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Notes -
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.
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.
"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.
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