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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34396 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.

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.

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