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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.

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?