certain Anglophone ideas causes mental illness." One of these Anglophone ideas is progressivism; another is the contemporary conceptions of depression and anxiety, which may have increased reporting rates.

Interestingly, in the case of schizophrenia (which standards apart from depression and anxiety in many ways, e.g. there's no non-pharma way to effectively treat schizophrenia) rates seem to be similar all over the world, and there is no clear Western/non-Western pattern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_schizophrenia#By_country

More comments

This could just as easily be ‘men who participate in polls run by prostitutes have lower relationship satisfaction’.

One way to find out.

  • This Study had a mean satisfaction of 68.2% (converted from a 1-6 scale). It was higher with "Beginning Families" and lower with "Families with Teenagers".

  • This post says 58% of people have "achieved marital satisfaction".

  • This PhD blog post says "As time went on, relationship satisfaction continued to decrease at about the same rate as overall life satisfaction."

The numbers all appear to be different across the studies, but that's expected. Any way you look at it, it's a substantial fraction of unhappily married people (presumably including some men, because the other studies don't separate by gender.)

These things are super sensitive to the exact question wording so it's pretty hard to draw strong conclusions

But are we talking about "happy sex life" or "all life issues in general" when talking about "marital/relationship satisfaction"? A couple could be having sex every day of the week but be unhappy because she is a spendthrift or he never wants to get involved in organising a birthday party for his mother.

I am yet to see a convincing mechanistic explanation for why "men who participate in polls by prostitutes" confounds with the types of questions Aella asks. Yes, yes I know selection bias yada yada, but you need to have a working explanation of why that specific sample would be bad at answering the question as a representative of the population, the mere fact that they are not representative is not enough, the ways in which they are not representative might not be relevant at all.

Which is what I do think the case is. I think "are you sexually satisfied in your relationship" is a question that goes deep enough into the lizard brain that for the sample of Aellas readers would be different, they would have to be a different species of human!

Also if you are a Bayesian, "bad" (I'm not convinced its bad, it might be weak but I do think there is some signal) data is still better than no data, at least you can update your priors in a certain direction, or prime it to update in that direction.

There is a source of bias here that immediately comes to mind other than Aellas readers. People will be more likely to take time of of their day for a stupid survey if they have a dog in race. Which direction that works in.. I don't know.

Also if you are a Bayesian, "bad" (I'm not convinced its bad, it might be weak but I do think there is some signal) data is still better than no data,

there are like fifty lesswrong posts about how a selected subset of available data, biased by some force with unknown or known motives, is very difficult to "bayesian update". like, if the coin's probability is between .1 and .9 but you're shown a subset of 1000 of 1M flips, how is that better than no data?

(I'm not convinced its bad, it might be weak but I do think there is some signal)

Is doing all the work.

Other than 'bayesian = bad data better than no data' i agree with you, and more generally agree that basically all criticism of aella's data aren't good. I'm not a fan of surveys-as-a-way-to-learn-about-human-nature generally, but her surveys are much better than most other surveys, and will probably surface many 'meaningful correlations'.

It seems pretty obvious to me that men who are unsatisfied with their sex lives are more likely to engage with... anything an autistic prostitute does. I don't claim that there's a good way to adjust for it, but we should probably treat this data as a reasonable upper bound rather than an average.

On average, would men whose wives engage with Aella's content or women whose husbands engage with Aella's content feel more threatened by it? To me it seems obvious that it is the latter. And if so, the sample is inherently biased towards men who don't care what their wives think.

I think "are you sexually satisfied in your relationship" is a question that goes deep enough into the lizard brain that for the sample of Aellas readers would be different, they would have to be a different species of human!

Eh, I think "I'm regularly visiting hookers" already tells us "I'm not sexually satisfied in my relationship". We can then argue over why that is: is the relationship dull and dead, or is he just a pervy horndog who wouldn't be happy even if he married a pornstar, if he couldn't fuck around on the side?

If you asked me to come up with an explanation for the possible bias, I'd say something like this: people reading a sex-adjacent blogger and responding to her polls must be hornier than average. They are more likely to be paired with a less horny spouse than a more horny one, leading to a higher reported rate of dissatisfying sexual life.

They are more likely to be paired with a less horny spouse than a more horny one, leading to a higher reported rate of dissatisfying sexual life.

Being the less horny partner can also lead to dissatisfaction with one's sexual life, so I'm not sure that follows.

How does this work in practice? "My wife keeps initiating sex, and I just can't keep up with her insatiable appetite"?

Exactly so. You can't just roll onto her, waggle about for 30 seconds and be done you know? We're talking at least 20 minutes of high cardio when you have been working all day and finally get to relax and here she is, demanding sex again. Or you had sex an hour ago, but she just watched a sexy episode of love island and is in the mood again. So she starts teasing your soldier until he's ready for action, which he will be before long despite feeling like he's been beaten into a coma, and so spent ejaculation feels like passing a kidney stone.

Also, especially with younger and less experienced couples, sexual prowess can be used as a marker of the health of the relationship, so when one of them feels insecure about the relationship they initiate sex to ensure things are ok. This can turn into a vicious cycle where one partner feels like they are a bag of meat for fucking, which makes their partner insecure, which compels them to initiate sex, which makes the other partner feel like fuckmeat.

Pretty much.

You laugh, but that can be true. Mainly it seems for the less-sexed partner, sex then becomes a chore: they have an amount of sex that satisfies them, but not their partner. Then they have to have sex if they're not in the mood, or else there is nagging and whining and passive-aggressive "well it'll be your own fault if I have an affair" at worst.

Even at best, "I'm having sex not because I want it, but because you want it", even if the less-sexed partner is happy to have sex for the purpose of emotional closeness or making their partner happy, can wear down the more-sexed partner; who likes to feel that they are being selfish and demanding and just using the person they are supposed to care about? If the other person doesn't want sex, does that mean they no longer desire you? Are they getting tired and want out of the relationship?

I am yet to see a convincing mechanistic explanation for why "men who participate in polls by prostitutes" confounds with the types of questions Aella asks. Yes, yes I know selection bias yada yada, but you need to have a working explanation of why that specific sample would be bad at answering the question as a representative of the population, the mere fact that they are not representative is not enough, the ways in which they are not representative might not be relevant at all.

I'm sure tradcons would have an obvious answer to this, and it might not be entirely wrong. (Though I don't know what a reliable poll of the state of long-term relationships among conservative religious folks would show.)

I suspect that reliable polling is fairly rare, but it does seem like religious in the sense of actually practicing people have better life and relationship outcomes in general compared to nonreligious people or religious in the sense of believing in God but only going to church on Christmas and Easter.

See aella's "You don't need a perfectly random sample for useful data, jfc"

Note that the very first thing she does in that link is to warn against doing what the OP did.

But if you have good reasons to think that there's an important selection bias, then you need to take that into account in your updating.

From a lot of random errant 'Me as a single late-twenty something talking to married forty-something coworkers' conversations, I feel like the longterm married/coupled POV can be dissatisfied with their sex lives on account of rather misunderstanding the current moment in singledom.

I've had way too many chats with schlubby 45 year old middle-managers who seem to be convinced that Tinder is a cornucopia of casual sex for everyman and/or that they'd be able to be a 'chad'. Admittedly I've also seen the same play out more than a few times with younger longterm committed friends who've tried opening relationships and/or breaking up with their SOs to sample the market and found themselves deep in the shit.

100%. I honestly think this is one of reasons it's valuable to have some non-monogamous options on the table in a long-term relationship - it helps combat the 'grass is greener' phenomenon if you're occasionally allowed to leave your house and check out the neighbourhood. And generally speaking, these days the neighbourhood is a burning valley of cinder and radioactive ash. Maybe you find an intact tin of beans or something but you're mostly relieved to rush back into your cosy warm home.

I don't even think that's necessarily a good idea.

The vast majority of male-initiated open relationships I seen have turned into absolute clusterfucks when the guy realizes how gigantic the gulf is between his & her access to casual sexual partners.

That sounds like horrible advice, and an extremely cruel thing to do to someone who loves you / you claim to love.

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that one did it without one's partner's knowledge and consent. And of course it won't work for all relationship dynamics. But I think more couples in general could benefit from having (explicit) loose rules around occasional dalliances outside the relationship.

Well, I actually think knowledge and "consent" is likely to be worse than straight up cheating.

I imagine it can work if both parties are honest about it and the understanding is "you just wander off now and again to fuck someone" so long as there are no feelings attached. If it's a regular affair, that could really be a problem. And if you fall in love with new fling and want to divorce - yeah, that's the Jeff Bezos story.

But it does seem to work for some couples - see Alan and Jane Clark. He was a notorious philanderer, she stood by him (mainly by characterising the other women as floozies and sluts, too low-class to be any real threat to her):

In 1958, Clark, aged 30, married 16-year-old (Caroline) Jane, daughter of Colonel Leslie Brindley Bream Beuttler OBE of the Duke of Wellington's Regiment and a descendant on her mother's side of the Scottish ornithologist William Robert Ogilvie-Grant, grandson of the 6th Earl of Seafield. They were married for 41 years and had two sons.

While involved in the Matrix Churchill trial he was cited in a divorce case in South Africa, in which it was revealed he had had affairs with Valerie Harkess, the wife of a South African barrister, and her daughters, Josephine and Alison. After sensationalist tabloid headlines, Clark's wife Jane remarked upon what Clark had called "the coven" with the line: "Well, what do you expect when you sleep with below-stairs types?" She referred to her husband as an "S, H, one, T".

I can imagine it working in a political marriage, or of some other kind of convenience, but how many people here are likely to end up in one? For everyone else, I unironically believe this is one of the cases where it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. If nothing else, don't mindfuck people into "agreeing" to something that's going to hurt them.

If nothing else, don't mindfuck people into "agreeing" to something that's going to hurt them.

Absolutely that. It only ends badly for everyone, because the resentful partner will not tolerate such behaviour for long, and the partner who thinks they'll be swimming in pussy (or male attention, works both ways) may find they've broken up a functioning relationship and still get nothing in return.

As for "forgiveness not permission", I think if you can have flings and keep it secret from your partner and they never, ever, find out about any of them, then it works. But if you have a fling or flings and your partner finds out, they'll be hurt. Even if they forgive you, it'll probably be conditional on "and this never happens again" and if you're having flings because you're unhappy with your sex life, it's more likely than not going to happen again.

So if you promise "never again", continue to have flings, and get caught out the second time, it's all ruined. You're a liar and a cheater, they're leaving you!

And if you're honest about "our sex life is so boring I need this", that's another level of hurt and anger and may wreck the relationship anyway.

So if you promise "never again", continue to have flings, and get caught out the second time, it's all ruined. You're a liar and a cheater, they're leaving you!

I know this isn't what people who are into polyamory are gunning for, but this is exactly why I think it's the better option. Let your significant other have some moral clarity, instead of wrecking their brain with "I agreed to this".

For some people it does seem to work, but that seems to be a subset of "we're weird in various ways anyway". The kind of people who couldn't have a conventional, and successful, relationship. I honestly don't understand what the difference is between "solo poly" and "sleeping around", but hey, I'm not in those circles.

For other people, the default is monogamy and that's why cheating is seen as so destructive. And even if you get your partner to agree (and I see some stories of people who nagged a partner into trying poly or an open relationship or the likes), it may not work out well; one or both of you may be unhappy, one of you may be getting all the new dates and the other gets jealous, one of you falls in love and breaks up the relationship and so on.

It's tough. I think a lot of people go into relationships genuinely intending to be faithful and committed, then after a while when everything is just normal and commonplace routine, they get a wandering eye and want something new and different. I think a lot of affairs happen because people are just stupid (that's being human, we're all stupid at times) and then it gets found out and there is Drama.

If you honestly can't keep it in your (gender-neutral) pants, then be honest with your partner (unless you are so super-organised you can juggle all the balls and never ever get caught out, but honesty is still morally better).

This already happens in some places. In certain places, the overwhelming majority of sex worker clients are married. And a high enough % of men do use sex workers.

There might be utility in it being implicit/explicit or taboo/accepted but this arrangement does seem to be at least somewhat of a stable equilibrium.

It's not infinitely stable, but neither is long-term monogamy if this survey is worth anything at all.

My black pilled theory is that no stable equilibrium exists in terms of mutual sexual fulfillment, it's a privilege if you find yourself in one. https://www.themotte.org/post/411/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/76905?context=8#context

Plenty of things are already happening, and are stable equilibriums, but somehow I don't see people sugggest that it's important to, say, go out and mug someone every once in a while.

I don't think even a fully-fledged non monogamous option is required for that. A bit of flirting with nonpartners here or there might just satiate the urge, after all a lot of the thrill is in the chase and flirting is enjoyable in and of itself even without it culminating in sex.

It does seem like playing with fire though. The people who actually have options will also be the ones who can afford to turn the side option into a main option, and you end up in a worse hellscape than the current one purely pushed by people on the margins making use of the new state of things and those not capable building a defense mechanism for it. Which is why I (hypothetically) think anything more than flirting should still be tabooed.

I'd go further: just don't spend too much time around your woman. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. One of the most awful things about growing up is gradually but inescapably discovering that my parents have an intense sexual relationship, even in their retirements, despite being nerds and squares. The best explanation I have is that they don't spend a lot of time around each other (they have lots of other friends and far more hobbies than they can pursue in a 365-day year) and so there's a spark of excitement when they actually spend time alone. They also had 3 kids and now have grandchildren they like to babysit, which also presumably limited their opportunities to spend time alone.

(And I hope that's the last time I have to think so much about my parents screwing in this thread.)

Companionate love blossoms with spending time together, but for keeping things alive in bed, I would guess that spending plenty of time apart is a good thing. The greatest danger for monogamous sex is the loss of a sense of it being special. For all their squarishness, bordering on puritanism, my parents always tried to impose on me the sense that sex is very, very special, and that the reason why not being promiscuous is important is not that sex isn't important, but that it's one of the most important things that humans can do.

Not only is this not a random sample,* you can't assume that only 40% of marriages are satisfying from data that only 40% are satisfied with the sexual aspect of the marriage, despite the mild correlation you mention. Plenty of relationships end despite the sex being good, after all.

*And her linked discussion re its ostensible value changes nothing.

Yes, this was my primary objection as well. While I am not married, I have previously had long-term girlfriends who were terrible at sex, but whom I was overall net-positive satisfaction on the relationship, because they made up for it in other ways, like never giving me back-talk when I told them to make me a sandwich.

I can certainly believe that this effect would be further enhanced if children were involved. If your wife's given you six darling kids and she continues to diligently feed and clothe them (and you), you're probably going to be very pleased with your marriage even if she doesn't put on her latex dominatrix costume that much any more.

Ah, gender war my old friend we meet again. I am a bit salty that Aella gets such massive sample sizes with so many variables only to give us some paltry plots, I wish she gave these datasets the Kaggle tryhard treatment.

Sexual satisfaction for males probably confounds strongly with The Coolidge effect (medium term) and aging induced decreasing testosterone levels for very long timeframes. I might be exceptionally male brained but it's natural to me that novelty produces the most dopamine etc in the sexual domain, the picture is different in the companionship domain, but strictly sexual, there's not much ambiguity for me.

Nevertheless, I do think the overly gynocentric culture that is giving birth to all the male malaise has a role in what Aella found.

Reading the Longhouse essay brought to mind a number of conversations I've had with male friends over the past few years -- normie middle-class Christian guys who want to do the right thing, but who feel hard-pressed by what you might call "toxic femininity." I am afraid to give specific examples, for fear of inadvertently outing some of these men to those who know them, but let me say simply that what these guys have in common is the feeling that they can do nothing right in their marriages or relationships with other women. (Emphasis mine) I think of one man in particular, a friend who emailed a couple of years ago to say that his wife faulted him for not being strong and decisive, but whenever he was strong and decisive, she laid into him for being bossy and uncaring. All the guys I'm talking about are committed Christians with educations and strong middle-class norms. One of these male friends, a younger guy who follows pop culture a lot more closely than I do, said that women like his wife and her friends are bombarded constantly with "you go, girl" messages in media, trying to convince them that the men in their lives are holding them down and holding them back. Along those lines, a middle-aged pal I see once or twice a year told me last year that most of his wife's close circle of friends had filed for divorce in the past year, for no reason other than that they were bored, and thought life had more to offer

I see a similar line of reasoning in the hivemind (especially femine discourse dominated ones) that leads to the highlighted outcome above. I'm not going to go into some screed but I would be surprised if "the squeeze" doesn't leak into relationships as well, or just stops existing altogether once the contract has been signed.

Here's a theory. Humans are not destined to be happy in relationships, in the same way, they are not destined to be happy in their jobs or whatever. By that, I mean that monogamous pairing doesn't really maximize local surplus, for reasons starting from humans being sexually dimorphic mammals. Similar to how no amount of material gain short of post-scarcity can sidestep the relative status issue.

My theory is that the only monogamous relationships that are sexually fulfilling to both the male and the female in the long term are those in those which the male and female both have very high "SMV". You are still left with sidestepping the Coolidge Effect.

The human flourishing project is a lot harder than it seems.

Here's a theory. Humans are not destined to be happy in relationships, in the same way, they are not destined to be happy in their jobs or whatever.

"Destined" in the sense that it's a natural and expected outcome? No.

Relationships, like jobs, do not in themselves provide happiness and one shouldn't assume that once you have one, happiness and fulfillment will come.

That doesn't mean you can't have a happy relationship or a job you like. But those don't just happen.

Wouldn’t we need to explain why monogamy became standard practice? One sees a fence in a meadow when reading your post.

Monogamous societies reproduced and conquered the neighboring polygamous heathens the next valley/nation/continent over?

But that belies the notion that monogamy is inherently an unnatural outcome. If monogamy out competed (at a societal level) non monogamous communities shouldn’t we ask why?

If monogamy out competed (at a societal level) non monogamous communities shouldn’t we ask why?

"Outcompeted" overstates atelier's hypothesis a bit. Monogamous societies might be better specifically at "projecting military force against the other tribe in the next valley", while being worse at everything else (including "generating happy men and women").

Indeed, it's easy to see how that exact situation might come about: a tribe full of angry, depressed married men who are henpecked by their nagging monogamous wives so much that dicing with death seems like a prospect of sweet release, would indeed seem like they'd be well placed psychologically to mount a "kill the men and kidnap the women" fratricidal attack on a neighbouring tribe. Conversely, a tribe of men and women living in a successful hippie-free-love non-monogamous sexual utopia have better things to do than scheme to kill everyone in the next valley.

a tribe of men and women living in a successful hippie-free-love non-monogamous sexual utopia

Not usually the way polygamy works, that's a man with more than one wife and very strict rules about what the women can and can't do, whereas the man can marry up to the limit of whatever is socially acceptable or how many he can support, plus can visit courtesans, dancers, etc.

Where polygyny is practiced, it's generally "woman marries brothers". There's few to no "free love non-monogamous sexual utopia" where both men and women sleep around with whomever they like and there's no drama.

Take the avatars of Vishnu, Ram and Krishna. Ram is the man of one wife, which is unusual and is all part of his character as the man of ultimate virtues who does not breach social limits. Krishna has eight main wives and 16,100 ceremonial wives, whom he marries after rescuing them from captivity by a demon in order to safeguard their dignity, since living with another man (even if that was not voluntarily) means they are now unmarriageable and would be shunned by their families and society.

Sita, the wife of Rama, is another example of the double standard, if you will. While the kings may have multiple wives, if they so choose, after she is kidnapped by a demon and rescued by Rama, she has to undergo a trial by fire to prove her chastity, and even after returning to their kingdom, social disapproval lingers:

Some versions of the Ramayana describe Sita taking refuge with the fire-god Agni, while Maya Sita, her illusionary double, is kidnapped by the demon-king. ...Ravana took Sita back to his kingdom in Lanka and she was held as a prisoner in one of his palaces. During her captivity for a year in Lanka, Ravana expressed his desire for her; however, Sita refused his advances and struggled to maintain her chastity.

...Sita was finally rescued by Rama, who waged a war to defeat Ravana. Upon rescue, Rama makes Sita undergo a trial by fire to prove her chastity. In some versions of the Ramayana, during this test the fire-god Agni appears in front of Rama and attests to Sita's purity, or hands over to him the real Sita and declares it was Maya Sita who was abducted by Ravana. The Thai version of the Ramayana, however, tells of Sita walking on the fire, of her own accord, to feel clean, as opposed to jumping in it. She is not burnt, and the coals turn to lotuses.

...In the Uttara Kanda, following their return to Ayodhya, Rama was crowned as the king with Sita by his side. While Rama's trust and affection for Sita never wavered, it soon became evident that some people in Ayodhya could not accept Sita's long captivity under Ravana. During Rama's period of rule, an intemperate washerman, while berating his wayward wife, declared that he was "no pusillanimous Rama who would take his wife back after she had lived in the house of another man". The common folk started gossiping about Sita and questioned Ram's decision to make her queen. Rama was extremely distraught on hearing the news, but finally told Lakshmana that as a king, he had to make his citizens pleased and the purity of the queen of Ayodhya has to be above any gossip and rumour. With a heavy heart, he instructed him to take Sita to a forest outside Ayodhya and leave her there.

...Thus Sita was forced into exile a second time. Sita, who was pregnant, was given refuge in the hermitage of Valmiki, where she delivered twin sons named Kusha and Lava. In the hermitage, Sita raised her sons alone, as a single mother. They grew up to be valiant and intelligent and were eventually united with their father. Once she had witnessed the acceptance of her children by Rama, Sita sought final refuge in the arms of her mother Bhūmi. Hearing her plea for release from an unjust world and from a life that had rarely been happy, the Earth dramatically split open; Bhūmi appeared and took Sita away.

Some versions of the story have Sita appealing to Earth to open up and take her away because despite all that has gone before and her second exile, Rama still asks her to undergo yet another public test of her chastity in order to satisfy the people once and for all.

This is noncentral to my argument. The precise internal dynamics of the non-monogamous society(s) are irrelevant; the hypothesis calls only for them to have (a) better mean happiness than Monogamy Land, and (b) worse ability to commit ethnocide than Monogamy Land.

Yeah, but if your premise on "why did monogamy survive and indeed become dominant?" is to be examined, then we have to look at real world polygamous societies, not fantasy versions. I don't believe in the Golden Age Peaceful Matriarchal And Mother Goddess Society crap, as to how patriarchy became dominant, so I don't accept that as a starting point when examining the question. if the matriarchy was so ideal, why did the patriarchy get to replace it? Same with "we all started off with everyone fucking everyone else and nobody made a big deal out of it" for "then the wicked awful monogamists ruined it for everyone". If we look around, we see there isn't "everyone fucking everyone else, nobody cares" but that "men get to fuck who they want, people do care if women fuck without consequences". That seems more likely to segue into monogamy than "no shame, no guilt, polyamorous fucking for all" society.

If we start off with "there is free love equal rights men and women both are able to sleep around nobody cares society" versus "monogamous relationship society", we have to check that against "and does this hold up in the real world?", else we might as well put it down to "aliens made them do it".

In fact, we've now got "free love equal rights men and women both are able to sleep around nobody cares society", do we have better mean happiness than Monogamy Land? The complaints aired on here backed up with "surveys say", would seem to indicate "no".

Raising kids takes long term cooperation and long term resource commitment. Pairing up in twos is an obvious, stable and usually effective way to get this done.

Some societies had a few very rich men with many wifes. If that's just the Emperor of China or King Solomon then their typically monogamous societies still function well for raising children. But if it is common for men to have many wifes then many other men get no wife at all. I don't suppose a surplus male population is good for societal stability.

Yes. But if monogamous relationships are inherently unstable, then why were they historically stable enough to fear kids?

Are monogamous relationships historically inherently unstable? I would have thought not.

I'm sure some married men historically wished they could have more sex. But they consistently successfully raised kids. And even if there is some inherent long-term instability problem with monogamous, many societies historically solved that problem by almost completely forbidding divorce.

Modern society has various issues that I don't think are necessarily inherent. Maybe many people in 2023 are bad at long-term relationships. But not so many people in the year 1500 or 500.

Because local sexual satisfaction is not a terminal value and might even be orthogonal to survival in the type of Darwinian processes culture(s) undergoes throughout History.

Male sexual satisfaction is an infinite pit that one should never set as a goal. See blueberry porn and homosexuals.

Male sexual satisfaction is an infinite pit

That's been my experience, is it common?

Having no idea what this was I googled it.

The blueberry kink is a subgenre of several other kinks: It combines force-feeding, expansion or inflation porn (using air, water, enemas...

So that's a thing. I didn't click the links but a variety of websites offer such porn. I suppose that scene where the mean rich girl blows up like a balloon in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made some people very horny.

I suppose that scene where the mean rich girl blows up like a balloon in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory made some people very horny.

I think that is literally where it all comes from.

To be fair, relationships in history also had to deal with one or both sides becoming unsatisfied, but the lust-focus of modern marriages make them particularly susceptible to problems compared to the more contractual marriages of history.

I'd add that it was typical in the past, for most classes, to keep producing children until at least you had grandchildren. If a marriage is primarily focused on somehow managing to produce a good number of children to survive to adulthood and support you in your old age, then you just don't have much time go worry about whether or not your marriage is satisfying. You're too worried about stopping Little Tommy from dying from tuberculosis.

More recently, the idea that your partner is supposed to be "your best friend" (and for some men, their only close friend) also seems damaging. Expecting one person to be an emotional, sexual, reproductive, and financial principal partner is naturally going to have a high failure rate. Contexts where husbands and wives can hang out with people outside their marriage, without fear of cheating (because they'll be in single-sex spaces) are an underrated feature of most (all?) traditional societies. Bridge-clubs/knitting circles for women and bowling/golfing/etc. for men had an underrated function. AFAICT, my most happily married friends are those who have kept up e.g. dog-walking with their gal-pals or footie games with their mates.

And what about the counterfactual?

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