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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 sounds like a rediscovery of the seven year itch. I think that people do tend to become dissatisfied after a while in any situation as novelty and excitement wears off. I don't know if men have it particularly worse, married women also seem to be unhappy.
In fact, everyone seems to be unhappy. So unless the cure is polyamory or just having affairs, I don't know what will make people happier about "I'm stuck with only one person to have sex with, and it's not as exciting as it used to be, and I wish I could be grazing on that greener grass on the other side of the fence".
I can understand twenty-somethings in their first long-term relationship having second thoughts, and wondering if they can do better. I can also agree that novelty and excitement inevitably wears off, but I don't see how that necessarily implies dissatisfaction.
Shame? Mockery? Psy-ops equal to in strength but opposite in direction to the current ones, which would glorify sticking through tough times, instead of chasing butterflies in your stomach?
What would psy-ops opposite in direction to the current ones even look like? Divorce makes for easy TV because it's dramatic and I think that's an underrated factor in current psy-ops.
The reply could at least be "yes, and you deserved it". Removing shame is one of the dumbest things western culture has done, IMHO.
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