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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.

Aging whore asks her simps if they are happily married, finds out that they would rather pay her for secks than pursue meaningful relationships with their wives.

This is extremely fascinating.

If a “fat acceptance” movement, morbidly obese female tik toker were to ask her audience “to those of you who are living unhealthy skinny lifestyles deprived of food and joy, do you enjoy your joyless horrible boring life?”, and then if the overweight audience responded with “no we hate being skinny being fat is much better!” Would this be a topic of discussion here? I mean other than yo ridicule it?

How many happily married men with consistently growing families down at my local SSPX parish do you think have ever heard of Aella? Do you think my wife’s parents, very clearly happily married for 50 years and still constantly getting annoyingly drunk and cringing us out by acting like horny teenagers have ever heard of Aella?

The fact that anybody pays any mind to these absolutely ridiculous “polls” is embarrassing. It is absolutely no surprise to me, and I don’t think should be a surprise to anyone, that unhappy men are the ones following this person around online and parroting her nonsense.

Lets take it a step further: the poll describes her customers. Perhaps the conclusion is that obsessively following around a prostitute, reading the things she writes, and integrating her understanding of the world into your own, is bad for building healthy relationships. So maybe a recommendation could be: stop reading this e-girls marketing materials, its ruining your marriage in service of her.

A couple months ago, you got dinged for posting a low-effort sneer.

This one is... well, you used a lot more words this time, but it's basically the same post.

I don't know why Aella is your trigger, but whatever, clearly you really don't like her. You are certainly free to criticize her and her polling methodology. But "I think she's a stupid whore, why are you simps talking about her?" is just telling people you don't like the topic of conversation and you want them to stop.

Instead, try just not reading threads that are of no interest to you.

FWIW, I didn't think this was a low-effort sneer, and I thought it was very much relevant and on-topic for what the person brought up. It's the core criticism.