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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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The cause of the discrepancy is almost certainly just the long-observed difference between what men and women consider a 'relationship'. It's the same thing as when your buddy tells you his relationship of three years with a girl "isn't that serious", while she's telling her friends she thinks he's going to propose. In the end, he's posturing to his friends and she's posturing to hers. A woman has an ongoing monogamous relationship with a man, she puts down that she's 'in a relationship'.

In cases such as this, I'd say the crucial difference is that the woman expects the relationship to end in marriage, while the man has no such plans/expectations. Hence the two different sorts of posturing.

Often the man does end up marrying the girl, at least in my experience.

It's the three years. As I said, if he isn't proposing by then, it's never going to happen, which is why women think "yeah, this is serious and heading that way". If you're only together a year and one or the other of you gives the "it's not you, it's me" speech then sure, it wasn't that serious. But longer than that is - or should be - leading to definite committment.

That's why I think the Sexual Revolution was a bad deal for women, no matter how the feminists of the day thought they could take on male sexual values and enjoy the same kind of benefits. The saying about free milk and the cow has value because it's true: why will a man take on the responsibility of marriage if he's getting all the benefits, including romantic, without entering into the institution? The same goes for women, of course, but I do think women still are being socialised with the view that a relationship should lead to marriage.

IMO it's a birth control issue as much as anything. Back in the days of spontaneous unwanted pregnancies, these things were a bit more self-resolving.

Shotgun weddings didn't get their name from the nature of the problem being self-resolving.

The possibility made you put a bit more thought into where you were putting your genitals, especially with the threat of the half-decade go nowhere relationship.

So I think cohabitation has largely replaced marriage, and my own view has long been that if you aren't married within a couple of years of 'getting serious' then it's never going to happen

I think so. One of the things that’s most important for women to realize is “if he wanted to, he would”. This is true for women, too, but men usually encounter it in dating or friendships (ie the archetypal friendzone ‘should I confess my love to my best friend, who is a girl?’ post) while women usually encounter it in either hookup situations where the man doesn’t want to commit at all, or in long term relationships where he doesn’t want to marry.

I think everyone has seen the same man go from entirely relaxed and putting in minimal effort in one relationship to being the consummate gentleman in another (in everything from chores to holding open doors to presents) and the sole difference is that he meets a girl he likes more and doesn’t want to lose. Almost every quality man I’ve met who got married has said that they knew very quickly after they met the girl.

At the same time, I think men naturally waver more about marriage than women and it’s not an awful thing for a man to be concerned about making the wrong decision, as long as he does come to one. But it’s very sad to have friends where you struggle to tell them that it’s not going to be them, especially if they’re really in love.

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