A recent article on the state of marriage and family discussed from a 32-year-old woman how she cannot find a mate for dating, marriage, and family:
We are living in a unique time in history. Never has politics been so polarised, never has mainstream society come so near to amorality (although Nero’s Rome came close), and never has it been so difficult for a woman to find a good man.
The latter is, I’ll admit, a bold claim but allow me to elaborate.
We constantly bemoan the state of society, the youth, universities, the media, et al, which seem to be collectively falling into ever deeper rabbit holes of noxious regressive ideas, behaviours and policies.
Religious affiliation and church attendance, especially among youth and men in particular, has never been lower. Pornography addiction is a scourge of epidemic proportions among men and even boys as young as 11. Put simply, the world is in a mess.
You’ve heard it all before.
Yet one important side-effect of all this that gets little attention is how tough this new environment has become for women, especially Christian women, to find good husbands. The situation is so dire there is now an emerging trend of women abandoning their faith and religious beliefs for the sake of romantic relationships.
Perhaps this is not considered a particularly serious issue when compared with Brexit, abortion on demand or the erosion of free speech, but I would contend it is every bit as important, if not more so. The future of our society depends on good, solid marriages, families and citizens. We need families to produce educated and informed young men and women who will continue fighting the good fight on all the issues confronting our society.
Yet for someone like me – a 32-year-old single Catholic – the situation looks bleak indeed.
I can talk to any young woman in my social circle and they will, one and all, say the same thing: there just aren’t any men. What we mean by this is there is a frightening scarcity of men aged 25-35 who are church-going, single and worldly-wise.
Most men I meet have two out of three of these qualities, with the latter often lacking. If they’re single church-goers, they’re usually awkward and in want of basic social awareness (a big turn-off for most women). If they’re more worldly, they’re generally not single or not religious. Even if they’re not religious, most young Australian men hold views and values that are left of centre and utterly opposed to our own.
This makes venturing outside church circles an often hopeless endeavour. (Not to mention the scarcity of men who are even open to the idea of chastity, but that is a separate issue entirely.) I’m not denying there are good, single guys out there. Of course there are. Several of my closest friends have been fortunate enough to meet and marry some wonderful, intelligent, principled men – but many more women haven’t been so lucky.
I meet them constantly at parties and other social events – beautiful, smart, single Catholic women who just want to find a good man to love and honour. Yet this pool of women seems to keep getting bigger, while the number of Godly, marriageable men is swiftly dropping.
In the early 1960s, 87 per cent of Australian men identified as Christian. That figure has now dropped to 49 per cent. I need not mention that regular church-going men are even fewer still. This trend is not just confined to Australia, either. It seems to be the norm across the West.
I went to a wedding in Seattle last year and met a woman about my age who asked me if she should move to Australia to try to find a husband, due to the lack of Catholic men in her social sphere.
The fact that this experience is almost universally shared speaks for itself. And unfortunately, the growing desperation fueled by this trend is beginning to result in some rather alarming outcomes. I personally know three Catholic women in their 20s and 30s who abandoned their beliefs in order to be with a man, all in the last few years. One met a man online who turned out to be married (though separated) with children, but she dated him anyway.
Another got married outside the Church, against the advice of her priest, to an agnostic she’d only been dating a short time. The third started going out with an atheist she met at university. A year or two later, she abandoned the Church and those closest to her to marry him.
These were not women whose religious faith extended to a tick on the census. They were all cradle Catholics, well-educated in their faith and very active in either their parishes or Christian communities. And these are just women I know myself – there are undoubtedly others.
Many will be unable to comprehend this. Indeed, I struggle to understand it myself. No matter how desperate you are to be married, how could anything be more important than your faith?
Women have traditionally been the bastion of moral integrity in Church history. It has been said that if you want to judge the moral compass of a society, look to its women. Go to any church and you will almost undoubtedly see more women than men.
According to almost every statistic, remaining faithful to one’s religion is more common to women, which makes each of the above incidents even more surprising.
Indeed, these stories are so shocking that just one would have been the cause of an enormous scandal to the woman’s friends and communities just a few decades ago. Yet the new social climate appears to fuel this special kind of urgency to be with a man – at any cost.
There has always been a social stigma around women who reach their 30s unmarried. This is perhaps felt more keenly in Christian circles, where marrying young is generally looked on very positively. I myself felt the panic creeping up on me when I neared my 30th birthday, fearing the judgement of those around me and dreading the whispers that I was too frigid or that I just couldn’t get a man. This is aside from the biological pressure women in their 30s face if they want to have children.
I get the panic, I get the struggle, I understand the fear. I’ve experienced all of it. Like many other young women, I firmly believed I would be married by the time I turned 25. My anxiety and doubt have steadily increased through all the birthdays, while my finger has remained bare.
Being so thoroughly convinced all my life that marriage was my vocation, it has come as a painful, and frankly humiliating, shock to find myself 32 years old and alone. So I completely understand the desperation that is now driving women to enter or cling to relationships even if they’re toxic, harmful or illicit.
Life is so much more exciting when the prospect of a man is in it. It’s no wonder women will sometimes stay far too long with, or even marry, men who are clearly wrong for them. The fear that this may be the only chance at marriage they’ll ever get is all too real, and the alternative can look like returning to a life that is boring, unpredictable and hopeless.
‘Sure,’ they think, ‘it’s not what I expected but at least I’m not alone – right?’ Loneliness is the real enemy in the minds of many women. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t. While this mentality has always existed, the dearth of good young men in our world appears to have pushed it into overdrive.
The fear of being alone seems to be driving women of faith to abandon everything they believe to secure a ring on their finger. I don’t want to be single for the rest of my life any more than the next girl, but that certainly doesn’t mean I think a man is worth overthrowing all I hold dear; everything that gives me hope and meaning and purpose in life.
No man could ever replace these things, nor would I expect him to, and it concerns me deeply that more and more women are losing sight of this axiomatic truth. Do we need more young men on the path to truth and goodness? Of course we do! I’m deeply grateful for the influence figures like Dr Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are having on so many men, young and old.
We should be doing all we can to help steer men in the right direction and find truth and meaning in their lives. Men who are guided by good principles, who have purpose and direction in life, are not only deeply attractive to women, they are invaluable assets to society. Yet many women I see and talk to feel as if their chance is never going to come.
I am now beginning to face the possibility that I may never marry. It makes me squirm with discomfort and anxiety even to admit this, but I have to be realistic. On a personal level, my faith teaches me that if I don’t ever marry, it’s possibly because that is God’s will for me. I may not like it, it may threaten to fill me with dread and despair, but that’s probably how I would have felt if someone had told me 10 years ago that I would still be single now.
And while I have experienced some real suffering in my 32 years, I know my life is valuable and meaningful and worth living, despite not turning out the way I imagined.
Moreover, I believe that if God wills for me to remain single, then that is what will bring me the most fulfilment and happiness in life.
I’ll be honest, this feels more true in my head than in my heart right now. I am still mid-struggle when it comes to acceptance, because deep down I don’t want to accept that this long-cherished dream of mine may never come true.
It feels as though accepting the possibility will shackle me to the inevitability.
But I also know, from wisdom and experience, that this isn’t true, that opening myself up to God’s will – whatever that is – will actually set me free. It may be difficult and painful, but only in the short term. I also recognise there’s an important difference between being alone and being lonely.
I implore other women in my situation to think about this. I know how easy it is to despair when you feel like you’re forever sitting in the waiting room. But I also know that neither a man nor a marriage can fulfil you in life – they’re just a bonus (if you’re lucky). If you accept this, and if you shift your aim to perfecting the life you have, rather than chasing after the one you imagine, you won’t lose your way.
For where your treasure is, there is your heart also. (source, source)
Now she does not say “gainfully employed” or “sexually frustrated” in this piece. However, her ramblings are delusional and do not reflect the current state of male-female relations.
There have always been difficulties between men and women, but it is arguable that the last decade has seen a marked decline in relations between the sexes that is undoubtedly historic. Women have been continually enfranchised with privileges once reserved for men in almost every culture to levels never before seen, and it is happening all around the world. One of the most powerful drivers of this is online dating, because women are able to “control” who they can interact with with a buffer around them (the phone).
Women are naturally hypergamous, as they will naturally seek out the “highest value” mate in the context of the current cultural climate. But “high value” does not correlate with “intrinsic value” such as employment, finances, stability, or personality, but as noted above, it operates firmly within cultural context. Thus if degeneracy and flashy clothes are perceived as something to have and emulate, then women will generally tend to seek out men who imitate those things regardless if they are mates of intrinsic value. In addition, if a man’s “value” changes, then a woman will likely be “less attracted” to him, and may leave him for another. It is a wholly internal process disconnected for the most part from a man’s exterior appearance. A man does not have to be handsome, or even a decent human being, but simply to match the cultural zeitgeist will usually be enough for him to get a date or even a wife.
Men are visual beings, and go by how women look. It does not matter if she is poor or rich, but if she has a nice personality and a nice body to match. Physical external characteristics trigger men, and is why women wear nice clothes, makeup, and perfume, because it attracts other men naturally as part of the male biological makeup.
Men cannot force themselves upon a woman because a woman has to “choose” a man. A man can influence the conditions of this such as by his presentation, use of language, environment, and lifestyle, but it is ultimately the woman who chooses to be with the man. This is the double scandal of rape, for in the first case rape is an objective evil because it is a man forcing himself on a woman, but in the second case when a woman chooses to allow a man physical access to her and she then cries “rape” not because he forced himself, but because she became dissatisfied with him and wants to socially absolve herself from association with him.
False rape claims are very serious and too common
It is enough for a man to control himself around women because of his natural biological drives. But women, as they choose based on internal characteristics, choose to betray or leave a man based on their own desires for power. It is why it is the common experience of so many that women will start “dating” a man while they are still married to their former spouse before divorcing him, because in their minds, they have already “separated” from him, and she is getting another man ready as her “replacement” for her husband before declaring her decision to leave him.
In the dating market, as noted above, women disproportionately pursue the top tier of men without respect to consideration if they are either top-tier women or are deserving of a top-tier man. This leaves a large number of men without a balanced access to women, and creates social anxiety, disorder, frustration, and the potential for violence.
A popular meme on the Internet describing marriage and family life, and somewhat crude, but with many valid points. Through a series of laws and decisions, the family structure has been attacked and men have little recourse. As such, many men simply would rather choose not to get married than avoid the above series of illustrations, which is common to far too many people and likely some of their own parents which they have directly witnessed.
The Church emphasizes marriage and family because marriage, when applied per the teachings of the Church, is a leveling force on the disorder caused by sexual license and in specific that of female hypergamy, and women cannot simply leave a man for their own personal desires. This concept has been directly attacked by the secular marriage system in the US in combination with laws on divorce, which acts as a mechanism of resource extraction and transfer instead of a fail-safe system for the welfare of the vulnerable members of society. The Church can only enforced her laws on paper, and because many do not seriously accept the consequences of the Faith, let alone what the rest of the increasingly pagan society thinks, a man who gets married is incredibly vulnerable to the whims of his wife with few legal means of recourse for protection.
The disorder of the dating market can be “leveled” by direct contact with women in person, such as meeting in a social setting, or through family involvement in finding a spouse. This is why “matchmaking” has been done in most cultures throughout history, because it eliminates the impulsiveness of a “free-for-all” model that is so promoted and boasted about in the US and Western world. But with the use of smartphones and the increasing depersonalization of society, it has helped to fuel the worst of female hypergamous impulses, resulting in a nation where the good looking and socially lauded are sexted regular photos of scantily-clad women of all ages asking for sex and the rest of the men can spend a week “swiping right” on Tinder and after several hundred women may get only a conversation or two.
It is true there are steps which men can take to help themselves to be more attractive to women. However, even here a man must know that his options will still be limited, as in addition to the above explained situation, many women today believe they can live in a state of suspended animation as far as their youth is concerned, fueled by the above ideas. It is not uncommon to see women well past their prime years of fertility, such as in their 30s and 40s, acting like they are teenagers in high school with regard to men and going out.
A man’s reproductive essence does not run out with age. A 70-year-old can sire a child with woman so long as she is fertile. A woman has a fertility window of about 30 years, from 14 to 44, and that window can vary depending on how many children she has, for a woman with many children will have an easier time conceiving later in life than a woman who has never had a child. A man getting married at 40 with a woman who is 20 can easily have over a dozen children. A woman getting married at 40 to a man who is 20 would be lucky to have one child, or possibly a second one.
There is much talk about how men need to “MAN UP” for women, but perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps it is women who need to re-evaluate what are absurd and ridiculous expectations that, spoken or not, are simply not going to be found. Most men are not stockbrokers earning six-figure salaries who work part-time that then drive their Jaguar to the beach, go surfing for an hour before returning home to sing her a love song and do the laundry-list of chores she wants taken care of, meanwhile she sits on the couch eating chocolate and watching Youtube videos while getting fat, and dinner is still not ready. Likewise, a man is not going to want a woman who has a large list of expectations but offers little for him or has been “used” by multiple men over a long period. While it may sound cruel, nobody wants to eat another person’s leftover food.
A popular meme describing male-female relations, and somewhat crude, but with many valid points
Most men want two things from a woman- food and sex -and will happily work very hard just to get and maintain a firm supply of both. Most do not care about what color the kitchen countertops are, what the neighbors think of something in the yard, what matches with what, or what somebody on the television said about something. Many can be happy with very little. It is the women who drive many of the expenses. Indeed, the fitness industry and gyms would close by the thousands if women stopped saying they want certain physical characteristics from men, and Home Depot or Lowes would shut many stores if women stopped wanting fancier houses.
It takes two to tango, and much has already been and continues to be expected of men. It is overdue that the women give their fair part.