Cohabitation: How to Become a 21st Century Concubine
From “The Case for Cohabitation” at the Daily Beast:
Today, with the exception of pockets of religious communities and Rick Santorum, we’ve mostly gone sex-positive as a nation—there’s now “sex week” on a large smattering of college campuses, and condoms, while occasionally controversial, are not hard to find at the vast majority of health centers. In other words, we have more or less embraced the reality that young people have sex before they get married, so they might as well be doing it safely.
Yet cohabitation seems to have replaced premarital sex as the axe to grind among everyone from social conservatives to psychologists. Given that 70 to 90 percent of young people will live together before they get married, though, it’s a pretty shortsighted view to the issue.
Cohabitation by its very nature is a shortsighted view to a committed relationship between a man and a woman. The amount of young people doing it doesn’t make it socially acceptable or desirable. Despite the author’s veiled attempt to minimize their voices by politicizing it, there’s a lot of good reasons why everyone from social conservatives to psychologists aren’t embracing shacking up. Not the least of which is how women fall into a second-class slot that even an eventual marriage won’t always change.
According to research the article cited, couples often “slip” into cohabitation rather than making it a conscious decision– it just seems easier. On the surface, it makes sense if you are sleeping over at each other’s place regularly. It would feel like the next logical step. However, it bypasses some important steps that lay the foundation for a relationship equipped to last a lifetime.
When considering living together, men and women often have two different motives or agendas. Women are more apt to view this as the natural phase before marriage — a progression toward, not a test of. Meanwhile, men are more likely to see it, according to researchers, as a test of the relationship — or worse, a way to postpone a commitment.
Often without realizing it, women enter into this type of relationship with the same frame of mind she would have as a wife. Instead, she has all the responsibilities and none of the protection of a legal marriage. In a sense, she is demoted to little more than a modern-day concubine.
Wouldn’t your criteria for a roommate be different than that of lifetime partner?
See also Dr. Helen’s response: Why should it be the man who is relegated to second-class status?
Anyone old enough to remember when this cohabitation nonsense started? It was supposed to make it so people could “test drive” a marriage. We would never have another divorce again!
…Oh, wow. Divorce sort of skyrocketed, didn’t it?
Don’t blame the divorce rate on a rise in cohabitation. The rise in divorce rate is do to society providing so many options and ease of living that many couples just lose interest in each other over time because they have other interests. There is really nothing holding the family together while there is a TON of things ripping it apart. 100 years ago families worked together to eat, to provide warm and happy home. Today’s families, have ballet lessons, soccer practice, yoga, time at the gym, the school play, the parent teacher meetings, 2 working parents, sports, (tennis or football) 999 channels. Families not only don’t hardly EAT together anymore, with 5 tv’s in the house, they don’t even watch TV together anymore. then there is Pablo the pool boy or that new secretary at work, that provides a brief moment of escape……
Today’s families, have ballet lessons, soccer practice, yoga, time at the gym, the school play, the parent teacher meetings, 2 working parents, sports, (tennis or football)
What’s wrong with any of that? My parents came to my plays and enjoyed watching me succeed. How do sports or arts hurt a family?
My point still stands: why hasn’t cohabitation solved the problem of divorce like it promised to? Cohabitating couples still have 999 channels on their TVs.
Marriages fail because at least one party is narcissitic and immature. Cohabitation feeds and legitimizes those two sins.
When I got engaged in the last century, while in college, I made a casual remark to my mother that we could always live together. My mom’s response was fine but she wasn’t spending a penny on a shower or wedding. That I was on my own. I said ok, got married and will be celebrating 33 yrs in June.
I tell my girls one a college sophomore and one a high school sophomore that boys and girls think about sex differently. Girls have sex because they love (have an emotional feeling) for the guy, but guys have sex because it feels good. Hey as my dad said why buy the cow when you get the milk for free.
Many women fell into the feminist trap that 1. they didn’t need a piece of paper 2. if they slept with a guy the natural step of a marriage would take place and 3. this living together would allow them to work out any differences between them (he’s a spender she’s a saver) or if they couldn’t work out differences they could split up without the hassle of a divorce forgetting about the emotional and financial entagelments.
Divorce is way too easy. A young couple, the ink is barely dry on the thank yous and they’re getting a divorce because she was, as my mother would say, in love with the idea of being married and planning a wedding and the living it was not what she thought it would be.
The comment about a marriage certificate just being a piece of paper continues to irk me. In reply, I tell them money is just a piece of paper too.
Occasionally, I see a light bulb illuminate above their head. Most of the time I just get dumb looks.
Cohabiting is the same as admitting you’re not in love, not really. After all, considering that marriage is only a 56% commitment (about 44% of first marriages end in divorce), it doesn’t represent a whole-hearted commitment. What’s cohabiting? A 10% commitment? Maybe 20%? It’s hard to tell the real numbers, but how many end up in a lifelong relationship is in that range. So if you aren’t willing to make even a 25% commitment to a person, how much in love can you be? I reckon not much. Naturally the commitment in a marriage should be 110%, as that would demonstrate, you know, actual love. Just as faith without works is dead, love without dedication is dead. Works don’t save, but they demonstrate that the faith that prompts them is real. Dedication won’t save you either, but it shows you mean it. If you can’t even manage that, then whatever degree of lust you feel is going to last just as long as the circumstances are favorable. The first little squall will capsize your half-assed excuse for an ocean-going vessel. A marriage has to endure storms and hurricanes over a 50 or 60 year duration. My parents have been married 45 years, and have been through the recessions of the 70s, the 90s, and the Oughts. They’ve had great times and lean times, and without that full-bore, absolute commitment they would’ve gone on the rocks for sure, because their temperaments are very EXTREMELY very different. Being all in makes all the difference.
So when I hear somebody say ‘we’re going to live together first’ all I can think, and sometimes say, is ‘why bother? You obviously don’t love each other enough to marry, so what’s the point of pretending?’
I do get into trouble sometimes.
Contemporary methods of courtship are the cause of America’s epidemic of unsatisfying, ill-fated cohabitations and marriages. With many men plunging into romances based on physical attraction and charm with little regard to shared values and compatibility, a future of heartbreak for both partners is often the case. It’s not due to couples having ADHD due to too many options. One hundred years ago courtship was completely different.
I am: One Million B.C., Raquel Welch. Cave, fur bikini, no police. ‘Nuff said.
Why would a man get married when he would be the one turned into a second class citizen? That’s the real question here. Marriage gives women rights and men responsibilities. Living together makes sense for men because it is imperative that he choose a spouse he can trust–there is nothing wrong with a man testing a relationship to see if it is the right one for him. If he makes a mistake, he will pay very dearly without protection from the courts or support from society.
Bless you, dear lady.
Unfortunately, even cohabitation is now becoming legally risky.
You are exactly right. As more couples cohabitate, the legal landscape will shift to “palimony” laws and such where men are held responsible just for living with a woman and have to provide for her in some way should they break up. Men must watch for these laws and act swiftly when they come up in various states. It can be done. They must organize and fight back against the tyranny of women and the Uncle Tims and White Knights who support them in unjust laws.
Worse thn that is stupid laws inplace that if a woman has multiple partners she can trap a man to pay child support (whether married or not) even if a DNA test proves later on that he’s not the father. The court now has a “well…the child is used to YOU being the father” clause that traps a man into paying not only child support until the child is 18, but well into his/her college years as well. That’s not right nor fair. This should be on mommy’s head – not pretend daddy’s!
Note that democracy has a life cycle. It is not a permanent state of politics.
A democracy will always devolve into a feminist police state over time. Misandry follows democracy as assuredly as grey hair follows youth.
The spring and summer of the democracy cycle are wonderful – it made the West the most prosperous civilization ever. But the fall and winter of the life-cycle are what we see now. Devolution into a feminist police state is inevitable.
Why?
Because while men vote for what benefits all people, women vote only for what benefits women.
Common Law marriages used to be quite common, ‘without benefit of clergy’ etc. Used to be a cohabiting couple would be considered married after seven years, so the law has already been in place for this kind of thing for a long time, at least since the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. What’s changed (IMO) is that men and women both no longer have any commitment to their duties. Rights have replaced duties. Now that we are told that we have a right to food, shelter, clothing, consumer goods, healthcare, and vacations for no reason other than having a pulse, duties are way past secondary.
What a load. I practiced divorce law for ten years and I can tell you that marriage puts the same duties on women these days as it does men, whether it applies to finances, children, marital property. Men are no more victims than women unless they choose to be.
The family law, divorce, custody and child support statistics paint a WAY different picture!
OH, no, no, no! In the old days men (when divorce was brand new in the ME generation of the 70s) used to divorce their wives and marry a newer model – often leaving their wives with no credit, no skills and nor resources. To balance THAT out men (who never did these dishonorable deeds) have been totally SHAFTED by the new laws put in place to lean towards women because of these atrocities.
Yup. Happened to my mother-in-law. Gandhi’s famous saying, “An eye for an eye will blind the world” is definitely true in this realm.
A simple alternative would be to rewrite the divorce laws so that either: a divorce initiated by one spouse can be vetoed by the other (you can still leave an abusive or adulterous spouse, but if he/she won’t consent to the divorce, you are still legally married), or else that divorces shall grant all child custody and marital property to the spouse that did not initiate the divorce, unless the divorce was induced by adultery, fraud or abuse. Furthermore, any allegation of adultery, fraud or abuse will be subject to trial by jury, per the Seventh Amendment. Lastly, visitation rights must be enforced by Federal kidnapping laws. If the child is more than 24 hours late for a changeover without a valid reason, it should be assumed an attempt to interfere with custodial rights, and thus the parent so interfering should be arrested by the FBI and charged with kidnapping.
There’s an old joke that has too much truth to it:
Q: What do a fire, flood, earthquake, tornado, hurricane and a wife have in common?
A: Sooner or later, one of them is probably going to get your house.
I haven’t seen my daughter in 13 years. My ex-wife committed perjury, with no consequences.
Even when I paid child support regularly, I was sued again by the state, to pay even more, based on money that I had already paid, as shown by the canceled checks.
The children were kept away from me by the courts, because it would be confusing to them, given the lies their mother had been telling them.
No, it is all perfectly fair. Anyone who says it is is a liar. Bollocks.
As a young, hyper-testosteron’d teen I took a deep breath long enough to see the absolute crap my sisters put their prospective friends with benefits wannabes through. I had more pride in myself than that and I didn’t start scoping out the territory, let alone marry, until I was 33. Some of my peers suspected I might have been gay but what was on offer wasn’t worth the price. I’ve been married once, coming up on our 22nd anni, with storms aplenty and the sis’s? Both have been married multiple times and at this point know better than to try to blame their ex’s in my presence.
Often without realizing it, women enter into this type of relationship with the same frame of mind she would as a wife. Instead, she has all the responsibilities and none of the protection of a legal marriage. In a sense, she is demoted to little more than a modern day concubine.
And if she gets married, suddenly she has all the protection and none of the responsibility. If she wants to deny sex, too bad for him. If she wants to watch Eat, Pray, Love and then abscond with Pablo the pool boy, too bad for him. Marriage just gives women the legal authority to rob men blind and steal their kids for any or no reason. No one wants to live with a sharpened guillotine like that hanging over their neck every day.
Which you are saying (in essence) is that there is no consequence for divorce. I agree with with. When it is an incompatibility issue I believe they should part in peace. But if there was harm on either side I believe there should be consequences in the divorce settlement. There should not be no-fault divorces when fault is deserved and caused. Pay the price for your misdeeds in the marriage.
What Arch and the honorable Dr. Helen are saying is bleak indeed: There is no win/win possible anymore. Either the man loses (in marriage) or the woman loses (in cohabitation). Does anyone see a way out of this?
Um… mutual love and respect maybe?
I’m sick to death of people telling me that the marriage my wife and I share is some sort of fluke. “Well, you’re lucky! Good for you!”
I’m not lucky!
Don’t marry an idiot, a sex-fiend, a drunk, a bully or a narcissist!
Hell, I’ve watched people marry all 5 of those things in one person!
You seem to be in pathological denial about how ridiculously unfair the laws are to men, who enter into the scam that still uses the word ‘Marriage’ but in reality is more like a slave title.
It is extremely unethical to tell a young man to get married these days. You might as well tell him to be a suicide bomber.
Are you a Christian? If not, shut up, because your words are scandalous. Here’s good advice: don’t marry a feminist. Don’t even consider dating a feminist. Christian men: find a good, Christian woman who wants to be a mother.
Are you a Christian? If not, shut up, because your words are scandalous.
You are a Christian? Nice Christian attitude, dummy. This may be news to you but Christian women are no better than any other women today. They may mouth the platitudes but they go off the deep end as much as anyone.
Bob, mythbuster didn’t say “Marry a woman who claims to be a Christian”, he said “Find a good, Christian woman who wants to be a mother”. (As Chesterton said, “Just going to a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.”) In other words, spend some time discerning a woman’s character. I know, right?
Good. Please keep being scandalous, Toad. And if myth buster or anyone else tells you to shut up, be MORE scandalous! Freedom of speech is for everyone.
Love is by nature risky. If you try to enter into a relationship holding something back so you won’t lose it, YOU HAVE ALREADY LOST. You cannot find true love without making yourself vulnerable, and those who try wind up much worse for it. What do the Scriptures say? “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her. Wives, obey your husbands.” A married man must love his wife more than his own life, and a married woman must recognize that her husband has trusted his heart to her and made himself vulnerable, and she must demonstrate that she is worthy of that trust.
Love is by nature risky. That’s why old Europe had marriage for life, to hold together and bind a culture, not leave such things a the future of the entire group to chance. It was often a sham otherwise, and everyone pretty much knew it. Lip service was paid to monogamy and women perhaps did what they could. In the main, women had no outlets if they were single.
Sexual instincts can’t be denied, only channeled. The other instinct is that survival of a group, a culture, in a way it is not constantly fighting within it’s own group over women. Again, that’s going to happen anyway, but it can be somewhat channeled, those energies bled off; arranged marriages build alliances.
But now here we are, the temporary beneficiaries of the shadow ground between the two worlds – inheritors of a culture based on the institution of marriage but morphing into an ad hoc culture of sex and romance that never could have built our nation. So, where do we go from here? Who knows because, like the song says, anything goes, and that includes cultural suicide, the very thing the institution of marriage was meant to avert.
Well said. If you haven’t yet done so, read “Coming Apart” for more along this line. Needless to say Charles Murray is not a casual blogger but a serious social scientist and what he says must be respected even if you cannot accept all his conclusions.
No, the other instinct in these matters – for men, at any rate – isn’t group survival but protectiveness. That ends up focussed on wives and children.
This worked for me, in the sense that an ex-girlfriend and I realized there were issues that were not surmountable. We wanted to save money, were at one or the other’s place EVERY day, together every weekend, monogamous, and in our 20′s / 30′s. We had been dating for a year before moving in together. We set a 2-year deadline to decide. Took less than a year for things to crop up that would probably not have cropped up until we were married and had titled property in each other’s names. Basically the extra time together in the evening (rather than being spent traveling to one-another’s place) or on the weekend, gave us the extra time to really get to know one another. Thank goodness.
“What’s love got to do with it
What’s love but a second hand emotion.”
Then people wonder why their lives have no meaning.
Reading both the article and the comments makes me sad.
There was a time when men took pride in responsibility, sacrifice and commitment. I’ve been married (only once) for 22 years. Raised two boys. Got thru alot together with my wife. At times it was not easy or simple. But, we kept together by being committed to each other. And, with God’s help, too. I’ve been very blessed.
I think folks these days just expect everything to be easy. Kinda like the old fashioned candy machines where you put in your 25 cents and pulled the lever to get our candy bar. Now, if you don’t like the candy bar you just thow it in the garbabe and keep trying. Secondly, it’s all about “ME”. All the focus on “ME” makes a permanent bond with a spouse all the more difficult.
Relationships are about self giving.
Well said, Keithp. And it requires both in the relationship to practice self-giving. Today I sometimes hear people say that if they meet the right person then they won’t have to work at it. Well, that might have been OK in 0.0001 percent of history’s marriages, and in a higher percentage of movies and fiction, but I believe that it usually takes continual, conscious effort on the part of both in a marriage for it to succeed.
Very well said sir! I truly miss the days when everybody had their duty and place. I love my upbringing with my father as the breadwinner and my mom as caretaker of the home. Very traditional and well balanced. Both men an women had their place in society and contributed meaningfully. Women had great say in the schools and dads contributed to that too. Women had the time to do so, men tok pride in their households not only because they provided for their family but in their choice in wife who also presented herself as head of household. Their children were their legacy to the world and they raised them to reflect their values and to push them out of the nest when they were ready to be functioning citizens – to be an asset and not a burden.
I really miss that world.
That world still exists for individuals who choose it–maybe not for the majority. Society is doomed therefore. I’ts all about good choices. I married my husband in 1983 and am still married to the same man. I never cohabited and was a virgin at marriage. My son married 3 1/2 years ago, never cohabited, and both he and his wife were virgins at marriage. I have two more virgins at home and in college. We’re Christians, not hypocrites. We love and support each other, we laugh and cry together. It’s what family is supposed to be like. But it isn’t accidental, it’s the result of correct world view and self-sacrifice by BOTH spouses, equally.
The comments here are depressing in the extreme.
When I ask people why they want to shack up, invariably I get two responses.
1. “I want the benefits of marriage without the downsides.”
In short order, most of them find that cohabitation is, in fact, the exact opposite. It is a lot of the worst parts of marriage without many of the good parts, and it is all the worst parts of being single without the good parts. Being single and not cohabiting doesn’t mean no sex (as per the article) but it does mean that you don’t have someone checking up/waiting up for you, and you have some alone time and freedom in scheduling. Cohabiting without marriage does not give you these abilities and worse does not confer the legal legitimacy to your situation (DNR requests, power of attorney, visiting rights in the era of HIPAA, rights with any offspring of said cohabitation, etc.). I personally know of one case where the next of kin (a father) did not allow the shack-up boyfriend he couldn’t stand to visit his cohabitor girlfriend while she was in the hospital in a coma and there wasn’t thing one shack-up boy could do about it.
2. “We’re saving a lot of money by paying just one rent.”
Especially love this one. My comeback is, “Oh, so your freedom is worth $XYZ per month.” The response is always, “No, of course it’s not!” Um, yeah, it kinda is. You are trading away your ability to come and go as you please when not out on a date for a cash sum saved by living together. That is a hard number value, little friend.
I recently had a medical appointment. The woman who took my BP and temp asked, among the other questions, “Are you sexually active?” When I replied in the negative, she said, “That’s good! That’s the only safe sex [outside of marriage].”
I found that peculiarly refreshing.
I think, perhaps, that the only way of avoiding the no-win situation is really knowing the other person, and making a promise in deepest trust. I think marriage and cohabitation are both entered into far too easily these days, and consequently there is not a high degree of permanence. The selection process has to be treated as a very critical life decision. It cannot be lightly made.
Your point about the need to approach the choice of partner carefully is so true! Know yourself and know your intended before you take this important step. It will save you a lifetime of misery.
Happily, more and more men are abandoning both marriage and cohabitation. We are going our own way. We are finding ways to live peaceful and productive lives without women.
This is what female supremacism in society has wrought.
Enjoy spinsterhood and cats, ladies!
Hey single guys have cats, too!
You speak the truth that feminists, white knights and social conservatives are terrifed by. Men used to be responsible for women with women accountable to their man. Now the state demands men being responsible while freeing women from accountability. Hence, MGTOW.
Amen!
I’m a traditional, happily married, Christian woman. I reject the feminism.
But my husband and I have 2 cats. Cats provide a lot of companionship and entertainment for older folks like us!
I feel that if we made men feel more respected and appreciated, they would not feel the pressure to find ways to live without women. We need all the strength and honor that boys and men have to offer or we won’t survive as a civilization. My nine year old son already sees that Hollywood tends to paint white males as bullies or buffoons. If young men felt they had more value, they would not be so lost or driven to living without women. We need each other.
Agreed! Men at their finest are truly noble creatures! All the art, literature, architecture, music and man-made beauty in the world was created by men – and white men at that.
I’ll second that!
I am so fed up with the war between the sexes. Men are fabulous, wonderful creatures who build the bridges and buildings, they invent, install, and repair the appliances that set us free, they drive the trucks that bring us our luxuries, they grow the food, they drill the oil, pipe the water, wire the electricity etc., They protect us from the bad guys. In short, they do practically everything that makes the world work. And for whom do they do this? For women of course. And what do they get for this? A steaming pile of horse manure laid at their feet every day. Nothing amazes more than a good man who does his job. This continual waaah, waah! He wants to enslave me and make me pregnant crap has got to stop. I never met a man like that. If they ever existed they are all dead long ago. Men deserve their pride, and they’ve earned respect. I love you guys!
Trust me, guys like that are still around. My daughter runs a court-ordered domestic violence treatment program. She sees guys like that in her classes on a regular basis.
So, the fact that some men are abusive negates all the good that men do? Sheesh, last time I try to give a compliment. By the way, I like all of your other comments.
Now that was interesting. Two conservative women – one of them with a Ph.D. – citing nothing but tactical (philosophical and legal) reasons for avoiding cohabitation. No citations of any peer-reviewed research on the subject (not even by the resident Ph.D.) and not a single word – not even a glancing shot – at moral reasoning.
Oh wait, I almost forgot. This is PJM. Only the token moralist (Klavan) is allowed to connect any dots between reasoning and morality.
My bad.
For those who find such editorial policy confusing (to say the least) or bizarre (at least for ostensible “conservatives”), Another Slow News Day has a blog page devoted to the topic of Cohabitation…
http://anotherslownewsday.wordpress.com/cohabitation-2/
… which includes both peer-reviewed research results and moral examinations.
You’re welcome.
In an equal before the law society, women need to get it through their head that men aren’t financial slaves for women to purchace and trap with their sexuality. I consider such attitudes to be evil, akin to those who thought that blacks were best when they were slaves.
Instead, she has all the responsibilities and none of the protection of a legal marriage.
And what “responsibilities” are those, if she not married? Clean up after herself? Share in the payment of a bill? Have to lift the toilet seat? Be nice to the man she is living with and treat him as an equal being with thoughts and dreams of his own, because she doesn’t have a legal hold on his wallet enforceable by sexist judges who don’t think women are capable of paying their own bills ever again after a marriage? Horrors!
In a sense, she is demoted to little more than a modern-day concubine.
Right. This from a member of the sex that has used the courts to turn marriage into financial slavery for men in favor of women who can’t be bothered to take care of themselves, now that they have equality.
She is demoted? By whom? Under what authority? The BF came in and said “I am taking a wife, you are now Concubine #1″? What a sexist lie. The woman who moved in can damn well move out if she doesn’t think shacking up is to her favor. Maybe if more women acted like adults in charge of their own lives and not slightly retarded children who need other peoples money to get by, we’d have more respect for marriage. And respect for women.
You’ve demanded “freedom” and “equality” but what that actually means is money continuing on flowing from men to women, either through discarded and broken marriages or the welfare state, when men refuse to marry the little grasping harpy they found out she was during the shack up.
And yea, the author here only seems to view men as a resource to be claimed and exploited, like a coal mine, and anything less than full ownership and control by the woman is unacceptable. Men are chattel, only useful in buying shit the woman can’t or won’t buy herself.
Pssst! Sarge! Women lower the toilet seat. And complain about it.
oops my scredd in not meant in reply to your post. Though I will say there is a moral componenent being overlooked in that women have an immoral attitude of entitlement towards other peoples money and the resources of society.
Thank God you mentioned “peer review.”
How on earth would any of us know what to believe without a never-read peer reviewed article in some professional shrink’s journal written by some grant-funded professor in a state-funded school who needed to publish something or risk a tut-tut from his “peers”?
Peer review is what got us in this mess.
secular marriage arrangements and cohabitation both render a couple unequally yoked.
What’s missing is God. Practically speaking…why why is God needed? Because both partners have each other by the short hair.
God is needed to manage our curiosity about things that have no answer.
– so is that woman on Facebook?
men are waking up to the fact that marriage as we once knew it is just about gone. my parents have it, but then their generation had little notion of divorce for profit. when the courts decided women got auto-custody of children (unless she is dealing drugs in the open, or something similar), they cut the throat of marriage. 80%+ of divorces are filed for by women, as they get auto-custody just as easily. think those numbers are just coincidence. Dr. Helen knows the truth because she is a smart woman dealing with it every day.
while on the subject of handouts, the only war on women is that soon they will be required, like us all, to tighten their belts. declaring they are being made war upon is just their way of trying to keep all the goodies they are constantly awarded by big gov. want proof? look up all the gov. programs for poor little sis, and then look at the lack of anything at all for men.
Don’t hold your breath that women will ever be required to go without their government cheese. Neither the Left nor the Right seem willing to challenge female supremacism.
Get ready to expel that breath, because I am a woman who was brainwashed by the newborn sluts of the 60′s who became my teachers throughout junior high and high school. Their message was to turn us young girls into whores. I can’t tell you how angry I am about this. My solution is to turn the clock back and brand every girl a whore who listens to stupid little boys who only want their willy wonked! ALL the old consequences should be brought back. Force men to be men again and not perpetual little boys who can wiggle out of responsibility. I want girls to value their virginity because their emotional damage it does to the young to lose it is not worth it. Save it my young ladies. Value it like your grandmothers did! It’s worth it and your young men will value you for it!
Only before God, will I and a woman be one.
Before the State… nothing.
Unfortunately the Church will kick you out the door if you tell them you want to be married outside of State control.
The Church is and always has been outside of the state. It is the state that conformed to the church and formed its laws around marriage. Why do you think gays want marriage? They are already accepted by the state with civil law – they want to break the back of the church with marriage.
After 46 years of a great marriage I am sure that the ‘test drive’ is nonsense. Women and men can choose a good partner just from dating and common sense.
Marriage is a religious, cultural institution, thousands of years old, where young men and young women made lifelong commitments to the future of their children in exchange for conjugal privilege. Rights and privileges always goes with responsibility: the right and privilege to drive on the road goes with responsibility of respecting traffic laws for the safety of others, but you always find someone trying to synthesize a third way.
The censorial disapproval of traditional American culture to children born out of wedlock relates to this Christian ideal: that foremost of all children’s rights, is to have, responsible, committed parents with the mature understanding that the meaning, purpose, ultimate happiness and fulfillment of life was found in something much larger than the pursuit of the self.
The cultural revolution of the 60s was about separating rights and privileges from responsibility in the pursuit of the self: the philosophy that happiness is found in pursuit of pleasure and gratification. The ultimate extension of this philosophy, for many, is the euphoria of drugs.
These “rebels without a cause” burned the heritage of committed parents (Norman Rockwell America) and broad connection to the “village” of extended family that they (undeservedly) enjoyed but did not pass it on to their children.
So many of these children are seriously disadvantaged: starting with prenatal drug and alcohol exposure, suffering emotional and psychological damage, sociologically handicapped, and worst of all — the loss of that religious/ cultural operating software that makes civilization possible.
Large amounts of social welfare spending, teaching effort, extravagant school facilities is never going to offset the serious loss of abandonment of the previous generation in the pursuit of the self. So many of these castaway children have no reference points to guide them into the future except what is brutally learned on the street in a dysfunctional society. That is the only reality they know, and school is only a meaningless rite of passage required by law.
People, it is quite simple.
The divorce rate of a society depends on one thing, and one thing only :
Will the living standard of the woman go down immediately if she divorces?
If yes, that society has a low divorce rate.
If no (due to crooked laws), that society has a high divorce rate.
Everything from ‘I’m not happy’ to ‘we grew apart’ are just rationalization for the cold financial decision. Even observers who say ‘that marriage was on its way out’….. well, note how that situation didn’t seem to happen nearly as much when divorce had a financial cost to the woman.
Interestingly, societies where men can divorce women at no cost, and keep custody of their children, still have low divorce rates (Turkey, Iran, etc.). Men tend to be responsible adults that way.
There is overwhelming evidence that the father, rather than the mother, is far more likely to put his children’s well-being above his own. Female behavior in countries where the woman can profit from divorce, vs. male behavior in countries where than man can easily toss the woman out without cost, prove this. This is a damning indictment of the morality of most women.
The bad thing about these countries is the very high rate of infidelity on the part of the men. They overly dominate to the point that their wives are effectively slaves. I wouldn’t call this a good situation either. Both situations allow one party to be wholly irresponsible to the extreme (women in the us, men in many muslim countries).
Agreed! I lived in Bahrain for over a year and I use to laugh, well laugh at the hypocrisy of all the Saudis that would come over the causeway on Thursday and Friday to score with gold digging British flight attendants, formally known as GAGs, if Gulf Air even exists anymore. They would throw their money around, while presumably their Arab wife or wives weren’t aloud to leave the house or they could be beaten to death. Yes, Toads, that’s exactly what we need to solve the problem /sarcasm
Toads,
Try “He’s a narcissist, and I can’t take his bullying any more.”
And these days in the majority of states in the U.S., the law does not grant a woman permanent alimony. A few years worth, maybe, if she’s been a stay-at-home mom for over a decade and needs training before entering the workforce, or else if her kids are still very young. After that, it’s off to work, baby! And the child support amounts are very low. There’s a 50-50 split of whatever assets were acquired in the marriage, which is fair. Believe me, plenty of women are still filing for divorce under these conditions. They will take the financial hit and the tough situation of working full-time while raising children on their own in order to keep themselves and their children as far away from their abuser as possible.
I loved being single when I was. I would no more have lived with a girl than jumped off the roof. I always felt that if i wanted to live with you I’d marry you…..and I absolutely had no desire to get married! I’d never even give a woman a key to my apartment….that was too big a commitment for me.
I can’t figure out what the benefits are for either sex but especially for the woman….My God…why would you say yes to this set up? Is your self-image really that damaged?
“test-driving” a relationship?
These idiots (male, female, whatever) have no idea whatsoever about the concept of Love.
Want to reduce the divorce rate to near zero? Give the man automatic custody of the children with no child support from the ex-wife’s earnings. Then, from his point of view, he automatically gets to pay for day care — or put up with and be polite to his supposedly obnoxious wife so that he retains her child-care services. The wife, on the other hand, no matter how “out of love” she has fallen, still has to put up with and be polite to her supposedly obnoxious husband or else lose daily contact with her children.
I have been told that these were the basic rules for divorce in Victorian England (along with having to prove fault, etc., before being granted a divorce) and those Victorians had a very low divorce rate.
Note that these rules just lower the divorce rate; they do not necessarily lead to a greater likelihood of being happy in your marriage …
I wholeheartedly agree. Men should by default get the children. Fathers are more likely to push the children ahead to become independent. Single mothers tend to raise wimps and entitlement babies.
If you want a full on read of the subject:
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/
In the 20th century, confusion entered the picture in regards to the usefulness of marriage as a conservative social institution to manage a culture’s sex instincts and love. In old Europe, love sometimes grew out of marriage, not marriage out of love.
Islam still manages the human instinct in this way, having a mistrustful attitude towards love and sexual attraction and prioritizing them below marriage. Iran in the 20th century still had strict purdah, the keeping of women out of sight of non-family males and even Jane Eyre wore a veil. And when Charlotte Bronte had a veil on Jane, East India Company doctors in Hyderabad had to visit aristocratic Islamic women from behind a wooden barrier, basically feeling only their wrists.
Without institutions, yes, we’ll get together and eventually say it would be easier to have sex if we had the same bed. And then there’s my books – don’t touch them.
Man , I hear a lot of bitterness between the lines in some of the comments here.
It is very possible to have a lifetime of love and marriage if you have a higher purpose than little games and self actualization. My wife and I were a couple of waifs who found Christ and each other. 30 years later our lives are still linked and our house is full of love. It’s not a generational thing. It’s a matter of being willing to give yourself away to another unreservedly.
Your hubris and ignorance are impressive. Plus, your generic shaming language is just a way you use your cowardice to silence those who speak the truth.
Things are very different for young people today, and contrary to what you delude yourself into believing, it is not 1972 anymore.
You need to spend the next 30 days reading Dalrock’s blog. He exposes how Christian frauds like you are really just feminists in disguise, and think young men are expendable cannon fodder.
It is unethical to recommend marriage to a young men today, given the state of the laws.
As a young person I do not wish for you to speak for me Toad.
Especially with such venom.
Trang: I’m holding out for the same. Wish me luck.
Wish you luck? Of course, because you will certainly need one heck of an excrement load of good luck to survive with that silly, infantile, unrealistic attitude of yours? Were you born yesterday? Have you not observed women in their natural habitat? You’ve never seen them lie, cheat, steal, and kill to get what they think the world owes them? You are truly an idiot.
Unbelievably nasty post. Why such venom for someone you’ve never met and for no reason? I thought libs were the kings of ad hominem.
Dalrock has probably the best analysis of the situation from a traditional Christian perspective. It should be required reading for all social conservatives.
This language of “it worked for me, therefore it must work for you!” really lacks empathy and denies reality. There’s a roughly equal number of men and women in the country. If feminism poisons 1/3 (or more!) of the women and makes them unfit for marriage, what exactly are we supposed to do? Bill Bennett would say marry them anyway and take your divorce-theft-rape like a man because it will inevitably be your fault that Snowflake is unhaaaaapy.
I’d rather keep my house, thanks.
Dang , who peed in your cheerios? Maybe you need somebody to give you a little kiss and turn the toad into a prince. I won’t spend 30 seconds reading Dalrock (whoever he is) and his antichristian propaganda. I have great disdain for sneering frauds like you who hate Christianity (and apparently in your case women)and yet profess to be conservative. You don’t have a clue about the enduring values that made this society great and are the only thing that can renew and preserve it.
A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society.-Russell Kirk
It’s interesting to read these so-called conservatives who deny the reality of where our rights come from. They betray their tortured existence with their venomous screeds.
You just don’t like being schooled by a higher intellect. Dalrock exposes with airtight logic how Christianity has become about 99% overlapping with feminism, and views men as the most expendable resource.
Thank god more young men are figuring out the church is a fraud, and are spending their time elsewhere.
Haven’t read the sainted Mr. Dalrock, but he sure seems to have his zealous acolytes amongst two or three of you. If Dalrock claims 99% of the church is aligned with feminism, he’s full of crap. Maybe 99% of the United Church of Christ or the Metropolitan Community Church, but that’s a preposterous claim otherwise. If he’s turning out bitter little eunuchs like you jokers you can have Mr. Dalrock.
Dalrock has exhaustively proved that this is the case. You know that you can’t stand up to the airtight logic, or you would go there and debate.
Let me clarify that ‘feminism’ is more than just abortion.
‘Feminism’ is a belief that the well-being of women is much more valuable than the well-being of men. Most Christian conservatives strongly believe this, as seen by their actions, even if they don’t admit it outright.
You need to go there and educate yourself, as you badly need it. Then you will see why young men are avoiding church, and avoiding the modern contract that calls itself marriage.
“A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society.-Russell Kirk”
What about THIS HERE SOCIETY, where I actually live? In this here society, only MEN are governed by morals; women have exempted themselves. Only MEN have personal convictions about justice and honor. Women have no such burden. As long as women have all the power and none of the accountability, we cannot and will not be a good society in any way shape or form.
You need to work on our prejudices. I meet plenty of men without any morals or even any sense of purpose. I meet women who have morals and a concern for others. I meet a lot of people, men and women, who are completely focused on self. Don’t let your bad experiences blind you to the kind and virtuous women that are out there. You may be looking for love in all the wrong places.
First, reading comprehension is goood. He said, my wife and I. So he isn’t a closet christian feminist using shaming language. I like Dalrock’s site, but you are completely misrepresenting him, and acting like a Dalrock myrmidon misusing his phrases as some kind of truncheon to show how smart you are. You failed.
This from the moron who uses no-maam as the website to show people. That is quite possibly the least respectable, least intelligent manosphere site.
Dalrock does a much better job of exposing how Christians and lefty feminists are completely united in the goal of enslaving and abusing men and boys.
A successful marriage requires two people who are prepared to sacrifice for each other–and if you aren’t prepared to sacrifice for each other, how the heck are you going to make the sacrifices required for raising children?
There are still women and men who are prepared to do what is needed to make a marriage succeed–but we are definitely in a society where greed, lust, and selfishness are now the dominant values. That won’t work.
My wife and I just celebrated our 32nd anniversary. (We met at a Bible study; she used the word “cognizant” in a context that made perfect sense, and I realized that I needed to get to know this gal a bit better.) There have been some challenges, especially in the first couple of years. It can be done.
When cohabitation ends, each party takes their stuff with them and that’s it. But according to Rhonda Robinson, that is unfair to the woman.
The “fair” situation, she seems to be saying, is a situation (marriage) in which – upon divorce – the man statistically forks over lots of money to the woman, also in the form of monthly payments well after the divorce (because women statistically “marry up”, and it is more common that the man earns more than the woman).
Each person keeps his/her own stuff = really unfair for the woman
The woman gets the man’s stuff and also some of his future stuff = fair
You have just described why women having the right to vote appears to work well for the first 2 generations, but by the third or fourth generation, becomes fatal for any society that allows it.
My goodness! So much bitterness on this thread.
I have been married twice. My first husband refused to get a job. It was clear I was going to have to support three people (including our child) if I stayed with him. Haven’t gotten a penny of child support.
My second husband abandoned me for another woman. He is two marriages out from ours and is one sick cookie. I was heartbroken by what happened, but glad now.
My story is commoner than you think, so I wonder at all these men who talk about what a bad deal marriage is for men. My first husband has a wonderful child with no responsibilities. My second liked marriage so much he keeps doing it and doing it and doing it.
“Spinsterhood and cats” someone jeered above. Well divorced women aren’t “spinsters” – but yes, I have found great peace by myself. It’s fine. It’s so much better than the decades I spent trying to make 75 cents into a dollar.
I wish I’d chosen more wisely, but I have a pretty good second best.
I’m not unhappy. Why are you?
Thank you, Ann. My, a lot of ‘women hating men’s club’ here.
So if men air their grievances about women and the legal system that gives them responsibilites but no rights when it comes to reproduction, family, marriage and sex, they’re a bunch of “woman-haters?” It really bugs you that men are speaking up, doesn’t it? Get used to it.
Hey Doc, read between the lines. There are a lot of women hating men commenting here . I feel sorry for them. Maybe they can all convert to the religion of peace, The middle east is full of misogynistic , angry woman haters. Probably take us a generation to kill them all off.
Men are avoiding marriage and enjoying cohabitation because the power balance is stacked in our favor, and I, personally, am not ashamed to admit it. In a marriage, the power is reversed. Don’t blame men because we’re wising up to the legal and financial trap(AKA ‘divorce rape’) that is modern marriage, blame women(and especially feminists) for making it so.
Actions have consequences.
Rhonda Robinson seems to have the unexamined assumption – prevalent in society – that men’s only worth is their utility to women.
If you look at it that way, she’s right: Cohabitation is a raw deal for women because they can really get a vice grip on his utility and output with marriage. Any idea of what is really fair between two human beings is not considered at all, the issue is simply that Situation A only gives a woman so much, and Situation B gives her more, so Situation B is the correct one.
Obviously! LOL
The problem is that more and more men are just refusing to play the rigged game. Ruh-roh.
The debate is moot. Liberals might cohabit more, but their divorce rate is much lower than conservatives.
Or, in other words, conservatives will not cohabit, but are more likely to divorce.
What’s the difference? For me, cohabitation allows me to test the waters without getting broke by throwing a wedding.
See:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
especially, “Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significantly higher than for other faith groups, and much higher than Atheists and Agnostics experience.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/25/united-states-divorce-rat_n_935938.html
http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistfamiliesmarriage/a/AtheistsDivorce.htm
styx
Divorce rates among couples using NFP is around 3% last I looked. Quite a few people don’t find it to be worth that upside, but if you want a marriage with low divorce rates, you might investigate that.
Probably because couples using NFP have strong religious principles driving them to use NFP–and thus driving them to remain faithful to their marriages.
I am not surprised that atheists and agnostics have low divorce rates. I suspect that their marriage rates are also low. You can’t get divorced if you don’t get married.
Good grief. Reading these comments gives me one more reason (among other reasons) to be glad I’m not a young person in this day and age.
The left has completely achieved its goals of destroying the traditional moral order. It is part of why America has no future.
I know women feel differently about it, but it is a feeling not a logical thought that they are expressing when they say that marriage emanates from love. But scientifically speaking, that is biologically speaking, there is only one reason for mammals to commit themselves to each other for life and that is to procreate and raise the children. Most offspring of low end animals have much shorter life spans than humans, and thus will become independent and self-contained and self-supporting in only a few years or seasons, and thus need parental protection and training only briefly. Human babies, being more complex and advanced, don’t have that luxury, though when the socialists in Russia elected to destroy that civilization in 1917 to rationally build something better (they didn’t even get close) tens of thousands of children were living like wolves on their own and though the conditions must have been horrible, alot of them survived without many natural built in weapons (claws, fangs, horns, etc.) until the state (Stalin) had to eradicate them since they were so undisciplined. So marriage as a biological compulsion, driven by love of course, which is the engine not the destination, is primarily to take care of the children and raise them until they can be responsible adults, based on the teachings given them within the strictures of the Family. This is the purpose. If we taught this in our schools and people realized it, that procreation is the biological goal of sex and that marriage is the biological/sociological tool that was naturally developed for one reason, to create, protect and properly train and educate the children (and to protect the physically less dominant partner as well) then we could return to the view that marriage is a neccessary component of love and having children, and not the other way around.
Marriage: Advantage woman.
Cohabitation: Advantage men and children.
Conclusion: The law hates men and children and takes them for granted, most likely because too many law professors are of the Hannah Rosin mold.
Action: Rediscover the Euro-American tradition of witch-burning. Start with the Swedish Minister of Culture and work your way down.
In no way are children advantaged by their parents cohabiting or divorcing. Both scandalize them and sabotage them.
Young guys, do you have straight male friends you’ve had for almost your whole life that you never want to lose? If you do or even, did, then you have the model for a good wife. The old saying is that sex is the cement of marriage. Do you know the properties of cement without the aggregate? It looks similar and feels similar but its brittle, easily broken, erodes to dust under stromy conditions. Cement/sex, alone is a bad product to live with.
Cohabitation “without benefit of clergy” — forgive me for misusing that idiom, but I’m not the first — was and is the logical conclusion of all the ideas floated about “trial marriage” half a century ago. It doesn’t matter whether you abhor the idea or applaud it; it flows from social developments that confronted American men with incentives we were unable to resist. Most important among those developments were the destigmatization of divorce and unilateral “no-fault” divorce.
Just in case you haven’t noticed, divorce is expensive, emotionally wringing, and long-lasting of effect. Even when there are no children and no big-time community property involved, it’s never easy to cope with it. And the law being what it is, the husband almost invariably gets the shaft and gets it hard. So we started to explore alternatives.
Some of those alternatives involved fairly radical measures, such as vasectomy. Others were less permanent. The most popular was cohabitation, “to see if this would work long-term.”
As I said above, you don’t have to love the idea to recognize how it flowed from the developments of the Fifties and Sixties. The incentives changed in a fashion that sharply reduced the average American man’s willingness to commit quickly and on slender evidence. We responded in the only way imaginable, given the incentives and the legal environment.
By the way, when Italian women of high birth took up husband-poisoning as a fashionable pastime, men became a lot less interested in marriage, too. Just a coincidence, no doubt.
The problem, of course, is that we’ve managed to exchange something bad (high divorce rate, husband exploitation) for something worse (cohabitation). Trying to hold anything back for fear of loss is a way to guarantee a relationship fails, and it will still be devastating. It also makes you into a liar. Finding out that a woman is a liar doesn’t give you a right to lie to her, it just gives you the right to call her out on her lies and tell her you’ll have nothing to do with them.
I agree. Young men should neither cohabit nor marry.
Either way, you are letting a woman into your home, which will quickly be transformed into her home, and your life will no longer be your own. All the stuff you enjoy will disappear. You will find that playing video games, watching sports, and other activities with the boys will cease. You will suddenly feel guilty if you open a beer. Money that could have been well spent on a very large TV will instead go for a couch & chair that you mistakenly think is pink when it is quite obviously salmon. The decor will be changed to suit a woman’s taste and 90% of the stuff in your closets and bathroom will be hers. You will find yourself a visitor in a home that was once yours.
But not to worry, this unhappy state is not forever. When the transformation is complete and it is the perfect hen house and your income is large enough, you will be kicked out to make way for the artist or bad boy who will help her find herself, and be left with nothing but the bills and a restraining order.
Hasn’t happened to me yet, and we’ve been married more than 32 years. Maybe it helps to find the right woman?
Any man considering any sort of relationship should first read the Book of Proverbs end-to-end.
For all those guys who claim they want sole custody of their kids. . .
The woman who will keep you from seeing your kids is, most of the time, not your ex wife.
It will be your latest shack-up, girlfriend, new wife, “Friend with benefits.” She’ll tell you she doesn’t want your kids around. They make her nervous. They make her think of your ex. They’re bad (your ex isn’t raising them properly!) They don’t respect her! She wants her own kids, boo-hooo, boo-hoooo!
And, most men will listen, and give the kids back, full time, to their ex—or to grandparents—or any available aunt, uncle, cousin, etc., all in order to make their new significant other, happy.
Also. . .
Our society just doesn’t want to admit this, but Mom/Dad’s boyfriend/girlfriend is often the most dangerous person in a kid’s life. Even non-violent stepmoms will often do their best to alienate a man from his kids, even getting him to disinherit them—and leave everything to her kids instead.
And this cannot be blamed on the ex wife.
There might, actually, be very good reasons (sorry, Dr. Helen) why a woman might not like the idea of her kids going to see Dad, if their new “Mommy” doesn’t much like them, and if Dad is so infatuated with her, he doesn’t intervene when she “disciplines” them. Or if he’s trying to re-live his college days, and is hanging out with some very unpleasant, questionable people. (And the same goes for many fathers, who’se ex wives live the same way—-my point being that divorce is a great evil; and so is shacking up.)
Not exactly. The study I read said that the most dangerous person in a child’s life is Mommy’s Latest Live-in Boyfriend, with Mommy’s Latest Boyfriend and Mommy’s Latest Husband coming in close behind. (The safest person, except on the Lifetime Channel or whatever it’s called these days) is Daddy, Who is Married to Mommy. Stepmothers were somewhere in the middle iirc.
Ah, yes, who needs some bad ol’ woman around, when you could spend your life playing video games, watching sports and drinking beer?
After all, you have to decide what’s important in this life! And what’s more important than that? /Sarc.
Modern marriage is just a bad deal for men. Of course, modern concubinage is a bad deal for women, who will, I suspect, soon be opting out of it. The guys may will be left alone, in an (uncleaned) house, that is entirely their own, with no narsty girl things lying around, to get girl cooties on the video games—and no one to cook, or clean up after them, just like Mom used to. And these days, you can’t just go out and grab your woman by the hair, and drag her back home to do her womanly duty, or get her family to beat her, until she submits; there are such things as restraining orders these days, and the law tends to frown on this sort of thing.
A houseful of cats doesn’t seem like such a bad alternative to many modern day males, and a lot of women are headed that direction. Men will have to learn to embrace their inner gay, their inner, celibate monk, or try for one of those swell foreign brides, who will fall desperately in love with—their green card.
Who is this not a bad deal for? The monster nanny state, who will be the go-between, for men and women, offer to get rid of that narsty traditional family which oppresses everybody and take care of all those pesky kids that result, when men and women do get together, in spite of all this—not to mention all those helpful doctorly types, who will “counsel” men and women that, “It’s not your fault Sweetheart-Buddy! It’s those evil feminists/patriachalists, who are oppressing you!”
And neither men nor women will have the right to complain about this; it will all be their own choice.
BettyBlue:
I live alone and live in a very clean house. I do it myself, but I could easily have someone come in and clean it.
If you think that giving a glorified cleaning lady half equity in your home is smart – I don’t know what to say.
I have always been interested in partners, not women who want to clean and then tag half my stuff. That seems to be misogynistic today.
Since women and the State have colluded to strip men of their money when a committed relationship fails, why on earth would they put the video game controller down? Porn is easier and safer. Adn far, far cheaper.
You are complaining about the behavior of men who are paying their taxes and supporting themselves, simply because they refuse to provide their wallet to some harpy who can’t be bothered to get her own careers worth of money and thinks she’s entitled to other peoples money simply because she possesses a vagina.
And, maybe if enough women were not so into marrying a paycheck (hypergamy) them they’d get more respect from men.
Sarcastic though you may be, you’re not that far off. There is a large chunk of the population (of both sexes) that isn’t mature enough for marriage or genuinely afraid of it, and these should do exactly as you suggest- live celibately, if not take a vow of celibacy.
I consider it my duty to inform you all of what is necessary for a man to have a loving, lasting relationship with a woman:
1. Find a professional woman that likes housework.
2. Find a woman that is good in bed.
3. Find a woman that likes a family and kids.
4. Find a woman that likes to go hunting and fishing.
5. And the most important thing in keeping this relationship; NEVER let any of these women meet.
There would still be arranged marriages if reactionaries had their evil way.
This article is really just a woman complaining about not being able to control men with her sexuality.
Jeannette, if you go back and re-read my earlier post, you’ll see I mention Mommy’s boyfriend.
But, just because Dad’s girlfriend/shack-up/new wife/the pole dancer he met in Vegas scores in the middle of something (whatever that means) that doesn’t mean she isn’t dangerous, too. Certainly, more dangerous than a kid’s birth mom.
And, as I pointed out, even the non-violent stepmommies can harm their stepchildren (assuming they even get to the point of acknowledging them as stepchildren, which many don’t) they can still be emotionally abusive, rejecting, do them out of their inheritance, and come between them and their father. It is the stepmom (or whoever) who is far more likely to tell a man he can’t see his kids than his ex wife, in my experience. And, of course, if she makes herself nasty enough, no ex wife will be willing to entrust her with their kids. It’s a win-win situation—for the stepmom.
This is, of course, politically incorrect. We are supposed to see Mom/Dad’s new boyfriend/girlfriend (sometimes it’s Dad who has the boyfriend; sometimes it’s Mom who has a new girlfriend) as a completely harmless, if not beneficial persons, a new chance at love, a new start, a new family, yadda-yadda-yadda, whom the kids are supposed to instantaneously love as their new Daddy/Mommy.
If the kids don’t immediately love them, there’s always therapy. . .
My point being that divorce, and random concubinage, is a very bad thing for kids. (It’s not all that great for adults, either.)
It’s great for a state that wants to eliminate the family, and gain more power over both men and women, however.
Because, of course, men never try, and never have tried, to control women with their sexuality—or their finances—or the law—or their superior strength.
They never try to control other men, either, or their children, or their subordinates at work.
/Sarc.
And we’ve been told about how males like that are awful, sexisty, sexists from the Planet Patriarchy and evil control freaks and possible wife beaters/killers who are not to be trusted. It is viewed, quite properly, as the pathology that it is.
How is it any better when women engage in it?
Vis-versa, SGT Ted, how is better when men copy these very same feminist pathologies?
Maybe the idea is for both sexes to drop their respective craziness, and realize they’re both being manipulated?
The time for women to improve their behavior was 40 years ago. It is too late now to demand that men not retaliate against abuse by women.
Women are the gender that broke the social contract. You are just trying to avoid the consequences of your misdeeds. To claim that ‘both genders need to improve now’ is like Japan in 1945 to tell the US, ‘I’m sorry for what I did, so let’s be friends’. No, the time for that was 1941, not May 1945.
If Japan had offered unconditional surrender without us resorting to nuclear weapons to induce it, we would have accepted. The key, however, is unconditional surrender, not conditional armistice. Likewise, if the harlot wife who divorced you sincerely repents and seeks to reconcile, take her back. Hosea, you have a right to be angry about being betrayed, but do not harden yourself to mercy, lest God deny you access to His mercy.
“Reality”, if you saw your wife/girlfriends as “Glorified cleaning ladies” I really don’t know what to say, except I’m not surprised none of them wanted to stick around.
Well, SGT Ted, if porn is easier, and far cheaper, why not just go for it? Then, you don’t have to worry about the female sex at all! (At least not the flesh and blood version of it.) You’ll be happier—and, trust me, your female acquaintances will be happier too!
As I said earlier, many women hating men would be better off embracing their inner gay, or celibate monk. And the women who might otherwise have become entangled with them would be MUCH better off!
And, if everybody adopts this attitude—happiest of all will be the Nanny State, who is the only who really benefits from setting men and women at war with each other.
BettyBlue,
What you are presenting here is kind of what men are complaining about. I think the men above are trying to put their experiences into words.
You are simply trying to get a nasty hook into them and cut them down (in a subtle way).
____________
“Reality”, if you saw your wife/girlfriends as “Glorified cleaning ladies” I really don’t know what to say, except I’m not surprised none of them wanted to stick around.
____________
You’ll be happier—and, trust me, your female acquaintances will be happier too!
____________
Betty can’t handle it that women are being criticized by men. There is a certain type of woman that does that on posts like this.
Essentially, the groupthink faults of modern women are really the result of something men did or did not do. Betty completely ignored my point about how pathological behavior that is condemned in men is considered Standard Operating Procedure and to be expected and celebrated when it comes to women. Note the belittling tone and the shaming language.
Let people do as they please. I like that. The issue is what burdens are they placing on the rest of us. I don’t like paying for others’ foibles and children.
What we all have to understand that many people of all genders and preferences have visions of life which are not very pleasant for the people they would like to share their lives with.
I personally find that the common view of marriage is most unpleasant, though I have been in the same on many decades, we are not of the common coin: we actually like each other. People fall in love with ideals and not with people.
It doesn’t take too many train wrecks before other people decide on other paths. When I was a kid, it didn’t take too many glue sniffers to convince the other kids that glue sniffing had no future.
I’ve seen a number of women who choose to cohabit because their ex-husbands are paying alimony and their new “partners” are bums.
Sounds like the promising environment in which to raise a child.
“Try before you buy” is a good idea for both sexes provided there is no hidden agenda involved apart from finding out if you could both make a life together before taking the plunge into marriage.
If one partner is using it in bad faith, then you get the situations above this post…
“There is a way that seems right to man, but the end thereof is death.” Cohabitation is such a path. “Try before you buy,” seems perfectly logical, but in the end, you are more likely to break up when cohabiting than you are to divorce if you marry without cohabiting married, and for those who cohabited before marrying, the divorce rate is higher than those who didn’t cohabit. Avoid contraception, and your prospects for preserving your marriage skyrocket, as the divorce rate plummets to 0.2%
Why does cohabitation have to be a test drive for marriage?
I used to cohabitate because I damn well wasn’t going to get married.
Now I don’t even want that. You just have a girlfriend who has her own place and her own JOB and her own life. Two adults, not one adult pulling the wagon and one adult riding in the wagon (aka: housewife).
I guess there’s an argument for marriage if kids are involved, but if there are no kids involved, men who get married are just flat-out stupid (and also naive if they buy the romantic comedy “soul mate” stuff). It’s their business if men get married, but I’m going to call it as I see it when they start pointing their greasy pork finger into my chest and trying to declare their superiority.
As a 62 year old male boomer whose parents are about to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary with no divorces in my family, I am appalled by the men’s comments (young men I would say). What you are scared of is not marriage. It is divorce. An unwanted divorce I presume, pursued by the gold digger wife. Well, if you can’t tell what woman is liable to fall into that category, and you don’t know how to keep a woman happy, then I guess you should be scared. But most women if treated right, would not divorce just for money. Find them, treat them right and don’t let them go. If they marry you in the first place, they see something they want to keep, and just be intelligent enough to show them that side, whenever things get rocky. It can be done, and that is what Marriage is, in a nut shell. Now Man Up you whooses.
Amen bro! For the haters above; I took the time to read the erudite Mr. Dalrock’s blog and I don’t get the acclaim. Just another obscure nobody tilting at windmills.
” … (young men I would say).”
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Thanks for the compliment: I’m 56 years old.
I read stories at one time about the Civil War. One stuck in my mind. A former slave was asked to simply go to work again for the master. This time the wages would pretty much equal the housing and food he had before. Like, same old stuff.
“Mr. Johnson is one of the best slave owners. He hardly ever beat me, well only a few times really hard. I going to work for him for the rest of my life!”
You just don’t get it. Chivalrous men and hard-core religious men are working under an illusion. Sometimes the wives even smirk about it. They demean the men while they are getting a free ride.
I seriously don’t get it – but the guys above praising all of that don’t seem to want to explain it, they just want to make insulting comments.
If anyone wants to explain it – other than “the Good Book says I’m the master, so I don’t understand why she divorced me” – then I’m all ears.
I feel really sorry for you. There are gold-diggers out there. In a society focused entirely on greed, lust, and selfishness, this is not surprising. But what I hear when I read a lot of the comments here is men who were badly hurt and either:
1. The women that they have known have really taken terribly advantage of them. (There are many such women, as there are similarly selfish men.)
or:
2. These are men who were so selfish that they did not realize how badly they were treating their wives, with predictable results.
Hi Clayton E. Cramer,
I was never “badly hurt”. I never married.
I have a strong memory as a child, though, of my mom going over to comfort a woman whose husband committed suicide out of the blue. That was probably 40 years ago – back when men didn’t talk about their stresses.
Your comments just don’t hit it.