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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.
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.
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
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.
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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:
Or
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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.
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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.
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