I think my understanding of "settling" is different from how it seems to often be used in these conversations, which seem to employ it to mean "being with someone with lower educational status/fewer markers of social success." In conversations with fellow single early-30s/late-20s women, "settling" has meant not-really-feeling-deeply-in-love-with-your-boyfriend-but-not-seeing-much-else-out-there. In those scenarios, the settled-for boyfriend often is educationally/financially/socially successful--those are the traits being settled for, in lieu of a strong emotional connection. I'm not saying there aren't status- and money-focused single women out there, but that isn't what's keeping the ones I know single. And I'm not convinced it's possible to socially engineer a society away from love marriages once it's transitioned from arranged/survival marriages.
One of the takeaways from Rob's essay is that meeting all the right demographic criteria is not a guarantee of happiness (which I so suppose is somewhat obvious).
To your point about settling, there's a real-life murder mystery surrounding the death of Dan Markel, a Harvard-educated law professor. In a nutshell, there was a very ugly divorce/custody dispute with his lawyer ex-wife, resulting in Markel's in-laws hiring hit men to murder him. (The mystery is the extent of knowledge and complicity of his ex-wife; to date, only the mother-in-law and brother-in-law have been charged).
Anyhow, after Markel's murder, his wife openly admitted that she didn't really love him but married him because he checked the right boxes: college-educated, professional/managerial class, would make a good dad and in this case, Jewish.
That is a fascinating case. Still, I'd point out that LOTS of people make the "checked the right boxes" post-game analysis when they get divorced. Or even when they stay not-completely-happily married.
I think the very idea of “choosing a romantic partner” is suspect. It casts people as external evaluators of their relationships rather than participants in them. The implied framework is “selection from a menu of options”. Real-world relationships don’t work that way. They are the product of many small decisions (your own and the other person’s) rather than one big decision to “select” or “not select”.
Henderson was advocating that we invest as much time and energy into building a relationship as we do building a career. But you are quite correct that unlike careers, relationships involve a lot of irrational feelings and emotions. (We've all heard the rhetorical question: "Why do brilliant people - usually women- at the top of their profession make such boneheaded decisions in dating/marriage?" Algorithms can only take you so far.
Feelings and emotions are why we form relationships in the first place. The belief that relationships can be meaningfully analyzed as “rational decisions” based on “objective criteria” and “comparing mate value” is itself a sentimental fantasy, ironically enough.
Specifically, it responds to the sentimental desire for a difficult and unpredictable aspect of the human experience to “make sense” at some deeper fundamental level
He and you are right imo. I made plenty of bad choices until I decided to really invest some time and energy into figuring out (1) why were the previous people wrong (2) what sort of person would be better suited for me (3) what’s a short list of must haves and deal breakers.
I think you are onto something about building/nurturing/creating love relationships.
One way I think about it is to think about how the ego. What brings two people together may be "instinct" i.e. erotic desire, but what keeps us together is the melting away of one's ego or pride, or sense of isolation. This is created by a commitment to accept the other as they are, and vice versa; to create a history together that creates growth together. I think a large problem for the educated elite women has been this mantra of "a woman does not need a man" and the belief in the existence of a "patriarchy" that works against them. These are toxic beliefs that bear rotten fruit, with becomes even greater when such woman want children. They can't seem to square the circle.
The data belies that story a bit. More educated women are more likely to be married, right up to the PHD level. There’s a dated cliche that professional and educational success threatens marital prospects for women, but the trend over the last few decades has been the opposite: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-most-educated-women-are-the-most-likely-to-be-married/
I don't know about that last point, conservative religious cultures just have a higher birth rate and stickier intergenerational ideological retention. But I suppose the inexorable consequences of actuarial tables across deep time is different from social engineering.
The question isn’t “why aren’t people finding emotional connections”, it’s “why aren’t people building emotional connections”. The framing of “matching”, like Henderson’s framing of “choosing”, obscures the dynamic and participatory nature of relationships. It implies a world of people-with-static-characteristics (“wiring”) who need to be matched correctly with other people-with-static-characteristics. That is how online dating algorithms work, but it’s not how actual embodied relationships work.
What you’re calling dynamic and participatory I would characterize as being relatively advanced stages of something that starts with hardwired, instinctive behavior.
I disagree. Relationships are dynamic and participatory from the very beginning. Whether a couple has a second date or not is dependent on their considered choices, which they bear responsibility for. Unless you’re making a broader philosophical argument that free will is an illusion and all our behavior is hardwired and instinctive, in which case advanced stages of relationships wouldn’t be any different.
I would agree with the broader argument that there isn’t a real free will, but I would also say that there is a subjective distinction between what seems to be volitional and what isn’t, and if you don’t have an instinctive, irrational attraction to someone, the kind of thinking that your frontal lobe does is not going to override that. But some people try. I suspect that trying is the source of many problems, and certainly I had to learn that the intellectual framework that I constructed around relationships and sexuality as a teenager simply does not match my actual sexuality.
Sure, but isn’t there a big gap between the claim that the first spark of sexual attraction is instinctive, and the claim that emotional connection is instinctive? I don’t think the latter is true. Emotional connections (with friends, family, and partners alike) involve an instinctive aspect, but also require deliberate choices to build and maintain over time. Romantic partnerships are created, not found. The common language about “finding a partner” obscures this reality.
Here you speak of women being "propagandized into hating men" and wiring for sexuality. Below you spoke of women indoctrinated with gender ideology.
I don't know what kind of social spaces you've been in but my question is - what percentage of the natal female population believes in these extreme SJW concepts (whether sincerely held or mouthed as virtue-signaling platitude)?
I'd be shocked if more than 15-20% of adult women who are NOT currently enrolled in a college/graduate school have any knowledge of this insanity. I'm thinking that the vast majority are normies who wouldn't recognize Judith Butler or Julie Bindel if they jumped on the hood of their car in broad daylight.
My own anecdata is that for 7 years I've been working in Pharma R&D operations, which is heavily female (65-70 percent). I don't hear women talking like this, even the millennials. I suppose if I attended the NYC Media Professionals convention I would hear otherwise?
While the 1990s media had fun with Carville and Matalin l, the truth was much more mundane. Carville was not a far left identittarian and Matalin is not a right wing nut job.
Sure, and while I have a generally blackpilled view of these issues in the big picture, I’m actually relatively optimistic on a personal level because human diversity allows for those sorts of things.
I think maybe it’s a generational issue. I don’t think most people know much about academic feminist theory or anything, but the number of people who have bought into some bad ideas is quite high in my experience. I just casually walk through DC and hear things about how “I can’t believe they’re excluding non-binary people from this women’s event; the whole point of being inclusive is just to exclude men”. Which is why I qualify myself by saying that my bias is that I’m probably around a lot of the most decadent parts of our society.
But even if I asked just the average woman I meet, for example, do they believe that there’s a gender pay gap, I think most of them will say yes. Obama said it. It’s obvious nonsense, but people believe it, and it leads to a conspiratorial mindset. The number of women who think that men are somehow secretly oppressing them is quite high. And it certainly bears relevance to the question. How can you have a real relationship with your oppressor? The whole thing becomes an apologia for all sorts of terrible behavior, and to me, any such belief is a non-starter for any sort of relationship.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that men married to women who identify as feminists actually have higher marital satisfaction on average, but I can’t find it now.
I remember reading that the word feminist should be retired because it doesn’t mean anything, and that was something like 20 years ago.
I mean, some people would say that a feminist is someone who thinks that the little Sarah Haiders of the world should be allowed to read, which I agree with unless she says something I don’t like.
There are any number of other confounders that might explain a finding like that, even if it is true on its face.
It still seems like the sort of thing that could be measured empirically, especially if the effects of gender feminism, woke ideology, or what have you are as dire for relationships as you suggest. It should show up somewhere in data on marital satisfaction, even if “feminist identification” isn’t the best way to isolate the views you see as toxic. I’d be curious to see any data on it.
As as an art-college-educated white woman with a dad who went to college and a mom who didn't, I don't think white-collar women "look down" on blue collar men, it's just class difference. People do not pair up outside their class, plain and simple. Class is beyond income- people who went to college have a lot more in common with other people who did. I'm pretty sure the college-educated carpenter who makes custom teak coffee tables would greatly interest the single female lawyer.
When I graduated college and got a job as a waitress, I worked with a lot of well-read hipsters that skipped the college track. They were perfectly intelligent and capable, but we didn't have the shared experiences that usually bond people together. (This is another reason we should have compelled national service!!!)
His refusal to say mass immigration causes lower wages confused me. Was his point that lower wages were just a byproduct and don't describe the actual issue clearly enough?
It seems there is a large number of women who "don't want children"... and then later in life they do. Which is a problem because up to that point they haven't "built themselves" to support children, which includes finding a partner, and accepting the idea of working on personal (as opposed to professional) relationships. I think that many woman who "can't find the right man" to have children with may need to ask themselves if they are part of the problem.
Any survey asking women about their desire to have children is worthless if the data is not disaggregated by age. Asking a 20 year old college kid doesn't make sense unless you plan to return to her with the same question in 10 years.
Im not much for the red pill dudes or the trad guys, but like a lot of the more extreme views being vocalized today, there are small truths at the bottom of the house of cards.
One of these truths is that women these days are far more invested in education than men are on a broad scale. This has its own repercussions economically but when you consider how selective people are becoming about whether someone is their “equal”……. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a man that cared much about whether his girlfriend or wife had a 4 year degree or a masters. I personally know several women who use this as a reason to not date a man. It’s wild to me.
Like I said. It’s not worth building a house of cards on this small truth, but it is a real thing. To me it’s an argument for getting married younger, where the playing field is far more leveled and it’s much easier to get to know each other before any harsh judgements are made.
I would agree. The question that follows is how many high achieving men there are for every high achieving woman. Remembering that the woman is more in charge of what is considered high achieving here. High achieving can look very different to different people obviously. I wonder what that difference looks like between men and women.
Doesn't the data on assortative mating contradict your assertion that men don't care about women's educational attainment?
My own anecdata is that I'm hard-pressed to identify a married male acquaintancewhose wife doesn't have at least a BA. (For reference age 54, college-educated, Northeast Corridor, 30 years in the white collar workforce). What you assert is sometimes true for Boomer colleagues in their 60s and 70s, but certainly not for anyone my age or younger.
To your other point, given the greatly increased educational and occupational opportunities for women since about 1970, the young cornerstone marriage is a relic not due for return. To Sarah's dismay, these later marriages shorten the fertility window but we can't go backwards.
I think your anecdata is likely in line with the whole. I have my doubts as to whether that is because men care about that in a partner, or because women care about education that much these days.
It’s also going to change a bit depending on where you live. Larger cities where there are a much higher density of white collar jobs are naturally going to skew much higher in educational achievement. At least to my thinking.
Some random anecdata of my own: I know a few younger families in which the two people met in college, and got married. The husband dropped out to get a job and pay bills, the wife went on to get a degree because mom and dad had offered to pay for her education. This is supreme anecdata obviously but it’s also a real thing. In the rural community of my youth there was quite a strong push for women to get a degree as a safety net for death, disability, or divorce. I think it’s possible that women take education more seriously to a significant enough degree to muddy the waters between correlation and causation here.
Let's revisit this conversation in 2034 when US colleges and grad/professional schools are 70 percent female (if current trends hold). I'd be very curious how college-educated women approach dating and marriage then.
Haha agreed. Another thing I forgot to mention as far as an educational difference. I would be interested to see data that shows the difference in how many men vs women view the trades as a viable career. Not just a job but a career. My suspicion is that the disparity is quite large. If that’s true, that difference alone would end up creating quite an imbalance amongst the highly educated. I am in agreement though. At this point it feels like crystal ball sociology.
I’m building trade adjacent - plumbers, electricians, industrial and commercial supply etc - and there are no women anywhere until you get up into the degree required levels of suppliers and manufacturers. I mean none.
Agreed. I’ve been in my trade for~10 years. I’ve never worked with a female tech. I know they’re out there but I’ve never worked with one or seen one in a shop I’ve been in. The leads me to believe that women in the trades are hugely skewed in favor of the office jobs that technically are “part of the trade”.
Trying to convince people to have kids to ensure the solvency of the social security system will convince no one. Spend more time explaining how children fulfill a person's life, which was not referenced until about an hour into the podcast.
You erroneously spend more time blaming men than women for both not being suitable partners and their unwillingness to settle down. While men are more judgmental about the appearance of women than vice versa (which creates a huge barrier for men); women are likely more demanding about every other quality.
I know this may sound a little offensive to Meghan (please know I love you), but women are often not good judges of women's appearance. To a women, every female friend is attractive.
And, if I have written this a million times I have written it once, men do not need to invest (a minimum of) four years of their lives and spend (at least) tens of thousands of dollars in a college education to find numerous, decent paying career opportunities. I think millions of female social workers, teachers, nurses, and their sisters toiling in the nonprofit sector are not looking down their noses at men because they failed to go to college, as much as they secretly are jealous (that they do not need a degree to find a good job).
Most young adults are fairly immature, not just guys. Many men spend too much time following sports and/or playing video games. Too many women waste time with reality tv. We all spend too much time on social media. It is a reflection of living in a more privileged society.
I'm never offended when it comes to this topic. (Usually, I'm the offender.) And, trust me; women know which of their friends are attractive. In large cities that skew heavily female, women under a certain attractiveness level are unlikely to date and mate. It is a fact everyone knows even if they won't say so out loud. As for educated women looking down their noses at blue collar men, I've said repeatedly that social norms need to change so they're less inclined to do so.
Apologies if we've done this dance before but I'm still baffled by the existence of these straight,* white,* college-educated women who hit 50 and are still single and childless.
(*Acknowledging that calculations are different for LGBT and black/Latina women).
I happen to know a pretty substantial number of women in this demographic and just don't see these never-married folks.
My only speculation is that I know very few creatives: the women I know tend to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, financiers, scientists academics, and Big Pharma operations professionals. Maybe that's the reason for the disconnect between our observations.
Perfect example: it wasn't until they became famous that I learned Jennifer Weiner and Jennifer Senior were both college classmates. It's not like we attended Ohio State - I guess we just weren't in the same social circles. I was chugging beer with jocks.
The professions you mention skew male. There are more than enough men to go around. Creatives and people in media, communications, non-profits, even entry/mid-level politics (DC has a huge surplus of single women) skew heavily female. I don't think I went to a single social gathering in my 20s and 30s that didn't have 5 women for every straight man. It's actually always been the case and still is, now that I think of it.
This is why I moved from deep in Silicon Valley (San Jose) to San Francisco when I was in my mid 20s. At the time, SF didn't yet have a lot of tech companies, so the male-female ratios were night and day different compared to SV.
Your demographic analysis makes perfect sense. If you don't meet a spouse in college/grad school you're more like to meet people in your industry or adjacent to it.
It's true that dating apps probably make that a lot easier. In my day, you had to meet people in the wild. And finance guys rarely hung with the poets. (Smart of them.)
So you didn’t see enterprising finance guys hanging in poet circles to meet women, and vice versa? Or wouldn’t they meet in bars? Or do the 90s rom-com thing where they accidentally crash into each other while running down the street?
A stress fracture doesn’t mean that anything specific happened to the bone. It just means that it gave out after repeated small impacts and now there’s a little crack, which can be quite painful. Usually happens in feet because your entire body weight is coming down on them, and more commonly in women and particularly older women because of bone density. Of course, women of a certain age should be getting a DEXA for bone density, but the main thing to do is look at footwear and activity patterns and see if there’s anything to do to reduce the stress.
Gout is most commonly in the big toe but can occur in other joints. It is because you’re not getting rid of some particular compounds that can turn into crystals when your blood gets overloaded in them, and the crystals tend to get stuck in your joints. It is extremely painful, and usually very obviously inflamed in one spot.
“I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again”
I have gout, Meghan. Fortunately mine's pretty minor. It's genetic - my father has it. It tends to get worse with age - he's in outstanding shape for his age while I am not, but he gets it much worse than me the past few years. If you don't have parents/grandparents who suffered from it, I'd wager it's unlikely you have it (but I'm no physician).
The main trigger for me is actually stress (one of the up-sides of unemployed periods is that I never have flare-ups during them. Heh). Under-hydration seems to be a factor, too. My self-designed "treatment" when it pops up is to drink lots of water and resist holding my urine. So essentially I make myself pee a lot. Seems to keep the urea washing consistently out of my system, which gets rid of the crystals that cause the pain. (Also I only rarely drink, so that helps. Alcohol is terrible for it.)
Lots of good comments and food for thought. You mentioned Paul Erlich and his badly missed predictions. He has had good research in his own field, but his failed predictions for the world ("Population Bomb", etc.) have been so wrong for so many decades I am always surprised that anybody now gives him the time of day. He is always claiming that he is just wrong about the timing. Gosh. (Actually, not surprised, because he is predicting doom, which is always more interesting.)
They keep going to this cornerstone vs capstone thing, but from my perspective, it’s more like a locked door that leads to all sorts of things and only opens for a few lucky people.
Visiting DC recently reminds me that perhaps the reason I am so jaded is because it is the epicenter of the current cultural pathology and perhaps has some of the world’s worst women, but taking that into account I’m not sure I’ve ever even been in a room with a potential wife. And if I did, I’m certain that it happened after I turned 30 and moved across the world.
For all this high-minded talk about kids and careers, the bar right now is trying to find a women who will actually acknowledge that there is such a thing as a woman. And on top of that, that this person likes being a woman. And then on top of that, that they actually like men. These criteria alone rule out the overwhelming majority of women I’ve ever met. And it’s not so much that people genuinely believe the gender stuff, but if you’re so shallow that you just adopt whatever the current craze is, you’re not a candidate for a committed lifelong interpersonal relationship.
I think my understanding of "settling" is different from how it seems to often be used in these conversations, which seem to employ it to mean "being with someone with lower educational status/fewer markers of social success." In conversations with fellow single early-30s/late-20s women, "settling" has meant not-really-feeling-deeply-in-love-with-your-boyfriend-but-not-seeing-much-else-out-there. In those scenarios, the settled-for boyfriend often is educationally/financially/socially successful--those are the traits being settled for, in lieu of a strong emotional connection. I'm not saying there aren't status- and money-focused single women out there, but that isn't what's keeping the ones I know single. And I'm not convinced it's possible to socially engineer a society away from love marriages once it's transitioned from arranged/survival marriages.
Rob Henderson happens to have also just written on the topic of dating/marriage. https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/how-to-choose-a-romantic-partner
One of the takeaways from Rob's essay is that meeting all the right demographic criteria is not a guarantee of happiness (which I so suppose is somewhat obvious).
To your point about settling, there's a real-life murder mystery surrounding the death of Dan Markel, a Harvard-educated law professor. In a nutshell, there was a very ugly divorce/custody dispute with his lawyer ex-wife, resulting in Markel's in-laws hiring hit men to murder him. (The mystery is the extent of knowledge and complicity of his ex-wife; to date, only the mother-in-law and brother-in-law have been charged).
Anyhow, after Markel's murder, his wife openly admitted that she didn't really love him but married him because he checked the right boxes: college-educated, professional/managerial class, would make a good dad and in this case, Jewish.
It's a fascinating case that's worth Googling.
That is a fascinating case. Still, I'd point out that LOTS of people make the "checked the right boxes" post-game analysis when they get divorced. Or even when they stay not-completely-happily married.
I think the very idea of “choosing a romantic partner” is suspect. It casts people as external evaluators of their relationships rather than participants in them. The implied framework is “selection from a menu of options”. Real-world relationships don’t work that way. They are the product of many small decisions (your own and the other person’s) rather than one big decision to “select” or “not select”.
Henderson was advocating that we invest as much time and energy into building a relationship as we do building a career. But you are quite correct that unlike careers, relationships involve a lot of irrational feelings and emotions. (We've all heard the rhetorical question: "Why do brilliant people - usually women- at the top of their profession make such boneheaded decisions in dating/marriage?" Algorithms can only take you so far.
Feelings and emotions are why we form relationships in the first place. The belief that relationships can be meaningfully analyzed as “rational decisions” based on “objective criteria” and “comparing mate value” is itself a sentimental fantasy, ironically enough.
Specifically, it responds to the sentimental desire for a difficult and unpredictable aspect of the human experience to “make sense” at some deeper fundamental level
He and you are right imo. I made plenty of bad choices until I decided to really invest some time and energy into figuring out (1) why were the previous people wrong (2) what sort of person would be better suited for me (3) what’s a short list of must haves and deal breakers.
Worked for me, so far ;)
I think you are onto something about building/nurturing/creating love relationships.
One way I think about it is to think about how the ego. What brings two people together may be "instinct" i.e. erotic desire, but what keeps us together is the melting away of one's ego or pride, or sense of isolation. This is created by a commitment to accept the other as they are, and vice versa; to create a history together that creates growth together. I think a large problem for the educated elite women has been this mantra of "a woman does not need a man" and the belief in the existence of a "patriarchy" that works against them. These are toxic beliefs that bear rotten fruit, with becomes even greater when such woman want children. They can't seem to square the circle.
The data belies that story a bit. More educated women are more likely to be married, right up to the PHD level. There’s a dated cliche that professional and educational success threatens marital prospects for women, but the trend over the last few decades has been the opposite: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-most-educated-women-are-the-most-likely-to-be-married/
I don't know about that last point, conservative religious cultures just have a higher birth rate and stickier intergenerational ideological retention. But I suppose the inexorable consequences of actuarial tables across deep time is different from social engineering.
Not finding an emotional connection suggests either:
An extrinsic cause, like say, women being propagandized into hating men
An intrinsic cause, like women not really being wired for heterosexuality
A matching problem, where people are just not getting the right partner
I see evidence for all three, and while I favor the first, the second is a viable option with more problematic implications
The question isn’t “why aren’t people finding emotional connections”, it’s “why aren’t people building emotional connections”. The framing of “matching”, like Henderson’s framing of “choosing”, obscures the dynamic and participatory nature of relationships. It implies a world of people-with-static-characteristics (“wiring”) who need to be matched correctly with other people-with-static-characteristics. That is how online dating algorithms work, but it’s not how actual embodied relationships work.
What you’re calling dynamic and participatory I would characterize as being relatively advanced stages of something that starts with hardwired, instinctive behavior.
I disagree. Relationships are dynamic and participatory from the very beginning. Whether a couple has a second date or not is dependent on their considered choices, which they bear responsibility for. Unless you’re making a broader philosophical argument that free will is an illusion and all our behavior is hardwired and instinctive, in which case advanced stages of relationships wouldn’t be any different.
I would agree with the broader argument that there isn’t a real free will, but I would also say that there is a subjective distinction between what seems to be volitional and what isn’t, and if you don’t have an instinctive, irrational attraction to someone, the kind of thinking that your frontal lobe does is not going to override that. But some people try. I suspect that trying is the source of many problems, and certainly I had to learn that the intellectual framework that I constructed around relationships and sexuality as a teenager simply does not match my actual sexuality.
Sure, but isn’t there a big gap between the claim that the first spark of sexual attraction is instinctive, and the claim that emotional connection is instinctive? I don’t think the latter is true. Emotional connections (with friends, family, and partners alike) involve an instinctive aspect, but also require deliberate choices to build and maintain over time. Romantic partnerships are created, not found. The common language about “finding a partner” obscures this reality.
Here you speak of women being "propagandized into hating men" and wiring for sexuality. Below you spoke of women indoctrinated with gender ideology.
I don't know what kind of social spaces you've been in but my question is - what percentage of the natal female population believes in these extreme SJW concepts (whether sincerely held or mouthed as virtue-signaling platitude)?
I'd be shocked if more than 15-20% of adult women who are NOT currently enrolled in a college/graduate school have any knowledge of this insanity. I'm thinking that the vast majority are normies who wouldn't recognize Judith Butler or Julie Bindel if they jumped on the hood of their car in broad daylight.
My own anecdata is that for 7 years I've been working in Pharma R&D operations, which is heavily female (65-70 percent). I don't hear women talking like this, even the millennials. I suppose if I attended the NYC Media Professionals convention I would hear otherwise?
It’s not obvious to me that relationships can’t work across such political divides anyway. James Carville and Mary Matalin are still together.
While the 1990s media had fun with Carville and Matalin l, the truth was much more mundane. Carville was not a far left identittarian and Matalin is not a right wing nut job.
Sure, and while I have a generally blackpilled view of these issues in the big picture, I’m actually relatively optimistic on a personal level because human diversity allows for those sorts of things.
I think maybe it’s a generational issue. I don’t think most people know much about academic feminist theory or anything, but the number of people who have bought into some bad ideas is quite high in my experience. I just casually walk through DC and hear things about how “I can’t believe they’re excluding non-binary people from this women’s event; the whole point of being inclusive is just to exclude men”. Which is why I qualify myself by saying that my bias is that I’m probably around a lot of the most decadent parts of our society.
But even if I asked just the average woman I meet, for example, do they believe that there’s a gender pay gap, I think most of them will say yes. Obama said it. It’s obvious nonsense, but people believe it, and it leads to a conspiratorial mindset. The number of women who think that men are somehow secretly oppressing them is quite high. And it certainly bears relevance to the question. How can you have a real relationship with your oppressor? The whole thing becomes an apologia for all sorts of terrible behavior, and to me, any such belief is a non-starter for any sort of relationship.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that men married to women who identify as feminists actually have higher marital satisfaction on average, but I can’t find it now.
I remember reading that the word feminist should be retired because it doesn’t mean anything, and that was something like 20 years ago.
I mean, some people would say that a feminist is someone who thinks that the little Sarah Haiders of the world should be allowed to read, which I agree with unless she says something I don’t like.
There are any number of other confounders that might explain a finding like that, even if it is true on its face.
It still seems like the sort of thing that could be measured empirically, especially if the effects of gender feminism, woke ideology, or what have you are as dire for relationships as you suggest. It should show up somewhere in data on marital satisfaction, even if “feminist identification” isn’t the best way to isolate the views you see as toxic. I’d be curious to see any data on it.
"The best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager."
-Sarah Silverman
One of my favorite SS lines. No way she tells that joke today. She may have even tried to scrub it from the interwebz.
Haha definitely. Her stand-up specials are mostly clapter now.
As as an art-college-educated white woman with a dad who went to college and a mom who didn't, I don't think white-collar women "look down" on blue collar men, it's just class difference. People do not pair up outside their class, plain and simple. Class is beyond income- people who went to college have a lot more in common with other people who did. I'm pretty sure the college-educated carpenter who makes custom teak coffee tables would greatly interest the single female lawyer.
When I graduated college and got a job as a waitress, I worked with a lot of well-read hipsters that skipped the college track. They were perfectly intelligent and capable, but we didn't have the shared experiences that usually bond people together. (This is another reason we should have compelled national service!!!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18bhyZIFXF4
""Society Is A Ponzi Scheme" - Warning On Population Collapse & Hopeless Generation | Eric Weinstein"
I thought that was very good. Curious what others think.
His refusal to say mass immigration causes lower wages confused me. Was his point that lower wages were just a byproduct and don't describe the actual issue clearly enough?
It seems there is a large number of women who "don't want children"... and then later in life they do. Which is a problem because up to that point they haven't "built themselves" to support children, which includes finding a partner, and accepting the idea of working on personal (as opposed to professional) relationships. I think that many woman who "can't find the right man" to have children with may need to ask themselves if they are part of the problem.
Any survey asking women about their desire to have children is worthless if the data is not disaggregated by age. Asking a 20 year old college kid doesn't make sense unless you plan to return to her with the same question in 10 years.
Im not much for the red pill dudes or the trad guys, but like a lot of the more extreme views being vocalized today, there are small truths at the bottom of the house of cards.
One of these truths is that women these days are far more invested in education than men are on a broad scale. This has its own repercussions economically but when you consider how selective people are becoming about whether someone is their “equal”……. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a man that cared much about whether his girlfriend or wife had a 4 year degree or a masters. I personally know several women who use this as a reason to not date a man. It’s wild to me.
Like I said. It’s not worth building a house of cards on this small truth, but it is a real thing. To me it’s an argument for getting married younger, where the playing field is far more leveled and it’s much easier to get to know each other before any harsh judgements are made.
High achieving men on their way up are unlikely to marry young.
I would agree. The question that follows is how many high achieving men there are for every high achieving woman. Remembering that the woman is more in charge of what is considered high achieving here. High achieving can look very different to different people obviously. I wonder what that difference looks like between men and women.
But... they aren't high achieving yet.
Doesn't the data on assortative mating contradict your assertion that men don't care about women's educational attainment?
My own anecdata is that I'm hard-pressed to identify a married male acquaintancewhose wife doesn't have at least a BA. (For reference age 54, college-educated, Northeast Corridor, 30 years in the white collar workforce). What you assert is sometimes true for Boomer colleagues in their 60s and 70s, but certainly not for anyone my age or younger.
To your other point, given the greatly increased educational and occupational opportunities for women since about 1970, the young cornerstone marriage is a relic not due for return. To Sarah's dismay, these later marriages shorten the fertility window but we can't go backwards.
I think your anecdata is likely in line with the whole. I have my doubts as to whether that is because men care about that in a partner, or because women care about education that much these days.
It’s also going to change a bit depending on where you live. Larger cities where there are a much higher density of white collar jobs are naturally going to skew much higher in educational achievement. At least to my thinking.
Some random anecdata of my own: I know a few younger families in which the two people met in college, and got married. The husband dropped out to get a job and pay bills, the wife went on to get a degree because mom and dad had offered to pay for her education. This is supreme anecdata obviously but it’s also a real thing. In the rural community of my youth there was quite a strong push for women to get a degree as a safety net for death, disability, or divorce. I think it’s possible that women take education more seriously to a significant enough degree to muddy the waters between correlation and causation here.
Maybe I’m wrong 🤷🏼♂️. I don’t know.
Let's revisit this conversation in 2034 when US colleges and grad/professional schools are 70 percent female (if current trends hold). I'd be very curious how college-educated women approach dating and marriage then.
Haha agreed. Another thing I forgot to mention as far as an educational difference. I would be interested to see data that shows the difference in how many men vs women view the trades as a viable career. Not just a job but a career. My suspicion is that the disparity is quite large. If that’s true, that difference alone would end up creating quite an imbalance amongst the highly educated. I am in agreement though. At this point it feels like crystal ball sociology.
I’m building trade adjacent - plumbers, electricians, industrial and commercial supply etc - and there are no women anywhere until you get up into the degree required levels of suppliers and manufacturers. I mean none.
Agreed. I’ve been in my trade for~10 years. I’ve never worked with a female tech. I know they’re out there but I’ve never worked with one or seen one in a shop I’ve been in. The leads me to believe that women in the trades are hugely skewed in favor of the office jobs that technically are “part of the trade”.
A few comments about this episode:
Trying to convince people to have kids to ensure the solvency of the social security system will convince no one. Spend more time explaining how children fulfill a person's life, which was not referenced until about an hour into the podcast.
You erroneously spend more time blaming men than women for both not being suitable partners and their unwillingness to settle down. While men are more judgmental about the appearance of women than vice versa (which creates a huge barrier for men); women are likely more demanding about every other quality.
I know this may sound a little offensive to Meghan (please know I love you), but women are often not good judges of women's appearance. To a women, every female friend is attractive.
And, if I have written this a million times I have written it once, men do not need to invest (a minimum of) four years of their lives and spend (at least) tens of thousands of dollars in a college education to find numerous, decent paying career opportunities. I think millions of female social workers, teachers, nurses, and their sisters toiling in the nonprofit sector are not looking down their noses at men because they failed to go to college, as much as they secretly are jealous (that they do not need a degree to find a good job).
Most young adults are fairly immature, not just guys. Many men spend too much time following sports and/or playing video games. Too many women waste time with reality tv. We all spend too much time on social media. It is a reflection of living in a more privileged society.
I'm never offended when it comes to this topic. (Usually, I'm the offender.) And, trust me; women know which of their friends are attractive. In large cities that skew heavily female, women under a certain attractiveness level are unlikely to date and mate. It is a fact everyone knows even if they won't say so out loud. As for educated women looking down their noses at blue collar men, I've said repeatedly that social norms need to change so they're less inclined to do so.
Dearest Meghan,
Apologies if we've done this dance before but I'm still baffled by the existence of these straight,* white,* college-educated women who hit 50 and are still single and childless.
(*Acknowledging that calculations are different for LGBT and black/Latina women).
I happen to know a pretty substantial number of women in this demographic and just don't see these never-married folks.
My only speculation is that I know very few creatives: the women I know tend to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, financiers, scientists academics, and Big Pharma operations professionals. Maybe that's the reason for the disconnect between our observations.
Perfect example: it wasn't until they became famous that I learned Jennifer Weiner and Jennifer Senior were both college classmates. It's not like we attended Ohio State - I guess we just weren't in the same social circles. I was chugging beer with jocks.
The professions you mention skew male. There are more than enough men to go around. Creatives and people in media, communications, non-profits, even entry/mid-level politics (DC has a huge surplus of single women) skew heavily female. I don't think I went to a single social gathering in my 20s and 30s that didn't have 5 women for every straight man. It's actually always been the case and still is, now that I think of it.
I was in the military in my 20’s. We had all of your men. It was lovely 😜
This is why I moved from deep in Silicon Valley (San Jose) to San Francisco when I was in my mid 20s. At the time, SF didn't yet have a lot of tech companies, so the male-female ratios were night and day different compared to SV.
Your demographic analysis makes perfect sense. If you don't meet a spouse in college/grad school you're more like to meet people in your industry or adjacent to it.
And if you go to a liberal arts college, there will be many more women than straight men.
Truth. And attending a law school vs. an MFA program will create vastly divergent social circles.
Can’t the women in female-skewed careers pair off with men in male-skewed careers?
It's true that dating apps probably make that a lot easier. In my day, you had to meet people in the wild. And finance guys rarely hung with the poets. (Smart of them.)
So you didn’t see enterprising finance guys hanging in poet circles to meet women, and vice versa? Or wouldn’t they meet in bars? Or do the 90s rom-com thing where they accidentally crash into each other while running down the street?
You can indeed read Rieff's "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." It's on Google Books.
https://books.google.com/books?id=GhOOI4N-XLkC&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false
A stress fracture doesn’t mean that anything specific happened to the bone. It just means that it gave out after repeated small impacts and now there’s a little crack, which can be quite painful. Usually happens in feet because your entire body weight is coming down on them, and more commonly in women and particularly older women because of bone density. Of course, women of a certain age should be getting a DEXA for bone density, but the main thing to do is look at footwear and activity patterns and see if there’s anything to do to reduce the stress.
Gout is most commonly in the big toe but can occur in other joints. It is because you’re not getting rid of some particular compounds that can turn into crystals when your blood gets overloaded in them, and the crystals tend to get stuck in your joints. It is extremely painful, and usually very obviously inflamed in one spot.
no one is going to give a shit about your career. and visiting patagonia 27 times isn't going to seem as sweet when you're 80 and in a nursing home
“I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again”
First!
DAMNIT!!!
at least i have 3 kids
Salute emoji
Re: birthrate doomerism, something I saw on last year’s “Google Rewind” has stuck with me like a cavity.
Google Rewind was basically just quips over news stories and trend (from 2022 in this case). One of the stories was about plant sales and it just said
“Plant Mom is the new Dog Mom!”
🤢
I have gout, Meghan. Fortunately mine's pretty minor. It's genetic - my father has it. It tends to get worse with age - he's in outstanding shape for his age while I am not, but he gets it much worse than me the past few years. If you don't have parents/grandparents who suffered from it, I'd wager it's unlikely you have it (but I'm no physician).
The main trigger for me is actually stress (one of the up-sides of unemployed periods is that I never have flare-ups during them. Heh). Under-hydration seems to be a factor, too. My self-designed "treatment" when it pops up is to drink lots of water and resist holding my urine. So essentially I make myself pee a lot. Seems to keep the urea washing consistently out of my system, which gets rid of the crystals that cause the pain. (Also I only rarely drink, so that helps. Alcohol is terrible for it.)
I'm sorry you're dealing with that. Sounds like a pain on many levels.
Oh, thanks, but like I said it's pretty minor. (Knock on wood.)
(Maybe you were so stressed-out a toe bone spontaneously cracked.)
I'm pretty sure the podcast caused a stress fracture.
Contact HR and file a worker's comp claim. I hear CA is pretty generous with such things.
Lots of good comments and food for thought. You mentioned Paul Erlich and his badly missed predictions. He has had good research in his own field, but his failed predictions for the world ("Population Bomb", etc.) have been so wrong for so many decades I am always surprised that anybody now gives him the time of day. He is always claiming that he is just wrong about the timing. Gosh. (Actually, not surprised, because he is predicting doom, which is always more interesting.)
Re: rich parents, y’all gotta read Penelope’s posts about Sheryl Sandberg
They keep going to this cornerstone vs capstone thing, but from my perspective, it’s more like a locked door that leads to all sorts of things and only opens for a few lucky people.
Visiting DC recently reminds me that perhaps the reason I am so jaded is because it is the epicenter of the current cultural pathology and perhaps has some of the world’s worst women, but taking that into account I’m not sure I’ve ever even been in a room with a potential wife. And if I did, I’m certain that it happened after I turned 30 and moved across the world.
For all this high-minded talk about kids and careers, the bar right now is trying to find a women who will actually acknowledge that there is such a thing as a woman. And on top of that, that this person likes being a woman. And then on top of that, that they actually like men. These criteria alone rule out the overwhelming majority of women I’ve ever met. And it’s not so much that people genuinely believe the gender stuff, but if you’re so shallow that you just adopt whatever the current craze is, you’re not a candidate for a committed lifelong interpersonal relationship.