In the comments section of my recent article Dating Before, During, and After Apps there is an interesting discussion about manipulative statistics and their utility for promoting marriage. Let me just quote what Gert wrote:
What I found funny was the claim that men in marriages are happier and live longer. I know so many dysfunctional marriages with depressed men. It also raises the question of where this alleged statistic comes from and how it has been interpreted. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
There have been a few studies that purported to show that married men are more successful or make more money, completely ignoring that more successful men simply have more marriage opportunities. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, which is clear to us but not necessarily to journalists and academics. However, I am quite certain that a lot of academics deliberately misuse statistics in order to deceive their audience. This is particularly true in fields like sociology or psychology. Well, people working in these fields do not even hesitate to blatantly manipulate their data to fit their preconceived notions.
I am not sure that married men derive many health benefits from marriage, even in harmonious marriages. However, I can see why married men would get ahead of unmarried men in the rat race. First, if you are married, you likely will have more expenses compared to a single guy. Thus, you would need to keep your job and in order to keep your job, you would work harder. In contrast, an unmarried guy can much more easily save up a sizeable nest egg and just walk off a job if he has had enough. There are even guys who only work part time because that brings in enough money for sustaining their lifestyle. The counter-argument is that single men would find it easier to move around, always taking the best job opportunities. While this is true in principle, I do not think that this is a standard pattern. Given how late people in the West marry nowadays, we can probably safely ignore this aspect because when people get married, their career is normally close to its peak anyway.
If you wanted to assess whether there are benefits of marriage for men such as increased income or better health, you cannot just look at a bunch of married and unmarried men and compare them. Clearly, more successful men find it a lot easier to get married. If you are in good health and draw a fat paycheck, you will at least be considered for a provider role by some roastie. Even if such a guy would get cucked, in the classical meaning of the word, he would still get all the hard-to-grasp personal benefits of marriage, at least as long as he does not know that he is raising someone else’s offspring. Then again, I would not be surprised if there are people out there who claim that men enjoy the benefits of marriage even if they put a ring on some roastie who has three kids from three different men.
An objective study on the topic of marital benefits would have to be done as follows: pick a random sample of the subset of men who are financially successful, healthy, and good-looking. Then, you embark on a longitudinal study where you check-in on them in a fixed interval, e.g. every six months or every year, for several decades. It would be best if the study only ended after the last guy in this cohort has died. Of the original sample, some men will get married and others won’t. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that we did not include sodomites and pederasts, which have no interest in heterosexual marriage anyway. The point is that you need to make a like-for-like comparison to the best of your abilities, at least until we are able to artificially create 50 identical Giga Chads in a lab and create conditions for them where half of them get married and the other half does not. For now, a sample in order to find men of a roughly comparable level of success and desirability is the best we could do. Such research would not get funded in the current political climate.
To refer back to Gert’s statement above: anecdotal evidence seems to support the claim that even if it is true that married men live longer, the men in question would probably live even longer had they not gotten married. I also wonder if those b.s. studies promoting marriage bother to look at long-term effects. I know of a few guys who had their lives destroyed by women. Surely, they would have been better off on their own. In any case, to me it does not make any sense to claim that despite their current life circumstances, they are still better off because they were married at some point.
Very good summary. Your contribution reflects my thoughts very well.
Just a few days ago I finished reading THE DIARY OF LUTZ HAGENDORF, the diary of a German soldier, who could both read and write, chronicleing his time in the gruesome 30-year-war in the 17th century fighting for the armies of the emperor against the protestants. It is a mind shattering read, not only because of the descriptions of violence and desolation of the wzr time experience, but also, because in it he describes how he was able to marry and have a little family at the same time. He attributes this not only to the love he had for his wife and children, but also because he was and remained wealthy enough (mainly due to looting) to even be considered a mate in the first place and after that his ability to constantly provide for his family, which apparently was not possible for other soldiers or most other men in gerenal.
This observation fits quite well into a commetary below this blog post. Since I’m European as well, let’s have a look back into the so-called Eurpean “middle ages” (but my musings certainly apply to any subsequent epochs up to the 20th century as well):
As certified by a man like Hagendorf, in those times (and later as well) not many men could afford to officially marry and/or support a large family. Even outside of war men by and large lived an unpleasant life of toil and labour. Thus they first had to support THEMSELVES even before thinking about an association with a woman. If they they couldn’t become eligible for marriage, if they were in need of some specific female attention and some in-and-out-action, they could always take a trip down to the whore house down the street – if they could evem afford that. And if they had a good week or month incomewise, they could afford more than one trip per month. Back then as now, the one thing most females could and would sell to men was the illusion of their affection and sexual submission. (It’s not without any reason that the whoring proffession has been called “the world’s oldest proffession”.)
Sure such men did have occasional sex with non-prostitute women, usually out of wedlock, and their children were considered bastards, i.e. outcasts of society to a certain degree. Such children were not able to rise throigh the ranks of society, thus producing this kind of offspring in a way served as a dead end for a family.
But if a man wanted or was obliged to get married, it was usually to continue the family name, to further secure the family fortune or any kind of tradition associated with his family. It was usually the firstborn son who had to shoulder that yoke. In this case, marrying a woman he’d be romantically involved was certainly not the norm and frowned upon. Instead the patriarch of the family would get in contact with the silverbacks of other respectable and established families, either local or not. And those patriarchs would find A GOOD and SUITABLE woman for him, suitable for marriage. The quesrion of suitability would concern her health, her skills as a homemaker, her nurturing traits and how agreeable and overall supportive of a potential husband she would be. In most cases such a woman would also stem from the middle and upper middle class strata of society, if not higher.
As we can see, most women (and men) were not suitable for marriage, and the aformentioned procedure of agreeing to a suitable pairing for marriage is proof to this fact. Most women back then were not marriable, and also did not come from a middle-class background. They were either WHORES or they worked in menial jobs like seamstress, chambermaid, washwoman, kitchen aid, babysitter. Life was hard back then for women as well and those jobs took a lot of daytime.
Nowadays the situation appears to be much different and we’re led to believe that 1:1-marriage between a man and a woman is the standard in life that anybody has to end up in. When in fact it is not and it has never been that way. But industrialization made every-day life much easier for both men and women, but particularly for women who now had all the kitchen and hourhold applieances at their disposal to get their toilsome work done much quicker and easier – all of those appliances and machines having been invented and built by men, of course.
Now many more men were theoretically marriageable in the eyes of women because now they could afford a woman – and society and the state for many decades managed to turn it into a societal norm to get married. The only problem with this concept was and is that the overwhelming majority of women today still is not marriage material. They still are mostly whores doing menial jobs (albeit sometimes on a subjectively much grander scale).
And the advent of feminism plus an overall heightened level of delusion about themselves and about women in general certainly didn’t improve the situation for men. In even not so past times religion and the divorce laws which followed from it, prohibited those whores to divorce their current sponsor easily – but since women have now been liberated fom their patriarchal chains and societal shame, they can now “fully express” themselves more freely. And of all the great things they could now possibly do, many women choose to do exactly this: Marry, then get divorced, marry again etc. (i.e. whorish “serial monogamy”) and/or further exploit their sexual power over men by filming “only fans”-related content – just take a look at all those myriads of “amateur” female stripping and masturbating videos on any free porn website.
Still today all women sell the illusion of purity, the illusion that they too would be a marriageable woman (and they even like to believe this very lie), when they are anything but. The finances, souls and lives of scores of men that have been wrecked by the association with such whorish women are the scary proof of this. That Western society is no longer able to sugarcoat this unpleasant reality for men has become quite obvious. And in a way, for us men, that’s a good thing.
Re your last paragraph, that’s what Chris D is struggling with over in the open thread, namely red pill rage at having been lied to and gaslit and then undecieved. But as you say, the cat is out of the bag now and good luck getting it back in. Ever.
Aaron Clarey has written about this as well.
https://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2021/07/neer-man-confused-again.html
Wow, that’s really good. It’s a point i’ve often discussed with friends, and if I was a manosphere youtuber, it would be one of the first videos I’d rush to record.
I’ve mentioned it in the comments here as well. We were the unfortunate generation where the internet wasn’t developed enough to dispell feminist bullshit, so we FUCKING LOST OUR YOUTH TO LIES. I literally feel like my youth was stolen from me, literally how he explains it.
One example I myself give is how nowadays feminists are so fucking deluded they put their actual photos or link to their actual instagrams. So if you’re a young boy and you read an article from feminists gaslighting you about what “girls want”. You can just click on her profile and see the article was written by fucking Jabba the Hut. I didn’t have that privilege in my teens. Those same articles traumatized me, coz I was imagining cute girls writing them.
@joyklaprade
“In biblical gender role teaching on self-sacrifice, the man’s role to “take a bullet” is almost always imaginary.
Meanwhile, the woman’s self-sacrifice is very real, constant, and genuinely benefits others.
She cooks, does laundry, dishes.
He imagines being an action hero.”
@matt_e_cochran
“This is usually imaginary precisely because she lives in a civilization built by men who sacrificed to make sure judges, executioners, & border guards keep wicked people far away from her.
Now, we let women who can’t perceive this rule over us, and we’re losing it as a result.”
In other words, when your society progresses to the point where stupid doesn’t hurt any more, it’s doomed.
aj:
That Twitter exchange is hilarious. As if men don’t do work as well.
I know where they’re going, though, because I’ve seen it before:
“Women do more housework than men!”
Yes, they do, on average. But men work (as in work at jobs) more than women, on average. While I’m sure that there are relationships where the labor burden is unfairly skewed against the woman, I’m equally sure that there are relationships where the labor burden is unfairly skewed against the man.
The whole “But… we do CHORES!” garbage has been a talking point for feminists for ages, but it’s mainly just so much noise.
Someone should send her the clip of that female judge pronouncing sentence on some poor oppressed rocket scientist, only to have him say “Nah f— that b—-” and lay the smack down on her, ignoring her pleas for mercy, until some imaginary action heroes pull him off her.
Still, it’s at least good of this lady to make a public service announcement that any quality man should stay miles away from her.
Twitter and Facebook are some of the biggest negative asymmetric bets outside of actual Russian roulette. The upside is you get hooked on dopamine hits from people liking your posts. The downside is you can end your career, your freedom, or your life if you post something too insane even for the Left, or something that unpredictably puts you outside the Overton Window twenty years later.