Young men and relationships

In My Humble Opinion
41

I kinda wonder whether we have a lot more addicts than we did thirty years ago, except instead of talking about alcohol or crack, I’m talking about screens.

People generally look for partners who bring something to the relationship. That could be beauty, that could be money, that could be humor, that could be skills in bed, that could be skills out of bed, that could be creativity, that could be intelligence, that could be kindness, and almost always it’s some alchemical combination of those.

There have been eras and places where addiction swings through a population, and it may rob a big swath of the population of attractive qualities.

At the risk of being a crotchety old dude, I wonder if there are more people today whose reliance on screens have taken away from their attractive qualities. You have guys who play Call of Duty so much that they don’t have many skills outside of the game. You have women whose Tiktok prowess leaves little time for wittiness. You have people who don’t pay much attention to others in their personal space.

If someone doesn’t have a job, but they’re witty and creative and intelligent, I’m not sure they’re going to be doomed to singlehood. Or if they’re beautiful and kind, or they’re funny and a great lover. Combinations of traits can make up for a lot of deficits. Patriarchal theories about women just wanting a protector fall flat to me, sound like someone massaging the evidence to match their gender ideology.

42

This fairly describes my relationship at the moment. My so has a doctorate in pharmacology and runs a pharmacy. She doesn’t need me for anything but emotional support and companionship. Hell she does her own home repairs and is raising an adopted teenage boy on her own. She’s great and I don’t try to be paternal and “Manly”™️

She helps me to set a good example for Vaderling for what healthy relationships look like.

I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the problem, lack of good examples or too many prominent bad examples.

I think it’s a complex problem with many facets and to try to boil it down to just one or two or three is an exercise in futility

43

I knew I liked you :slight_smile:

44

I disagree with your contention about SDMB rules, but this isn’t the place for that debate. No annoyance here, but since you quoted me I did not want your point to go unrebutted. I’ll drop it at that.

45

The Six Harsh Truths article has been around for a while, and it seems like a good starting point for those folks:

I don’t think a hard “=” sign is the right fit there. But it hardly seems controversial to say that there’s considerable correlation. Wealthy trust fund babies who have never worked a day in their life are a thing, and there are plenty of ambitious folks out there who lack the intellect and/or luck to be convert their ambition into long-term financial security. But laziness is surely underrepresented in the rich category and overrepresented in the poor category, and being ambitious has to improve your odds of landing in the rich category instead of the poor category.

46

Good point. And in addition, junk food and a sedentary lifestyle have reduced many people’s physical attractiveness, and we are constantly faced with unattainable celebrities, who we may be subconsciously be comparing the real people we meet to.

47

When women are able to earn their own livings, and exist independently of men, they may well choose to do so. Men in general have not adapted to this reality. They often feel that if they double down on what worked before this was true, they ought to be successful. What worked before was to provide the means to live for the woman. That’s all that was required of them, really, since women were essentially powerless without them. Generally. In return, women had to provide all kinds of services.

When you consider that so many men are so ill-equipped to be actual contributors to a relationship other than monetarily, not having any sense that they need to be emotional and household maintenance and childcare partners, if they are to compete with even being alone, for women, it’s not surprising what is taking place now.

For a lot of women, they’d rather be poorer, than have to take care of another needy individual who doesn’t know how to pull their own weight and support them, essentially a giant whiny baby who could also be not just demanding but dangerous.

This is another perennial article, by the way, same statistics but with interviews with single women who say just what I said above.

48

Oh, wow. That takes me back to when Cracked still had decent writers. There’s a lot of truth to that article, for any type of relationship, friendship, romance, economic, you have to have something to offer the other parties involved. You might be a nice guy, but if it takes you five minutes to finish your turn when we’re playing Settlers of Catan, I’m not inviting you to board game night again.

49

I thought of that when composing my first post. I hope I’m staying on the right side of the line. Also, see the rest of this post.

I tend to think of it in terms of feedback, and not just to the topic in this thread. I sympathize with people who are alone and frustrated by it. I’m one of them. I’m sure we’d all like to find a solution to our loneliness. The problem is that that desire for a cure provides an opening for others to exploit. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a book I could read, or a guru I could follow, that would tell me what I was missing and make me charismatic, irresistible, rich, and/or happy. And along comes some group which promises to do just that.

The trouble is, their solutions make things worse instead of better. Which makes someone more desperate, and they cling even more tightly to the next solution they’re offered, etc. It’s like feedback going through an audio system, each loop amplifying the problem, until something has to give.

Not to hijack, I hope, but I see this dynamic in more than just lonely, young men.

50

So much this. The problem seems to me that many men have not realized that they can live independently of women. My grandfather, widowed in the 1980s, remarried within a year, because he literally couldn’t live without a woman tending house for him. I don’t think men in the 2020s are quite that helpless, but many have an expectation that there should be a woman in their life taking care of them.

51

There’s ambition and there’s ambition. There are plenty of people who have a great deal of ambition; but their ambition is to do something that doesn’t make much money. People whose primary ambition is to make lots of money are likely to wind up with more of it than people whose ambition is to accomplish something else, yes.

And – the society, as currently set up, absolutely demands that there be a shitload of people working in low wage jobs. There are only so many high-paying, well-respected jobs to go around; declaring that most people who don’t get one aren’t “ambitious” is nonsense. And declaring that most of them are “lazy” is even worse. Most of those people in the poorly-paid and disrespected jobs are working their butts off, often at things absolutely necessary for the functioning of society.

52

… Or non-White men.

Or women

53

And this confirms that WAG.

The state of marriage and cohabitation in the U.S. | Pew Research Center.

No real change in the total. Just fewer marriages and more cohabitations.

Taken together, six-in-ten Americans are either married or living with a partner, a share that has remained largely unchanged since 1995.

54

I am very lucky in that I have managed to work my entire professional life in a generally interesting (if not always as well paying as I’d like) field that lets me work salary exempt, generally not too hard, and with lots of benefits that many people would be envious of (for example, I get five weeks paid vacation this year and encouragement to take it.) I’m glad that I’m not one of the guys I drove past today that were digging up the street or putting up a new building nearby. That said, my ambitions for life were both fairly modest and rather grand simultaneously–and had very little to do with what I make or do for a living, other than means to an end–and it’s fair to say I have given up on them and am back to just marking time in life while trying to distract myself without working too hard. I wouldn’t be surprised at all that the guy with the shovel digging up the median is happier with his life than I am with mine. And let’s face it, that fixed road will mean a lot more to people than what I’m doing.

55

A small point. The Atlantic has spent the last several years running long articles explaining every problem that afflicts American society. More punditry than journalism.

Their batting average is not very high, IMO. I still subscribe for some reason - keep print magazines alive! - but I often skip the 10,000 word explainers.

56

I read the whole article and my initial reaction to it was “OK (white straight male) Boomer.” And this is coming from a 61F reacting to an author who is clearly not a Boomer. But I’m also speaking as someone with a 22yo LGBTQ person in the house.

The focus on attracting women who want to find a provider to marry seems straight out of the 1950s. If I’d read that myself in the 1980s, I’d still find the perspective antiquated and sexist.

I also wonder if it’s a young male incel perspective, since that’s a thing. (Thinking fans of Andrew Tate.) Not accusing the author of being a young male incel, but the perspective is just so “off” to me.

I mean, no woman wants to end up married to a deadbeat lazy sack-o-shit, but I think there’s some middle ground and allowance for bad times as well as good. It also feels like the premise of the essay is to advocate for giving young (white) men more opportunities in the job market so they can provide for their wives, and maybe let them stay home and raise the chillens. An acquaintance on another forum actually believes this, and he’s only 40-something.

57

As TLC let us know back in 1999, they don’t want a man with no ambition, no money, and who doesn’t treat their “shorty” with love:

A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly
And is also known as a busta
Always talkin’ about what he wants
And just sits on his broke ass

I agree with you, there’s some middle ground here. A young man doesn’t have to be over 6’ 2" making $100,000 annually to find a good woman interested in him. But a young man can’t just sit and do nothing hoping something good happens for him.

58

This is, in essence, my nephew.

He’s 24 years old, and is now almost three years removed from graduating from college, with a degree in chemistry (with a minor in music, specifically voice).

He’s an extremely smart young man, but he has no idea what he wants to do with his life now. He’s decided that he doesn’t actually want to work in chemistry, and he doesn’t want to teach, which would have been the two primary things he’d be potentially qualified to do with his degree.

When he was in school, choices were essentially made for him: what classes to take, what work to do to complete his degree. But what has become apparent is that he isn’t a self-starter, and has no idea how to even start exploring what his options could be.

Thus, he’s been back in his parents’ house since he graduated, and not doing much of anything. He’s never held a job of any sort, and while I know his parents want him to succeed, and ultimately be able to be self-sufficient, they are unwilling or unable to give him any kind of a shove to get him moving.

He’s also very overweight, which likely doesn’t help his self-esteem, and as far as I known, he’s not ever been on a date of any kind. (I have suspicions that he might be gay, or asexual, but I am not certain of any of that.)

He seems to be, in essence, waiting for something to occur, or some guidance to be given to him from above on what he should do, and shows no interest in seeking any of that out on his own. It makes me sad.

59

Rush wrote a song about that called Something for Nothing in 1976:

Waiting for the winds of change
To sweep the clouds away
Waiting for the rainbow’s end
To cast its gold your way
Countless ways
You pass the days

Waiting for someone to call
And turn your world around
Looking for an answer to
The questions you have found
Looking for
An open door

Oh, you don’t get something for nothing

60

That does put a different complexion on the issue. But I notice there is still a large difference between college educated and non-, even when percent married and cohabiting are combined.

I couldn’t find anything saying whether this gap has changed over time, though.