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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34402 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.

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.

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.

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