I can see that. I think it is a challenge to explain the benefits of parenting without sounding all Pollyanna about it. Despite the stress, I think having a child is one of the best decisions I ever made. My life has more joy in it than it did before. I often describe it as the birth of a whole new sun. There’s the one at the center of the solar system and then there’s the one walking around my house. This is good, hard work, the worthwhile kind, and challenging enough to keep me engaged.
While I think people are right to make the decision that feels best for them, I think economic instability is a significant factor in folks being reluctant to get involved with another person or have a family, so I am in support of policies that make having families easier. There are a lot of people who would have a family if it weren’t for doubts about whether they could support a child. I think it’s a shame for those people.
Yes, I struggled in my post. The downsides are obvious and legible, the benefits not so clear. Perhaps we lack shared tropes to describe them; I was thinking the other day how there are an endless series of songs, movies etc about romantic relationships, but very few about the relationship between parents and children. Still, it doesn’t seem to be helping encourage the latter, since the thread was about how young people aren’t so keen on getting into relationships.
Re @jsc1953’s original question, perhaps there’s a general societal problem of valuing self indulgence and an easy life above the satisfaction that only comes from working hard to achieve something. Relationships can require work, compromise, and taking a risk; easier and safer to stick to casual flings, or just stay single.
The other thing that is happening is raised and maybe unrealistic standards/expectations, plus choice paralysis. I saw a young person asking on social media how anyone ever found a compatible partner before internet dating, with it’s huge pools of potential partners, and ability to screen for a multitude of personal characteristics. But it is far easier to judge the best choice for you from a more limited set of options, and people just didn’t expect their partner to match them perfectly in every way.
I’m 42. Since I was about 25, I’ve had many single female friends who I thought would be good partners are would introduce a close male friend or relative to. I’ve had about three make friends in the same category (though quite a few who were already married or in long term relationships). In short, I think there are now far more eligible women than men.
Our marriage experience sound not that dissimilar to yours. My wife and I met when we were young. Dated a long time while we attended business school in different cities. Lived together for quite awhile before finally getting married and having kids. Our oldest is a bit on the spectrum, so some things tend to be a bit harder with him.
People use terms like “it’s hard”, “hung in there”, “maelstrom”, “chaos”. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to have to “endure” their life for a handful of moments that don’t suck.
The data (that there are far more women who are both willing and capable of a serious committed relationship than there are men) is pretty clear. I have read a few statistic-studded essays on this theme.
Although what is also seems clear is that the real thing that has changed is that women’s standards for what they will put up with have become out of step with what men are capable of. Time was, women accepted that they would do the emotional and domestic work of a relationship, and men would provide a paycheck and a last name, both of which were societally necessary to women. As women clawed their way to more financial and sexual independence, that deal seemed less and less interesting to them.
There are more men now who perceive that they need to pitch in to make a relationship work than there used to be, but the imbalance is still very noticeable. At least to young women. And, as long as women are not averse to having sex with men whom they judge are not relationship material, that imbalance will probably remain troublesome.
Could the number of young adults with poor social skills and a low level of confidence be increasing? My twenty-something self could probably have been in a room full of females who were looking for relationships with no other males present and still not end up with a date. A few probably would have thought, “can’t he see I’m interested?” No, I couldn’t have.
There is also a mismatch in that a greater number of women are college educated and above than men are. These more highly educated women tend to desire greater equality in a relationship and have career ambitions; the less educated men in greater availability are more likely to have so-called traditional values. They are not great matches for marriage to each other.
Yes, at least for in person social skills. The experience needed to develop those skills is relatively lacking with much more of the social world occurring on line, only exacerbated during Covid.
In the Before Times, pre-COVID, I had a coworker who was around 26. We were chatting about this-and-that when the subject of dating came up, so I asked her, “Do guys still ask women out face-to-face or do they pretty much handle that via text messages these days?” She said it was mostly via texts these days and I jokingly told her when I was her age women had to look me in the eye as they tore my heart out, ripped it apart, and stomped on the pieces right in front of me.
I can’t help but think any dating advice I’d give a kid would be as outdated as telling someone to go into an office to drop off your resume, and, oh, don’t forget to ask to speak to the manager while you’re at if. So long as you give him a firm handshake you’ll make a good impression.
I appreciated and agreed with most of what you said. I just had to single out the above bit, which struck me as false, while painting 50% of the population with a broad brush of (inadvertent) contempt. (Italics mine)
Most men are capable of fulfilling women’s puttin’ up with standards. That many of them don’t do that is another thing.
Hi. I know you and I have failed to communicate a time or two, but please accept what follows in a spirit of friendly curiosity, not as a gotcha or an invitation to irritation or bickering.
I accept your contention completely. Makes qualitative sense to me. I’d like to read some of your sources if you can still find them to get a quantitative sense of the problem and the trend over time. Thanks.
I wasn’t quite that bad, but the difference in my skill & confidence level now at 65 and then at e.g. 25 is night and day. I’m sure glad to be me now, but it acutely highlights just how much I missed out on back then. Sigh.
My soon-to-be-ex-wife has a Master’s. And demanded the same of her dates she got from the typical on-line sources. It made for a very small dating pool despite being in a ginormous metropolis. Of course she was in her late 50s and early 60s as this was going on, so not directly applicable to college and immediately post-college people. But it’s a real factor.
The educational attainment demographics were just approaching 50% - 50% from a previous male majority as she and I were in college in the late 70s and early 80s. Now the balance has gone a long way farther towards female dominated and that extends even into the advanced degrees.
Lack of social skills because so much day to day human interaction has been replaced with virtual communications.
Unrealistically high standards (again, possibly due to excessive social media consumption) (ie what percentage of women look like Margot Robbie in Barbie and what percentage of men are over 6’1" and make in excess of $200k a year?).
High costs associated with traditional marks of adulthood such as home ownership and raising children.
Ready access to alternatives to being in a committed relationship - online dating, career, videogames, media, other forms of recreation.
A general lack of role models for what makes a good, solid, long-term committed relationship (ie their own parents suck and everyone they know is divorced)
Maybe even a fascination with non-traditional gender roles and alternative dating scenarios plays into it as well (like so and so’s non-binary cousin is in a poly relationship with etc etc.).
Excessive “wokeness” makes men either afraid to approach women or they overcorrect and think they need to act like alpha-male douchebags.
Maybe I should have used a different word. I think young men are not inherently incapable of relationships with women, but they neither are taught to value relationship skills nor hone them, in comparison with women. As women are getting more aspirational (pickier), men are retreating into fantasies and loneliness.
When I surfed around, I only found op eds and blog pieces, which sometimes listed statistics, sometimes not.
Here’s one that makes a lot of different points:The Hill (blog)
A Doper turned me on to this site some years ago. It’s sobering how fast I can reduce the 6M population of my metro area to 50 women. Most of whom would already / still be married unless they’re a psycho.
It is also interesting to put in the opposite (e.g. me as a woman seeking a man) then enter my own facts as “her” desires to see how many similar men like me are out there as my competition.
To be clear, the things that sucked were life, not the relationship. It has overwhelmingly been a good and supportive relationship. I can point to only a couple times it went off the rails in twenty years. Nobody can avoid the shitty parts of life whether they are in a relationship or not. But it can help to have someone there to support you during the hard times.
Sacrifice is an inevitable fact of adulthood. I was just thinking about this the other day when a woman my age was talking online about how angry she was that she had to choose between a family and career and she couldn’t have it all. Like, that’s life? Women face many inequalities in society, that is 100% real. But not getting everything you want, having to sacrifice for the things you have, is a reality for the majority of people, regardless of gender.
I think that sacrifice can become more apparent when you get married and have kids, but it’s not even limited to that. Before I had a kid I sacrificed an inordinate amount of time and effort to really learn to write, and it’s one of the most deeply satisfying things I’ve ever done. By the same token, I’ve had to sacrifice my writing time as a parent. Life again.
It really depends on whether you define happiness as some sort of hedonic state or as something like living according to your values regardless of whether it’s highly pleasurable in the moment.
In the era of completely self defined relationships, no one is required to learn a particular relationship skill to meet someone else’s demand.
Consider two dogs. One dog is content to be fed and will do its business outside. It cuddles with the owner in night. Otherwise it doesn’t require much personal care.
Another dog requires a three mile walk every day to be happy.
Since we’ve dispensed with overarching ideals of what a dog should be, the three mile walk a day dog isn’t somehow a better dog than the low maintenance dog. They are just two dogs with different things they need to be happy. The world doesn’t own the three mile walk a day dog a complimentary owner. If it’s harder for that dog to find a happy context, so be it.
If you are going to free relationships from social context, you have to accept that your wants are just desires and demands, and the world doesn’t owe you anything. Other people don’t owe you anything. If a woman wants great sex and an activity companion and the same politics and the same religion and a certain level of degree attainment and a certain level of income, she is certainly within her rights to turn down all comers who don’t meet her requirements. She is NOT entitled that a partner that meets all of her requirements actually exists. Because she isn’t inherently better than these other people who are making their own decisions about what they require. If her list is 10 requirements long, she isn’t better than someone whose list is only 2 requirements long.
If you want people to live up to something, you have to create a greater social context where all of us are required to live up to certain things. If you don’t want that, you get what I said above. A list of requirements does not imply moral standing.
But what we’re really talking about here is a fundamental problem with men pulling their own weight in a relationship, and that is a value judgement I’m comfortable making. No woman is entitled to any kind of relationship, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a moral problem that many men expect women to do a disproportionate share of the work in a relationship. It’s more than a social mismatch. It’s a moral failing, and it’s one predicated on the belief that women should be subservient to men. Even if such a man never gets married, he is probably making the world a worse place for women.
I’m completely on the outside but from what I can see , it’s less that men expect the women to do a disproportionate share of the work and more that many men care less than women if there is a actual relationship at all. And as long as they are able to get what they want, whatever that may be, they aren’t going to do the work required to have something they really don’t care about.
If my husband wants the bed made every morning , he’s going to have to do a disproportionate share of the work involved in making the bed. Not because I expect him to but because I don’t care enough about the bed being made to bother doing it. And the only way that’s going to change is if not making the bed keeps me from getting something I do want, whatever that may be.