The 2013 Census data came out today, and Han Solo at Just Four Guys has already made good use of it. My initial take is that the trends we have seen over the last few years may be leveling off for the later age brackets. At the same time, never married rates jumped over 2% for the 20-24 age bracket.
However, one year’s worth of data doesn’t give us enough information to assume a change in the trend. I’ll chew on this some more and if I think I have enough for a post I’ll put one together. In the meantime, check out Han Solo’s narrative and charty goodness here.
the never married 20-24 bracket doesn’t bother me that much. the trend on the 25-29 bracket and the 30-34 bracket bothers me quite a bit.
frightening really. what are the statistics for never married men in these age brackets?
Considering how trivially folks consider their marriage vows and the over-whelming secular concept of marriage that dominates pop culture, I’m fine if fewer marry.
I’d rather people not tarnish marriage any more than it already has been.
Really?? I find it horrifying that 82.5% of women aged 20-24 are unmarried. I married in that age range, as did many of my friends, despite being college-educated girls (this was in the early 1990s). Twenty-four isn’t really all that young for a girl to marry. I find it very worrisome that so few girls in that age range have married.
Dalrock, thanks for linking to my post. I noticed I used the white-only instead of non-hispanic white-only file. I redid the plots with the correct non-hispanic white-only file and updated my post. No real changes of note but good to get it right. I noticed the difference in our plots for the 20-24 y/o women and found that I had downloaded the wrong file. So thanks for putting up the plot which clued me in to my error.
SSM,
Yeah, really. I was very focused on working and getting my degree in that age range, the last thing I was thinking about was marriage. I didn’t know what I wanted for breakfast. To think that a woman could make a lifelong commitment to a young man at age 22 doesn’t make too much sense to me.
I am very happy that it worked for you Mary. I just don’t think it works that way for most women (particularly at that age.) So no, that doesn’t bother me.
The never married numbers for 30-34 really bother me.
I think there’s a huge cultural component in whether marrying at 20 is going to be stable or not. Both my mom and my sister did and many years later are still married. But they grew up and remain in a fairly conservative culture that values marriage and believes it’s forever.
“The never married numbers for 30-34 really bother me.”
Me too. Since at that age. The quality of the eggs are substantially reduced. The mutational load is much more higher. And various genetic disorders more likely.
The only way to decrease the other years is to decrease the 20 – 24 age bracket. The truth hurts.
Any women over 24 who isn’t married, such a waste. Career slut is the correct term!
To echo what HanSolo said, it can and does work for most women if they are raised properly. And the culture supports them, and encourages them towards this path. And punishes those who transgress.
Wow, after 34, White Non Hispanic Women are pretty much stuck with the bed they made in their twenties and early thirties… the difference between 35 and 44 is so small as to say if you’re still not married, you’re not going to marry.
I’d like to see the statistics on other groups… whether any MGTOW has taken root, and whether are not the number of divorced once never marrying again numbers have gone up. I’ve seen men put through modern divorce, and most are done after the first dance with that mess. I have to admit that I checked this thread to see how many never married men there are at my age.
Dear SSM:
The good news is that the females who are 18-24 who *are* serious about marrying have much better pickings to choose from. I’ve written about this before. I’ve run across a good number of these chicks. Many of them are virgins or almost virgins (maybe one or two prior lovers, which clearly embarrasses them and which they didn’t find particularly empowering).
These chicks are much like playas, in that they know exactly what they want, and they don’t waste much time on the men who aren’t going to spring for a ring and wedding date. The ones I’ve met have generally been married off very quickly (the ones I am thinking of are already married, in a matter of months, not years) to very eligible men — business owners, dudes with advanced degrees, and fellas from very good families.
So the foolishness of the many is the good fortune for the few. A smart girl of moderately decent looks can nail down a handsome, reliable man and ride him (lol) to a very nice life for herself. They would have had a tonne of competition just a generation ago. Today the field is wide open.
Also, as Grey Ghost pointed out several times, these women don’t need to forego their educations. They can study part time while raising the kids, and by the time they hit 33 or so, the kids will be grown and they’ll have an MS in some serious discipline, and they can get part time work or start a business. All the feminist twaddle about “having it all” will come true, ironically by not following the feminist script. Something to think about.
Boxer
Pretty much exactly what I said years ago Boxer, but I was sexist for suggesting a woman start her family first and have her husband help her with her education…
Now… years later, I just don’t care that much anymore.
Ok I checked Han Solo’s page out… an found the statistic I was looking for. checking when I was part of each category (now in the 35-39 category)… It looks like the number goes up with each new year of people joining a category in the 20’s and late thirties. In the early thirties, is the up and down from betas being consumed by baby rabies wives? It’s the only aberration from the trend that otherwise shows that each new generation of young men are seeing what they’re up against, and even if they’re a beta, thinking twice.
I still mean to be married someday, but I also think a marriageable woman is a rarer and rarer thing to find, especially when the table minimum has gotten so high for the gamble. Better have a sure bet, otherwise, don’t play.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/18/sorry-but-being-a-mother-is-not-the-most-important-job-in-the-world
FH,
She may not have found the right person yet. I sure didn’t. That is not a lot of adult years of knowing what you want and making sure you marry that one. At 19 I thought I knew everything. At 24, I realized I didn’t know a da-n thing.
I didn’t find the perfect person for me until I was 30. And didn’t get married until I was 31. That is just the way it worked fo rme. YMMV.
Tom,
That seems to be the case in my office, that’s for sure. Although I dont know if those guys are even away of the men’s movement of MGTOW. I think for them they just don’t want to get married if it means paying off all her debt. That seems to be the reoccuring problem I see all too often with the 20-something boys dating the 20-something girls, debt.
So they date…. a long time, trying to pay off the debt. Sometimes they live together (in sin) to save and pay off the debt. Kind of sad really.
Debt is a cruel master. Outside of my marriage, I finished paying off my debt just as the economy and my field of work slowed down in my early thirties. I have a mortgage payment and will eventually have a car payment again, but otherwise I pay off the cards each month. I have friends though who are still under it’s heel and they’re the same age as me, raising kids.
So I wouldn’t condemn a woman for debt, but rather if she had 10k in debt and wanted to spend 20k on a wedding and honeymoon ha ha. I’ve done photography for family friend’s weddings, so that they could keep the wedding under a couple thousand. Those couples are still married, because part of the fairy tale of being married wasn’t being able to spend without worry.
That was a bizarre Freudian slip…I meant ‘outside of my mortgage’ ha ha. I’m not married.
I’m tellin’ you guys: the secret to getting rich is to go long companies that manufacture cat food. Remember where ya heard it first!
Wait- is IBB female?
If so, that explains a lot about her hamsterizations.
If not, then what part of the relative SMV value graph did he not understand that he would so misunderstand the difference between men and women waiting until after 30 to get married?
bill burr has a great bit on being a mother being the hardest job on the planet. unless you’re looking to have kids (whether or not you’ll be able to keep them is irrelevant), there really is no advantage to get married now.
It’s really telling that, as soon as America unarguably hit a hard year (2008), nearly 1.9% of the 20-24 female population hitched up. They probably panicked, thinking that they wouldn’t be able to get a job after they graduated from university and took the first offer that came along. The slightly older women didn’t seem to panic; doubtless, they felt more secure because they already had jobs. Or perhaps they didn’t have as many suitors clambering for them. Yet lo and behold, as soon as the recession ‘went away’ (stopped being reported ad naseum in the main stream media), women’s trends went back to normal.
Wait until today’s modern woman finally realizes that, no, thinks aren’t getting better. The so called independent woman will not survive the quickly coming poverty. They better fatten up them cats, cause once the government can’t pay them any more these ladies aren’t gonna have anything else to eat.
I wonder if there are any stats relating to actually being ‘currently married’ rather than ‘ever married’? I guess it would have to be extrapolated from divorce stats which are notoriously difficult to calculate.
I suspect there are a heck of a lot more single women from 35-44 than the ‘ever married’ stats.
Good to see women continuing to empower themselves right out of the marriage (& baby) market.
Notice the sharp increase since 2007. That is a moribund economy knocking men out of the labour market.
For all the ‘high ideals’ women have about love & marriage….it appears to come down to money in the final analysis.
@TFH says: “Remember that marriage only is equitable (putting aside all the horrid modern laws) if the woman marries while her best years of appearance and fertility are ahead of her. So age 22 is the ideal age for marriage.”
Women married at 22 (the height of the SMV) right up until the 1980’s.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html
Up until WWII, men married at about 26, which can be argued was the SMV height for males at that time period. Most jobs didn’t require a high school education, so most men didn’t complete high school. Thus, most men had been out of school and working about a decade by the time they reached 26.
Most men today complete high school (at 18) and a significant number go on to get a bachelor’s (finish at 23) or a masters (finish at 25). When do men today reach their SMV peak? 33-35, about 10 years after they complete their education.
>> I didn’t find the perfect person for me until I was 30.
he was perfect, or you were in a a perfect panic and decided to acept a type-of-guy that previously was unacceptable?
The marriage rates are frightening etc etc? Sack up butter cup.
How every horrifying the marriage rates are, marriage is worse and their is no point in fretting over things beyond our ability to affect
the trend on the 25-29 bracket and the 30-34 bracket bothers me quite a bit.
It’s really not that big a difference, when it comes to the 30-34 crowd, really. The real story is that by 34, 75% of women have been married. About 25% of women seem to marry between 30 and 34, while about 35% marry between 25 and 29. Small numbers marry before 25 (17.5%) and in the late 30s (10%). By the time they reach 40, the marriage rates are low and in a fairly constant sense over time – these are really the “hard to marry” types at the very low end of the SMP/MMP who were more or less always screwed, augmented very slightly by women who simply wait too long (but this is a very small number of women, because the number of never marrieds at 40 is only slightly higher than it was in 1999.
So, basically, almost 60% of women are marrying between 25 and 34. This is also what we see around us anecdotally in most places in the US, anyway, isn’t it? Aren’t most of the weddings you hear about or attend between people in those age ranges (at least where the woman is in that age range)? It’s slightly trending up, but it isn’t that most people are getting married post 35 – it’s just trending between, say, 29 and 32, and it’s still the case that more are in the 25-29 group than in the 30-34 group.
It’s true that the under 25 group is dwindling, but we also knew that. There are some places in the country where this isn’t the case (I know an academic at WVU, for example, who says that the students there are often paired off and married in the 23-25 range), but for the most part it is very oddball for a woman to be married before she’s 25. I don’t see that trend reversing – there are too many durable reasons for it that themselves are not going away, and look to be fairly permanent (again, barring the oft-wished for doomsday reset scenario which always seems just … over … the … next … hill …).
I guess I just don’t see much to be worried about by these numbers. People are still getting married, almost all of them. Yes, later than before, which implies smaller families for the most part, but it isn’t anything like the death of marriage at all.
IBB
you didn’t get married until you were 31. You are a man, A woman past 24 is a slut in the making or well on her way. And even if she is a virgin she will have pretty much have the same characteristics of a slut anyway due to hypergamy always being in play.
I like Novaseeker’s analysis; all I would add is that as children are born to women in the 25-30 age group more than any other age-group a fair number of children are being born illegitimately to women who subsequently go on to marriage. That cohort of women who never marry (just under 10%) looks pretty constant.
As for the future I will leave that to TFH to predict.
As for the past it is interesting to reflect on how things have changed: When I was first a law student two members of my class were married before we had even begun classes. The other day I observed a chap – same pretentious moustache – I had known when he came down from Cambridge and who two years later qualified as a lawyer. You might thus have said he had a high-ish SMV, yet I recall that party – he would have been 21 or 22 – where it was clear that he and a woman, who I knew already had three or more children, were a newly-made item. They married. What was he thinking (the bitch subsequently divorced him). He was probably a virgin (not that we ever talked of such things) and she the first woman ever to take interest in him. Most if not all of my lawyer-contemporaries were married by their mid-twenties. With women marrying young, there was thus great pressure on men to find a woman, partly because one would otherwise miss out and partly because as between men a guy who had no regular woman was perceived a loser, as of course remains the case unless one has true Alpha abilities. In my early twenties I regarded women in their late twenties who were single as on-the-shelf and thus probably bearing some non-resolvable problem. This I found to be true; twenty-nine year olds were desperate and thus dangerous.
Every age has its problems and each age must sort out its own difficulties.
bc,
Well, the graphs are nice and all, but that doesn’t mean that people can simply choose to marry or not marry based on what the graph tells them is the most opportune time. It doesn’t work that way. We have men and women in my office that are single, men and women in church that are single, many of them would like to be married right now but they haven’t found a willing participant yet that they love.
Sometimes these things are outside your control. No matter how much I wanted to be married, no matter how many graphs I saw, I didn’t actually meet a woman that I could love for a lifetime until the first 3 decades of my life expired.
gg,
That’s correct. I just didn’t find the right woman who was right for me until I was 30. I have been looking for a few years (after I finally figured out what I wanted) and then, God presented to me the woman that would be my wife. We “vetted” each other for a few months. Got engaged. And we were married just 14 months after we met, immediately got started on having a family.
I was lucky. Some people are not so lucky.
No, it doesn’t have to be this way. It very much IS this way for some women and for some women it isn’t.
This past Sunday, I sat down with a friend who is going through a divorce with a wealthy woman who left him and her child. She was a model “wife material” when he met her, religious sweet, etc. oh wait except she was a single child of a super wealthy family. Spoiled and mean in the end.
Why ever, ever, ever get married?
Young women are attractive, but women more and more seem like dull, uninteresting creatures.
Nova,
That sounds right.
It it were entirely up to me (which it isn’t) 90% of all women would be getting married (for the first time) between the ages of 25 and say… 32. I wish I could instanly pair everybody up and they would love each other for a lifetime, alas….
Well, the graphs are nice and all, but that doesn’t mean that people can simply choose to marry or not marry based on what the graph tells them is the most opportune time. It doesn’t work that way. We have men and women in my office that are single, men and women in church that are single, many of them would like to be married right now but they haven’t found a willing participant yet that they love.
Sometimes these things are outside your control.
Some things are out of one’s control, but a lot isn’t. I think that’s reflected in the numbers themselves.
By 30, 52% of women are married. By 35, it’s almost 75%. While some people think that the greater amount of time y0u take, the greater the chances are of finding a match (larger sample size over time), the trouble is that as you march along the pool is shrinking, so your sample size is shrinking along with it. The result is that it actually gets harder, not easier, the longer it goes along.
Women are generally adaptive to this, so far, I think. The main impact is that the standards fall – at some stage they do, because ¾ are married by 35, and almost all are married by 40. It’s very unlikely that this is because no-one suitable was met until 34. It’s more likely that as the reality set in that the pool was shrinking (which is anecdotally enforced – women see that most of their friends are married, etc.), standards were recalibrated, and more people seemed suitable than before. And that seems to work for the women who are marrying in their 3os more or less. Some call this “settling”, but it’s probably just as accurate to call it adjusting to reality.
The best chance a woman has of securing a mate that is the “best” – i.e., not just suitable, but suitable AND the kind she desires the most – is when the pool is bigger in her middle 20s. I would say between 23 and 26. At that age, it’s still the case that the pool is quite big, she can keep standards higher (provided she doesn’t set them too high altogether, which is a common problem among women of this age due to their rock star status sexually) and secure a higher value, less of a compromise, mate than she will be able to do at 34. The issue is one of (1) motivation (i.e., wanting to “have fun” and “find myself” until late 20s or 30ish), (2) opportunity cost (how do I know that the guy behind door number three when I am 28 won’t be better than the guy I have now at 24?) and (3) miscalculations of what is achievable (i.e., mistaking rock star status sexually for ease of securing commitments from the men who are showering her with sexual attention at, say, 23 or 24).
Women differ on this. The fact that 35% are marrying between 25 and 29 says that there is a good chunk of women who are fairly realistic, marriage oriented, and are willing to bear the opportunity cost (or don’t care about it). A good number of these would have met their husbands when they were 25 or younger and married a year or three later between 25 and 29 as well. Of course, there is the ~27% that marry in the early 30s and the ~10% in the late 30s, which is about the same size as the chunk that marries in the late 20s. It’s the latter group which is, to a significant degree, comprised of the kinds of women I describe in the paragraph above. It needs to be noted, though, that most of these women do adapt and find a suitable person to marry, even if that person is not the kind of person they would have been interested in marrying when they were, say 25 or 26. Most do adapt at some stage – only a rather small portion does not.
So, yes, there is always happenstance and luck. But there is also timing, motivation, and miscalculation involved. The types who are marrying in their 20s are not just “luckier” than the ones marrying in their 30s in terms of just having found that special someone at that earlier age. There are differences in how they approach that phase in their lives, and that aspect of their lives, that tends to drive results in this area more than pure luck. Just as the “luck” of women seems to magically improve as they age through their 30s – having, of course, more to do with adaptation than luck, in the end.
Up until WWII, men married at about 26, which can be argued was the SMV height for males at that time period. Most jobs didn’t require a high school education, so most men didn’t complete high school. Thus, most men had been out of school and working about a decade by the time they reached 26.
Most men today complete high school (at 18) and a significant number go on to get a bachelor’s (finish at 23) or a masters (finish at 25). When do men today reach their SMV peak? 33-35, about 10 years after they complete their education.
If a boy is smart enough to get a master’s in a good (STEM) field, he will likely be able to finish a grade-based homeschooling curriculum between ages 12 and 14. Let’s say 14 (you know, the age when educated young men, two centuries ago, knew Ancient Greek and Latin?). If his family lives near a junior college which accepts early entrance students, he can get his prerequisites and liberal arts nonsense finished by 16. He can then do his upper level courses and finish his bachelor’s at 18. Master’s at 20/21. And marriage! He could, at the extreme low end, even marry at 18, provided he is employed during graduate school (I’ve heard this is common, but don’t have experience, so please correct me if I’m wrong).
It’s really not that extreme when one considers just how difficult school used to be, even in the 1950s after Dewey’s odious philosophy had taken hold. In comparison, most colleges today are a complete joke (excepting certain career fields). What do y’all think?
Here’s an eighth-grade test example from 1912. While some of the knowledge is specialized, the applied skills being tested are likely past most college students: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/century-old-8th-grade-exam-can-you-pass-a-1912-test/2012/01/04/gIQAxjC00P_blog.html
Novaseeker@10:00 a.m., “Some call this ‘settling’, but it’s probably just as accurate to call it adjusting to reality.”
In case you tl;dr’ed Novaseeker’s excellent 10:00 a.m. post, this is one of the greatest things ever said regarding this phenomenon. At ages 16-26, women have incredibly low standards for their sexual partners and absurdly high standards for their marriage partners.
When you compare 1999 to 2013
The 40+ married age bracket does not really go up. So I think the data is consistent with a delay in marriage rather than a trend never to get married.
so you are seeing a 37 year old 1st time bride rather than a 23 year old 1st time bride.
Marissa,
A lot of that is probably “the pill” being made available for younger girls and unsupervised dating in general.
Nova,
Serious question for the ladies here.
Do they really know exactly, PRECISELY what they want in a man (for a husband for their whole life) at age 21? That just makes no sense to me. At 21, I wanted this-this-and-this in a woman. At age 24, I wanted that-that-and-that in a woman (and there were completely different from this-this-and-this.) At age 28, I finally realized that I was wrong at 24 and WAY WRONG at 21 and I NEEDED TO HAVE these-and-those (these-and-those weren’t even on the “vetting radar” at age 21) because these-and-those were dealbreakers. But I didn’t know they were dealbreakers until I experienced living like that with a woman who didn’t have these-and-those (thank goodness we never married because we would have wound up divorced.)
You just change so much in your 20s. It would have been absolutely impossible for me to make a lifetime commitment to a woman at that age not because I was immature, but because I was infact mature enough to know that I didn’t know what I wanted. Do women really know what they want at 21?
I dated an immigrant from East Africa who was quite brilliant (she had a physics degree, and a job as a “scientist” — so much for us dudes who chase immigrants being insecure guys who want a dishrag of a girl to slap around, but that’s another story).
I asked her what happened back home in Kenya when some young kids get sick of each other after being hitched up as youngsters. She gave me sort of a dull look, like I was asking a stupid question, and then answered “the same thing that happens in small towns in Appalachia”.
In a healthy, traditional society, you wouldn’t have been divorced. Your family, her family and probably all your neighbors would get together and start prying into your business. Unless one or both of you had a *very* good reason, you’d both get your asses kicked and told to grow up, and would be forced to behave yourselves as a respectable couple thereafter. If there was a good reason (one party banging someone else) the offender would be run out of town, and would have to make his way to Nairobi (or New York City) on foot, and live without the comfort of the community.
In a healthy society, coupling is supported and respected as the bedrock upon which the community is built. People who disgrace marriage are treated like outcastes, because they’re not a benefit to the community.
Boxer
@ Robert Yates
You didn’t factor in divorce. Just because a woman marries between 18-39 does not mean that after the divorce men want to marry again.
I believe Dalrock said the strongest evidence is in support of a “re-marriage strike”; with which I concur.
Think about this… it is the stories behind the divorces that cause pause. Troubled marriages or late-age marriages or marriages to former carousel riders, etc, give men some pause, but the stories of divorce give the strongest caution. A lot of men have to go through the divorce grinder in order to demonstrate enough evidence in order for men to delay or pass on marriage or refuse second marriages.
Boxer,
I am not so sure those things happen in Appalachia anymore. I’m not saying the entire region is covered with coal miners (employed until they fail their eventual drug test), meth-heads, and meth-cookers who dwell in a life of rampant alcoholism and incest (ala Jennifer Lawrence in Winterbone.) But I’m not convinced that level of shaming kids into staying married exists there the way it once did not two generations ago. If you believe what Charles Murray wrote in Coming Apart and you believe his statistics (I certainly do) I would argue that they aren’t getting married at all!
Nontheless, here are the marriage rates over many years.
Number of Marriages per 1,000
Unmarried Women Age 15 and
Older, by Year, United States:
1922 99 (found on Web)
1960 73.5
1961 72.2
1962 71.2
1963 73.4
1964 74.6
1965 75.0
1966 75.6
1967 76.4
1968 79.1
1969 80.0
1970 76.5
1972 77.9
1975 66.9
1977 63.6
1980 61.4
1983 59.9
1985 56.2
1987 55.7
1990 54.5
1991 54.2
1992 53.3
1993 52.3
1995 50.8
2000 46.5
2004 39.9
2007 39.2 (Rutgers 2009)
2008 37.4 (Rutgers 2009)
2009 36 (UVA 2010; project moved from Rutgers)
2010 32.9 State of our unions data
2011 31.1 (http://ncfmr.bgsu.edu/pdf/family_profiles/file131529.pdf)
Note that the last figrues I had for UK were 18, and for NZ were 28.
Those of you with a strong math background well know that changing the rates of any function changes the future values of that function. You have a choice of looking at cute graphs year after year, or figuring out what the future values weill be, today.
scary sh-t ’71. your data is frigthening.
We all know where this is taking us.
Danny @4:07
Great Bill Burr video! lol
I think there is certainly something to that. What is called societal shaming is really just family support. Having a member divorced is an embarrassment to a normal family, and a hardship too.
In any event, I thought of that girl (scientist from Kenya) today probably because she is one of the people I wrote about here last night. She’s one of those virgins who was gaming dudes for a ring. Not only did I not get to bang her, but I didn’t even get to feel her up after three dates. (I’m laughing about this now).
She’s already married, to a very nice guy with a medical degree. The next time some bitter dyke shows up here on Dalrock, asking where all the “good men” have gone, I’ll make it a point to tell her that the “good men” were too boring for the empowered feminist types, so they got married to the immigrant girls. The good men can be found in the big houses in that neighborhood you can’t afford, and they’re busy breeding up dozens of good looking babies, with the non-feminist girls, who really are “having it all”. Maybe if some feminist dyke bitch is lucky, she can get a job as a housekeeper for one of these families…
Love it, Boxer! You are a cruel man, hee, hee.
Maybe if some feminist dyke bitch is lucky, she can get a job as a housekeeper for one of these families
Let us hope not. Who would want their kids exposed to an attitudinous, feminist dyke bitch?
Why would they marry when they can have bastards?
@IBB said: “Do they really know exactly, PRECISELY what they want in a man (for a husband for their whole life) at age 21?”
Yes, they do know what they want in a husband.
As they get older, women are more willing to focus on what they need (desirable traits) in a husband rather than what they want (attractive traits) in a husband. They might settle for what they need, but they never outgrow what they wanted at 21.
This is why the “alpha f**ks, beta bucks” pattern is such a disaster for the beta husband. She resents her husband, because he is a constant reminder that she didn’t get what she wanted.
“I guess I just don’t see much to be worried about by these numbers. People are still getting married, almost all of them. Yes, later than before, which implies smaller families for the most part, but it isn’t anything like the death of marriage at all.”
Yes, people are still marrying, almost all of them. But how good are these marriages? How likely are they to last? And it’s one thing to “get” married; it’s quite another thing to “be” married and “stay” married. I suspect one reason why some marriages are failing is not only because it’s easier to get divorced, but because they men these women married just weren’t “the best they could do” (or so they think).
It’s pretty clear, too, that for first marriages, the quality of men and women declines as they get older. It’s also clear (at least for women) that the longer a woman waits, the worse she does in terms of selecting a man for marriage, mostly because the pool is just smaller.
Nova, 11/26, 10:00 am
Spot on. This is exactly what is going on with women as they get older and begin seeking a husband.
It’s also clear (at least for women) that the longer a woman waits, the worse she does in terms of selecting a man for marriage, mostly because the pool is just smaller.
One would think that this would serve to introduce women to the concept of “cause and effect.”
Alas, one would be wrong.
So, are we thus in agreement that a woman justifying her single-dom throughout her twenties and early thirties as finding herself and seeking Mr Right is pure sophistry and that when she does find Mr Right it is most likely to be a result of a more realistic appraisal of her then MMV?
The late Robin Skyner and the still with us John Cleese co-authored a book entitled Families and How to Survive Them, and its first chapter is, Why did I have to marry you. The basic idea goes like this: we marry those who are like ourselves and thus the most attractive pair off first. Eventually the last pair have no choice but to marry each other and amazingly they turn out to be the best suited to each other too. It is an interesting idea (but I think without a shred of evidence to support its psychobabble).
Opus,
John Cleese is in no position to give marriage advice to anyone. He’s hysterical, but that episode on Cheers is the closest the man should be to giving marrital advice.
@thegreatshebang
I agree with you. But this particular chart only proves there is a delay in marriage and does not address the reduction in average time spent married in one’s lifetime via 1) the decrease in remarriages and 2) the reduced duration each marriage lasts.
so maybe in the past a women could get married at 20 and stay married for 20 years, divorce, and then remarry and spend another 50 years married but now that same individual will wait until they are in their 30s to get married, stay married for 5 years, divorce, and then remain unmarried for the rest of their life. Women 1 would be married a total of 70 years while woman 2 would be married a total of 5 years: which is a 92.86% decrease in time spent married but this particular chart only reflects data to support a marriage delay.
These stats are missing two variables…Homogamy and Bureaugamy.
Now that same sex marriage is legal in 15 States, we must now include teh Gayz marital numbers.
And then we can also consider any single mother household in which the mother receives welfare entitlement benefits (WIC, EBT, Section 8 etc.), as these households represents women married to the Government.
Only then will we see a more accurate picture of never marrieds….
@ Robert Yates
Dalrock also has pointed out that the interesting part of the data in this graph (on earlier posts) is the effect as women go through the age brackets over time.
Women at 20-24 at 70.4% in 2001 became women at 25-29 at 39.3% in 2006. But women at 20-24 at 78.7% in 2008 became women at 25-29 at 48.2% in 2013. More than the entire increase of 8% delayed marriage an additional 5 years on average.
A certain additional amount (10% or so) of women who have delayed marriage are finding it delayed a long long time. In theory, the data could keep rising for 30+ and 40+ over the next 15 years. Over time the data will answer the question if a marriage strike is affecting 10-20% of the population.
The current data on the graph at 40+ is less relevant because data on the chart only goes back to 1999.
IBB,
“Do women really know what they want at 21?”
For sure, if I may answer a question you did not in fact ask, men sure don’t!
In general, IBB, I daresay, some very mature women do. But these are the women who are very much in touch with their feminine natures and mature very early, much like our grandmothers. These women are rare these days. These women know the difference between ‘I want to get married and have babies because my barbie doll is cute’ and ‘I know the real deal about marriage, and despite all I know, I still want to take the plunge and do it at a young age’.
Sadly I was not one of them!
😦
There are more women like me than these unicorns…sorry to say, lol.
If I had married at age 21, it would have been a terrifically hard road for me to travel. Not necessarily a bad thing – afterall, marriage is a sacrament, and however God chooses to sanctify me is His business and His alone. But I think (for me), it worked out fine waiting until I understood better what was expected of me, so I could do it (marriage) the less painful way.
Whilst waiting however, I am happy to report that I was really indeed waiting.
Yes a woman should try as much as possible to have her marriage and peak fertility coincide. Failing that, her marriage and …just …fertility.
But for some of us the greatest thing is the marriage itself, whether we have children or not.
I am expected to regard my husband as more important than all ten of my future children. More important than all the financial worries, the health issues, the…you name it.
So it really would not have worked out if I had married at 21 in the pursuit of peak reproduction at the expense of a lifelong marriage.
Some of us are expected to have just one shot at marriage, as required by Canon law.
So we will wait, and wait, and wait, until we get the green light.
We won’t marry unless we are convinced over and over that the moment is right, and that the other person is the right one, and that we ourselves are ‘good to go’.
We are also by nature ‘slow coaches’ and won’t do anything unless pushed. In many ways we could be our own worst enemy, but we won’t have it any other way. 🙂
Might I nominate you as president of this club?
😀
What is this club and as President, what are my responsibilities? Young men don’t listen to me, neither do you women, so unless I have the authority of a President Obama to enact legislation on a club that everyone is forced to be a member, I don’t think I’m the best candidate for your Presidency.
I was just kind of curious if women even knew what they wanted at 21. I didn’t think they did. It appears I have been proven right on this one issue. So if that’s the case, then maybe encouraging women to get married at that age (when they don’t even know what they want) is not such a good idea, certainly not an idea that should be pushed in the manosphere what with no-fault-divorce still being law and all….
Excellent analysis Novaseeker. I would add that the data hints fairly strongly that the settling by later age bracket women is getting more pronounced. My own read of the trends of the last few years in the 30 something age brackets is a number of women stared down the barrel of spinsterhood for a few years and then swallowed hard, found an available man, and marched him down the aisle. Forget a 134 point bullet list, finding a man who has a pulse and a job is hard enough, with 15% of unmarried White Non Hispanic 30-34 year old men earning nothing, and 29% of them earning less than $15k.
Even so, the trend towards lower marriage rates has neither stopped nor reversed. What we can only speculate on is how durable marriage is as a social norm to the incessant nibbling around the edges we continue to see. So far it has proven to be remarkably resilient. However, I think this resilience has lulled conservatives into an unwarranted sense of security. My own guess is that the momentum of creeping delayed marriage will not go away as women overshoot the magic age of
27282930. We can already see in the data that large numbers of women who presumably still want to marry (based on the older cohort data) are remaining never married in their mid and even late 30s. I could be proven wrong in the years to come, but I don’t think there is a landmark which can stop the delayed marriage trend. Like you I don’t place much stock in the doomsday porn view, but I do think there are three risks (which may show up separately or together).1) The first risk is that by postponing marriage later and later into adulthood, the normalness of marriage as a social institution could eventually fade away for the middle class as it largely has for the working class. This seems especially likely as over time we trade out older generations who married in their early to mid 20s with those who themselves didn’t marry until their early to mid thirties (and with a higher percent who never married). Compounding this is the stubborness of the fertility window, and as we have seen later marriage is coinciding with a steadily increasing out of wedlock birth rate. Conservatives are still focused on cohabitation and gay marriage as institutional threats to marriage, but out of wedlock births are a much more potent risk because they get to the heart of what marriage is about (forming a stable family to raise children).
2) The risk of marriage age men changing from fear to greed (and women changing from greed to fear) in the “marriage market”. I don’t think we are seeing any indication of this as of yet, and if it is there it is very weak. However, as women postpone marriage past their own peak SMV towards men’s stronger SMV this is at least a potential risk. The problem for marriage delaying women is they are betting on men their own age and older being available to marry. If this transpires I would expect a small group of (additional) men to elect to remain players. The bigger signature of this I would expect to see in the oldest would be brides being frozen out as younger women start to poach the available older and more established men. Of the three risks, I think this one is the most likely to be corrective in nature.
3) The weakened signal. When young men see marriage as likely in their relatively near future (and a girlfriend or two to hold them over in the interim), doing the work to signal provider status makes more sense. As we move the age of marriage for men out to a decade or more over 18, an 18 or even early 20 year old young man is going to see less incentive to bust his tail to signal provider status (and overcome the increasing feminist headwind). He looks at his older brother and his friend’s older brothers and they seem perfectly fine working hard enough to get by and filling their lives with video games and hobbies. They observe these older men either having success with women or not, but either way signaling provider status has much less to do with this than the man’s “Game”. Note that even if marriage rates remain high but just occur later, he will start to observe his slacker older peers being able to marry. Either marriage will appear inevitable or off the table, but either way it is so far off it will tend to be discounted in his thinking. This isn’t to say that all young men will slack off, but that the whole curve of men will tend to move towards the less intense production/earnings side. The likely response by government to an increase in “peterpan manboys” would almost certainly make the problem worse, by raising taxes on the men who are doing the work to signal provider status.
I’m curious what everyones’ take is on Pope Francis’ latest comments (i.e. feminism now to be doctrine).
If Bill Maher loves this Pope (and he says he does), then I hate this Pope.
Bill Maher said that? Wow. I mean, it could just be the NYT twisting the Pope’s words, but either way, that’s certainly not the kind of endorsement I’d want.
Why were the historical mothers of this country mentally ready to start families at 15-22? It’s all about culture. The trend of infantilizing the youth (why is a 26-year-old man still in school and not working? the same aged woman not married or with child?) is the issue. In the mostly agricultural environment of this country’s first century and a half, boys began to be men around 13-15, depending on the duties they were physically capable of completing; women around 14-17 depending on menstruation.
I was the same as Spacetraveller. At 21 and a (stupid) rabidly anti-marriage, anti-children feminist, I wouldn’t have dreamed of being where I am now. But why was I like that at 21? Upbringing, public school, culture, and the personal choices I made. In no way was I prepared or expected to be a woman, wife, or mother.
Marcus,
Yes he has said that repeatedly on his Real Time HBO show (including last Friday Night night.) He loves this Pope, the Pope for the Atheists. This Pope says all the things those who hate religion want the Pope to say. So I hate him. I miss our former Nazi-Youth Pope, believe it or not.
Marissa,
Apples and oranges. This is not about youth infantilizing so much as its about maturity of our nation.
A 15 year old boy can drive a tractor, can ride a horse pulling a plow, can feed hogs, can milk cows, can plant seeds in a field, can feed and kill chickens, can harvest eggs, can harvest tomatoes, and (after the work day’s done) knows how to put his little stiff thingie inside the little girl’s tiny thingie. Marriage then worked.
A 15 year old boy can NOT design and architech databases, write OOP C# code with full inheritance according to Business Requirement Documents, know scrum-aglie, know how to commuicate with people from India, create meaningful pivot tables in Excel, migrate source code from servers, administer TFS, create TFS requests, manage 50 year old men, or fire 50 year old men who aren’t pulling their weight or are just trying to scam the company. They can not do ANYTHING unsupervised in an office where they are interacting with other people. As a result, their earning power (in an office) is far beneath what they would need to be married. On a farm (your own farm) with livestock (and no other men to argue with) is one thing, producing wealth in a moder information age office is something completely different. And NO amount of “home schooling” is going to get them there…
…that is why the 26 year old man is still in school. That and he can keep getting student loans at 1% interest.
So today, marriage does not really work the way it did not even 100 years ago.
IB,
“What is this club and as President, what are my responsibilities?”
Hahahahahaha!
Bravo. Most people would have asked what their rights were as President.
I hope no-one takes my comment to indicate: Marry as late as possible!
I think it’s worthwhile having the discussion — i.e., is it simply the case that 30 is the new 22 when it comes to the ideal age for marriage, given the society that we live in? That is, leaving aside other consequences of delaying marriage that may trouble Christians in particular (e.g., fornication risk becomes sky high when people are expected to be celibate from 14 to 30), is this life script (using the 20s for education and career foundation building, and then marrying around 30, +/- 2 or so years), which has become pretty much the norm in many parts of the country, just an inevitable and necessary development in light of the social and economic model people are facing in the 21st Century?
IBB, you make an excellent point. I’m thinking too much in my agricultural/Oil &Gas (the labor side, not engineering) bubble. I do think many of those tasks which an entry-level 26-year-old with a Master’s can be done by my aforementioned homeschooled 21-year-old with a Master’s. But the tasks you listed–would any of them be done by an entry-level 26-year-old man? You seem to be conflating the 15-year-old becoming-a-man with the 18-21-year-old should-be-a-man (in my examples). I don’t think a 15-year-old can run a farm (though he can complete some duties) or complete a bachelor’s degree.
Nova,
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes…..
….the manosphere needs to find a way to incorporate this reality and reconcile it with the Bible. That can be done.
@greenlander
“”I’m tellin’ you guys: the secret to getting rich is to go long companies that manufacture cat food. Remember where ya heard it first!””
…………and companies that manufacture vibrators!
Nice to see you again.I hope all is going well in Eastern Europe for you.
I think there will always be ‘late bloomers’.
These people will always bring up the rear, even in the era Marissa talks of, where people are marrying in their teens. For these people, the lateness is worth it because they like to take their time. Both my husband and I are in this group, him more than me, in fact.
For the majority of people, the early marriage thing works (if they are going to marry at all, that is). It is noteworthy that at 21, I knew I wanted to marry and have a family. What I was not sure of, was HOW I was going to get there. I took my sweet time to get there. And I am happy with the results (so far, and I reckon forever). For some people, it works better to get there early because the slow coach approach is inappropriate for them or is impractical.
This is why I also don’t fret so much that 21 year olds are not getting married. But of course I am getting nervous at the idea that 30-something women are still unmarried, some not even close to marriage. Because I understand that for most of these women, something has gone horribly wrong, rather than because they have a strategy to delay marriage, or make themselves better candidates for marriage. THAT is what is troubling.
In many ways, the data themselves say nothing to me. The anecdotal evidence behind tha data would be more interesting.
And I think IBB and Marissa are both right in that the context in which we find ourselves very much drives the need for marriage and also the dynamics of marriage. A 15 year old boy in 1922 would soon need a wife bcause he is almost ready to provide for a family. A 15 year old boy in 2013 is still a child. Likewise a 15 year old girl in 1922 has already learned all the skills she needs to be a mother. A 15 year old girl in 2013, not quite 🙂
So whilst it makes sense for a 15 year old in 1922 to get married and be a parent straightaway, it is contextually inappropriate for a 15 year old today.
One has to adapt as best as one can to the culture/context. With the best intentions, all adaptations may work out fine.
@depressed danny
“”They better fatten up them cats, cause once the government can’t pay them any more these ladies aren’t gonna have anything else to eat””
………it will give a new meaning to the term “eating pussy”
Yes IBB, the manosphere just needs to man up and marry those sluts, it needs to incorporate this new paradigm shift into its floundering reality. Lol, dude, if you and Nova haven’t yet figured it out that the current ‘economic model’ of the 21st century is dead, well… marrying sluts just ain’t going to cut it.
There is no point to marrying a post 30 year old woman, leaving aside my cut-off of 24 for the moment. What are you chaps going to say when the marriage age continues to increase? That 40 is the new 22? Get a life chaps… a woman is beyond her time when she has reached 30, if society, the economy or the ‘education required to…’ means people ‘have’ to marry after 30, perhaps you need to look at society.. just maybe..
30 year old women chose to marry the government, perhaps they can divorce him and claim their cash and prizes?
@johnnycomelately
“”I suspect there are a heck of a lot more single women from 35-44 than the ‘ever married’ stats.””
So do I.In the office tower that I work in here in Toronto,I would guess-timate that the women between 35-50 …….that there is about a 70% single rate.They are EVERYWHERE!
….the manosphere needs to find a way to incorporate this reality and reconcile it with the Bible. That can be done.
When the Bible unequivocally decrees that sex outside of marriage is a sin, your idea here is utterly ludicrous. Modern Churchianity has already embraced this idiocy. The idea that the key is to convince young Christians that they must live 12-15 years of celibate sexual maturity before they are “ready” for marriage at 30 is a recipe for widespread marital dysfunction.
Most people, Christian or not, are just not going to remain chaste until their late 20’s/30’s.
Delayed marriage is antithetical to Christianity.
It is paying obeisance to Mammon before Biblical Principle.
You can probably take the ‘married rates’ of all age groups, divide that by 2 (50%) to keep it simple, add the two figures of each age group together and have a rough estimate to the amount of women in that age group that are currently single.
Marissa,
Thank you.
We just need to keep thinking outside the box here in the world of reality if we want people to choose the red pill. That’s what I want but we must deal from reality for that to happen.
A 15 year old might (if given very detailed instructions) be able to work in the oil fields and on a modern 1000+ acre agro-business farm, but only a very well formed job and not in any supervisory capacity. The farm of yesteryear, Dorothy’s farm in Kansas, for all practical purposes they are all gone. We are not in Kansas anymore.
Welp, my niece and nephew (14 and 16) are homeschooled. They are bright and (because they have been “tutored” for years, and not taught in a classroom with 25 others) are probably 2 or maybe even 3 years academically ahead of people their own age. And socially, they don’t have clue. Their mom has them in karate (with other kids) and she keeps them involved in church activities, but as far as knowing what they want to do with their life (forget supporting themselves) they are MORE than ten years away from where they need to be. They are just not socialized, have ZERO conflict resolution capacity. They only know what they know, don’t have a clue about the business world.
Maybe for your kids, it will be different. But I have a lot of experience with home schooling. I have seen some great success and some terrible nightmares (my home-schooled cousin at age 19 not even able to do simple algebra.)
Some of them. The difference here is the 26 year old man will have enough knowledge of “the business” to use his cognitive ability to make some decisions on his own without continuously asking other people “what do you want me to do?” because that doesn’t work in an office. On a 1920s family farm, he knows what he needs to do (at age 15.) His 14 year old wife knows what she needs to do. Later the two of them know exactly what they need to do in the bedroom.
@Casey
“”it appears to come down to money in the final analysis.””
“It’s all about the bucks pal….the rest is only conversation”…….Gordon Gekko.
I mean, add the non-married rate to 50% of the married rates to find a rough figure. Just using 50% as that is the divorce average?, although, different age groups have different divorce stats but I’m lazy.
“Likewise a 15 year old girl in 1922 has already learned all the skills she needs to be a mother. A 15 year old girl in 2013, not quite”
Nor a 30 year old women in 2013, in many cases.
What I find especially amusing is a group of feminists I’ve read about who say they enjoy learning the skills that, basically, a 15 year old girl in 1922 would have learnt (e.g. cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc). They say they enjoy working in the kitchen and wish they could do so instead of a career. It put me into one of those “am I going insane or is this actually real” states of mind – that feminists would enjoy doing the so-called “lowly, unpaid labour” tasks that are considered a form of “slavery” (when discussing women in the 1950s, say), but… only when the husband/man is removed from the picture.
To me, it’s the classic Chesterton quote:
“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Which is up there with:
“The feminist convention is for the woman to continue using her father’s name as a statement against patriarchy.”
― James Taranto
“I suspect there are a heck of a lot more single women from 35-44 than the ‘ever married’ stats.’
Well, “ever married” does include divorced individuals.
FH,
I am not saying marry sluts. I am saying FIND A WAY. There has to be a way. If not (if there is NO WAY), we are in Revelation’s End of Days and the Anti-Christ is here (somewhere) and many of us are already f-cked.
Keoni,
There has to be a WAY. Either that or we are DONE. I think the manosphere has a winner here, but only if they can find a way to get us from A-to-B. We need to have these conversations of our Brave New World within Biblical boundaries of God Almighty’s Law. There is a way. We just need to talk about it in a serious sense, a converation NO Christian leader who fundamentally follows the Bible has had, that I can tell. I’m not going to kill myself, I refuse to believe we are at the end.
Lol IBB, you’re talking to the wrong chap. Remember, I don’t have a choice, I’m not attractive enough. My interests are served by getting the men, who are attractive enough, to either eschew marriage or find a woman who is young and chaste. That is it.
Marrying later does not necessarily mean finding your future spouse later. It might be that the people who marry still meet before 25 but do not marry until 30, instead of more or less right away. If this accounts for 20, 50 or 80 % of the added years I have no idea.
FH,
Yes I know. I’m sorry FH. I have friends who are ugly, they are in their 40s and will never be married. This life on this planet is going to suck for you, I understand. It’s kind of like that for Aaron Clarey/Captain Captialism because he is so “short.” Women probably wont give a man that short (who later develop’s short-man’s-syndrome) the time of day.
You can do all that, but you can also do other things. I would like to fins a way to make our Brave New World work properly with the Bible.
I can’t. I can’t find a way. If I do, I’ll write a book that no one will read.
LOL chicken little has made an appearance and now the sky is falling
The one thing that bothers me about the ‘ever married’ stats is that I know of a lot of ‘quicky’ marriages that last for less than 2 years. So while it seems the marriage rates are stable, it doesn’t gel with on the the ground observations.
IBB, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. My experience with homeschooled children and their parents sounds vastly different. The parents I know are auto-didacts who either didn’t attend college or dropped out. A few are college graduates and self-starters or excellent multi-taskers who are involved in a lot of social activities. They have developed networks so their kids learn and socialize with other home-schooled kids. Some are even “unschoolers” (not really my bag, but okay if it works). A large percentage of them are secular.
You also keep using a 15-year-old in your example, where I have previously said you are “conflating the 15-year-old becoming-a-man with the 18-21-year-old should-be-a-man”. The 15-year-old who is not raised in an infantilizing manner is comparable to today’s 18- or 19-year-old of American public school graduate. He still has a few years to learn to be a man (the enterprising 18-year-old today can take up a trade to immediately begin working, for instance, but usually isn’t ready to do much in the way of independent work or supervising). There are 18- to 19-year-old tool techs and roughnecks in the oil and gas sector. Attending a three-month trade school opens up even more opportunities (can you imagine taking home more than $50K after tax at 18-25?).
Ultimately I am trying to join the discussion which Keoni Galt just articulated. Raising boys into men at an earlier age than is now normal (but which is contrary to most of human existence) so they don’t have to suffer two decades (or more) of chastity after hitting puberty.
I know it’s just anecdotal but in my family/neighborhood/work/social circle there are plenty of attractive young women, (25 + ?) between 18-35; two are married, one is engaged for a summer wedding this year. The divorcees (4) are all still single, getting fat and are very bitter. The divorcees all initiated their respective divorces too. There is a cougar who recently got dumped AGAIN and it now very bitter(I predict her next stop is sensible shoe land). There is the never ending drum beat of where-are-all-the-good-men.
I get hit on regularly by women 1/2 my age (not boasting, it’s a pathetic fact).
There are about 15 young men in the same circle, NONE have any desire to marry or even shack up; their slogan, bro’s before ho’s. They all work, party, have fun, travel, bang bar sluts like screen doors in a hurricane, but have no desire to pit ring on it. EVERY ONE of the guys has a divorce horror story they know of or are the children of. One said recently, “pussy is overrated”.
hahahahahaha
Sorry for the glee, it’s unbecoming
The main problem with “making it work”, from a Christian perspective, has to do with the fornication risk.
Of course, the rules are the rules — so it’s actually an easy question on that level. Just don’t have sex until you marry, and if you want to wait until 30 to get married, that’s fine, but just don’t have sex.
That’s kind of what the church has been doing so far, as this life script has become fully blown for many people. De facto, of course, it’s known that most people don’t abide by the strictures. It’s often raised that this also isn’t new, because it was common in earlier eras for people to marry people they had been having sex with beforehand — but while that may be true, it has never before been the case that this was a series of people stretching over 15 or more years. It’s one thing for a couple who is deeply involved to have sex a few months before marrying, on the one hand, and for individuals to have sex with various BFs/GFs over the course of 10-15 years prior to marriage, on the other. Both are sins, but they are not nearly the same phenomenon. The church today de facto turns a blind eye to this, essentially following a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach, even though virtually everyone in the church actually knows that most of the young are fornicating to some degree or other before they marry. A blind eye is turned to this, by and large, as long as people are actually getting married, and in the church, and saying they want to raise their kids as Christians and the like.
Perhaps that is the answer. Namely, continue the de facto “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, while officially teaching that people are to practice sexual abstinence until marriage regardless of when they may marry. It isn’t really a “solution”, per se, because it either denies that the fornication is taking place (or refuses to admit that it is) or de facto, even if only tacitly, accepts it. But perhaps that’s okay, as well. After all, everyone is sinning all the time. Why make a big deal out of these sins, even if we are endorsing a life script that makes committing them almost inevitable in the case of many people? The benefit of this, of course, is not driving these people away from the church.
Like you I don’t place much stock in the doomsday porn view, but I do think there are three risks (which may show up separately or together).
Yes.
I don’t disagree with your assessment at all, but I don’t see any realistic solution here.
Nova,
Maybe we should put this question to Matt Walsh given his ridiculous blog post today but does a 16 year old boy (or even 27 year old man) who is NOT married, but IS masturbating in the bathroom (to porn or maybe,to nothing), fornication? Does God frown on this? What if this is the prayer? “Lord God Almighty, you gave me hormones but you have not given me a wife, the dam is about to burst oh Lord, we must releave the pressure, open the valves!”
I’m actually being semi-serious here because this is a serious issue. This comes back around to the concept of “Sexbots” that some in the manosphere have talked about, they can’t get married as no woman would have them (and they are Christian so they don’t want to fornicate) so they go get a “Real Doll” (egads.) Its kind of like that movie Artifical Intelligence with Jude Law’s character, a sex robot for women. Gross if you ask me, I don’t have (nor would I ever get) a sexbot but I was a 15 year old boy and (well) I might have wanked once or twice (maybe more.) So I certainly understand how difficult it is (I guess it is this way for women since so many have dildos and vibrators.)
So I guess what I’m saying is this, is masturbation fornication? You don’t even have to be thinking about someone else.
@IBB
“”I miss our former Nazi-Youth Pope, believe it or not.””
I faxed my resume to the Vatican.Apparently,they are not hiring Jews…..Go Figure!
So I guess what I’m saying is this, is masturbation fornication?
Well, the church has pretty much always considered it to be a sin. It isn’t adultery, no. It isn’t technically fornication. But it’s its own sin.
I don’t see how this solves the issue, because you’d still have the church basically tacitly saying “under the present circumstances, we’re de facto giving you a pass for this sin” — which would be the same if actual fornication were involved.
Again, I think the only way “out” of this, if the church wants to endorse the current life script, is simply to just dump these sins in the general “sin hopper”, don’t both with them any more, or any less, than other sins, and move on. De facto, of course, this is what the church has already done, for the most part, outside the most conservative fringes here and there.
Mark,
LOL! Me thinks Pope Benedict was simply a victim of being born a Catholic boy in the worst possible country at the worst possible time. Thank you for not flying off the handle.
@Buck
Great Post!
“”I get hit on regularly by women 1/2 my age (not boasting, it’s a pathetic fact).””
Same here!
“”There are about 15 young men in the same circle, NONE have any desire to marry or even shack up; their slogan, bro’s before ho’s. They all work, party, have fun, travel, bang bar sluts like screen doors in a hurricane, but have no desire to pit ring on it.””
Same here!
“”EVERY ONE of the guys has a divorce horror story they know of or are the children of.””
Same here!
Shalom!
@IBB
LMAO!
“”LOL! Me thinks Pope Benedict was simply a victim of being born a Catholic boy in the worst possible country at the worst possible time. Thank you for not flying off the handle.””
I am just being a wise ass…..no offense!……L*
Is the trend of women delaying marriage in their 30’s still working against women, for women or is it leveling off?
These women need to learn their lesson.
1) I want to see the numbers of unmarried women in their 30’s continue to increase
2) I want the younger generations of women in their prime 20’s to take notice.
If I may say so, conflating a pixelated image with a real person is like being unable to tell the difference between a photograph of an omelette and an omelette. This is however quite common. Masturbation is merely a response to a lack of the real thing (as is pederasty). The various never-ending fetishes, so it seems to me are various ways of deflecting the desire for love and sex. If women put out more there would be less erotica. I think we can safely say that Alpha males do not resort to such things any more than they would read Roissy. (Who he?)
“What if this is the prayer? “Lord God Almighty, you gave me hormones but you have not given me a wife, the dam is about to burst oh Lord, we must releave the pressure, open the valves!””
Oh dear Lord, this is perhaps as frustrating as a woman who (despite not having a husband) wants to have a baby so bad (at ovulation time) that she will go with just about anyone, just so she can have one, even if it means she sins in the eyes of The Lord.
What is the difference between these two sins?
For the man, it is over as soon as he is sated (literally at his own hands).
For the woman, it is not over yet. When this child is born, it needs to be fed, clothed, looked after, loved, raised to be a decent human being. This requires that she have a helper, a designated ‘mate’, AKA husband.
She soon realises that she didn’t quite think things through…so someone has to pay for her not thinking things through. The father (who may not even know he is a father), or the government, or whoever, has to pay…then begins an ugly war…
Both are sins borne out of our respective human natures.
I sympathise with both cases…
Both scenarios can be solved with an early marriage.
But…in most early marriages I have seen, the woman gets her babies, out with the man.
The man starts to get a ‘roving eye’, out with the woman.
Again, human nature.
Not easy, either way!
But trying to do the right thing helps. Which requirse a lot of prayer and dedication to the other.
A bit off-topic, but VERY IMPORTANT, nonetheless. As many men as possible have to try to shut down this travesty of an app/website meant to slander men. It is being praised in the liberal MSM press (of course), and must be stopped. If there are any attorneys here who want to start a class action, that would be appreciated as well.
Offensive app: lulu app (see https://onlulu.com/)
Why it is bad (if not obvious): http://www.consumerprivacy.us/privacy/lulu-privacy
(See this as well:) http://www.consumerprivacy.us/privacy/reclaim-your-privacy-from-lulu
Petition to have it stopped: https://www.change.org/petitions/lulu-shut-down-lulu
Guys–now is the time to band together.
Dalrock–if you could please highlight this dangerous app, that would be great!
The education system could have men and woman ready to exit high school three to five years sooner than they currently do. We don’t teach young children enough when their minds are still sponges. A: We underestimate a child’s capacity to learn. For example: Before a child can even talk, he is understanding large amounts of language and can be taught things. Yet we miss this window to teach completely. B: We hold back many so that less children feel left out or inferior. The most socialist part of our society is the education system. C: Education is a racket: It keeps young men in their most ambitious, energetic, and productive years out of the workforce and therefore not competing with “sigh” (I hate to make them my whipping boy) the baby boomers. It also feeds the bloated educational system with more and more of the proverbial resource pie, resources that could go to production, R&D, debt payment, etc. Our education system is broken because it won’t let smart people be smart. It holds many back. It should be a spring board, that launches minds. Instead, it puts weights of mediocrity around people’s necks.
A person cannot be an “almost virgin.” It’s an either/or thing. Full stop.
If it were a sin one would think the Bible would mention it. It doesn’t. Not even once.
It specifies that lots of other things are sinful… things that are much less common. Make of that what you will.
or almost virgins (maybe one or two prior lovers, which clearly embarrasses them and which they didn’t find particularly empowering).
These chicks are much like playas, in that they know exactly what they want, and they don’t waste much time on the men who aren’t going to spring for a ring and wedding date.
Well, I suppose if the men they are marrying are much older than they are…
I can’t see well-off (and presumably smart) men taking a risk on women who have demonstrated a divorce risk (e.g. novelty-seeking by promiscuity and potentially a range of other things). I suppose they’re doing a favour for those men who don’t “spring for a ring” by bailing quickly.
I think Novaseeker and IBB need to go and reread Dalrock’s blog. They seem to have forgotten that they are defining the exact problem within Church and marriage and then offering it as a solution. Firstly, not calling sin, well… ‘sin,’ and delaying marriage to such a stage where women have become such whores, cannot bond to their husbands, have literally demolished their MMV and men have no incentive to work hard and achieve because their supposed ‘future wives’ are busy fucking other men for 15 years prior to the eventual marriage. But, hey ho, let’s just give em a free pass because we don’t need them to leave Churches..?
I can’t even….
Never mind that marrying so late deprives children of young parents and grandparents that can actually take part in their lives.
Sorry gents but you’re completely wrong in this.
My wife had just turned 20 when we met (if I’d met her 32 days earlier she would have still been a teenager). We both knew almost immediately that marriage was in the cards. We got married exactly 19 weeks after we met, and most of that was the engagement. Some people actually do know what they want – and what they need – at a young age.
I’m with Feminist Hater on this one – delaying marriage for 15 or 20 (or more) years after the conclusion of puberty is almost torture for anyone who takes the Biblical view of fornication seriously. Much of the modern Western church isn’t offering young men much more that “Born-again virgins” and “Man up!” these days… Sad.
Just because women say a man is ‘bad’ does not mean they won’t have sex with him. Women write love letters to serial killers, after all, even if those same women will agree that a serial killer is bad.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10466382/Charles-Mansons-25-year-old-girlfriend-claims-pair-are-planning-to-marry.html
I’ve read (in the open literature) that women will derogate a desired male in order to get access to him (over other females). In my understanding it’s not common, since derogation leads to lowered status which seems contrary to the typical standard of female mate selection (looking for highest status mate). Women are usually derogating each other (i.e. female intrasexual competition).
That women prefer part-time work is simply irrefutable. It was true back in 2007, and it’s even true among Ivy League graduates! Study after study, both here and abroad (the majority of women in the UK, Spain and other countries seek some combination of paid work and family work) shows women as a whole (the Sheryl Sandbergs notwithstanding) want multifaceted lives. They want balance.
And there’s only one way to get it: rely on a man’s more linear career goals. Unlike women, a man’s identity is inextricably linked to his paycheck. That’s how most men feel a sense of purpose. Indeed, research shows men see it as their duty to support their families even when their wives make as much money (or more) as they do!
Because women with husbands vote Republican. Single women dependent on the government vote Democrat. Thus, a plethora of policies and media tropes aimed at producing the latter.
Via: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/179857/
From: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/11/22/why-women-still-need-husbands/
Marriage, kids, house with a white picket fence lifestyle is really over rated. It is almost like a form of religious cultural brainwashing. Most likely, marriage leads to arguments, dependency, obsessive compulsive character, and expensive divorce courts and lawyers to clean out your finances. An interpersonal relationship is over rated. They should just factory, mass clone huge batches of future replacement humans and cut out all sex, intimacy, emotional attachments, and religion.
“Marriage, kids, house with a white picket fence lifestyle is really over rated. It is almost like a form of religious cultural brainwashing.”
-Actually marriage is ordained by God. It’s not brainwashing. Marriage has been a nucleus of all civilizations throughout world history.
“Most likely, marriage leads to arguments, dependency, obsessive compulsive character, and expensive divorce courts and lawyers to clean out your finances.”
-You say “most likely” as though you are randomly guessing then list negative behaviors with no factual backup. Even so, this negativity associated with marriage is only a product of our technologically advancing morally defunct man made society. Not of marriage itself as ordained by God.
“An interpersonal relationship is over rated.”
-Actually your wrong. Human beings are inherently social creatures.
“They should just factory, mass clone huge batches of future replacement humans and cut out all sex, intimacy, emotional attachments, and religion.”
-Then you would not be human anymore. You would just be a robot.
You have some pretty stupid comments. However even more stupid is the fact I responded to them.
Voting republican is not voting against the leftist agenda so I don’t much buy into a media push to discourage women from marrying to garner support for the dnc.
So what happens when (yea!) these upsloping trendlines — get out your least squares fitting equipment… — or some derivative quantity, in the future crosses some threshhold X: 50%, 70%, 90%, whatever?
Nothing. Because there’s nothing substantive you can do married that you can’t do unmarried. Marriage is a fundamentally superfluous distraction so it’s not clear what the graphs are “really” measuring, if anything. They become like Rorschach tests.
If one or the other lines was to make a sharp bend left or right, or even start oscillating violently, so what?
Because there’s nothing substantive you can do married that you can’t do unmarried.
Unless you’re religious… then you are basically required to get married (if you want to do those “substantive” things).
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Feminist Hater again you have a great handle on this… I very much agree with your conclusions.
Coincidentally just today I was alarmed to skim read a couple of books that tie in with this.
We’re currently housesitting and I came across a book endorsed by FOTF called ‘Finding the Love of Your Life’ and it’s follow-up “Learning to Live with the Love of Your Life’ by Neil Clark Warren (co-founder of the dating site eHarmony)
In his books, he stresses the advice NOT to marry until you really ‘know yourself’ which apparently happens around mid to late 20s!
In fact – 28 is his magic number:
“Why 28? Studies show that this is the age when most people get clear about who they are, where they are going, and how they want to get there. In our society where adolescence often lasts until the middle 20s, identity formation is incomplete until individuals have emotionally separated from their parents and discovered the details of their own uniqueness. Most people under 28 aren’t in a good enough position to know the kind of person with whom they could form a meaningful lifelong attachment. They simply need more life experience.”
See that?! The last sentence is pretty much a ‘godly expert’s’ blessing to … well EXPERIENCE life.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130401005484/en/Dr.-Neil-Clark-Warren-Founder-CEO-eHarmony
I think it’s interesting and not unrelated that the advice given by Christian authors about relationships very much coincides with the world’s viewpoint. Most interesting is that the vast majority of readers of such books are FEMALES. (likely a complete switch of percentages from here in the Manosphere… so imagine the ‘comments section’ type discussion that goes on among the ladies bible study groups! Yikes.)
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah 🙂
Hannah
Oh I forgot to mention that this author feels so strongly against early marriage, that he made his daughter PROMISE him that she wouldn’t marry until she was older than 24!!!
Ahy ahy ahy…..
Of course women are responsible for their own sin, but it really is apparent that in today’s climate, there’s a lot of ‘Here’s One I Made Earlier’ going on from parents’ cooking up a disaster….
Yes Hannah, I would agree with you, lots of parents have a big finger in the pie of guilt with regards to the current relationship model. They seem to be doubling or perhaps quadrupling down on the attempts to get more and more of the current youth to buy into their models, via use of shame and indoctrination.
While I don’t think I have the best ‘handle’ on this current situation, for myself personally that is, the ability to look from the outside in does in some weird way, help to understand what befuddles the plebs.
Funny, I would say well before 24, he says well after 24… I would love to know what happens when they reach 30 and ask daddie why no man now wants them whilst they had perfectly good suitors all ready to marry them back before they were 24..
@ Hanna,
Not all Christians say to get married late. Mark Gungor is one who advises people to get married while young, and not to wait.
He has his own show. http://www.markgungor.com.
He’s a hoot to listen to.
Someone I know plotted with a young girl to marry her a few weeks after she turned 18.
The amount of pressure on them not to do was intense.
If he’d just banged her, there would have been no pressure on either of them to stop.
The modern Christian prefers that our daughters fornicate than marry.
@ Feminist Hater
“Never mind that marrying so late deprives children of young parents and grandparents that can actually take part in their lives.”
“Sorry gents but you’re completely wrong in this.”
Give the man a prize……truer words were never spoken.
Let’s not also forget the risk of a parent dying increases with age….(clearly).
If you want to be there for your children, probably best you get to know them early.
@ Martian Bachelor
Agreed…..if the never married rate climbs all the way to 100%; it won’t matter.
The laws will just change to accomodate a woman’s ‘choice’.
Something along the lines of being able to extract alimony from a man for having looked at her while she crossed the street.
Different governing states are in the process of re-defining marriage OUTSIDE the marriage construct. I.E. in British Columbia you are automatically ‘married’ once you have cohabitated for 2 years……with all the resultant obligations of a marriage if it goes bad (automatic equalization settlement, alimonty, etc….etc.)
This is no different than when they started creating laws allowing surgical wallet extraction for bastard children.
Men, just shut up & put on your yoke and pull the plow.
That’s the underlying message.
2 years? Kick her to the curb at the 22 month mark
Hey Frenchy, thanks for that link…. his Manly Men’s conference – ‘Escape The Matrix’ looks interestingly manosphere-wisdom inspired!
“Celebrate Being a Man!
No singing. No crying. No holding of hands.”
and:
“This year we’re going hog wild with the pig roast. We’ve purchased a few pigs to raise at a farm in Wisconsin and are forming plans to roast them ourselves. Why? Because we’re men!”
Nice 🙂
But if he doesn’t write books worshiping at the altar of Romantic Love, then the ladies aren’t likely to be reading his wisdom… Doh.
Hannah,
He doesn’t write those kinds of books. However, women still flock to him. Not him per se, but his message. From what I’ve read, his services have a very large male population (because the men are fleeing the effeminate church services).
He has some great DVDs and you can listen to him online.
And he has one line about adultery that I just love,. When talking about women (and sometimes men) breaking up a marriage for reasons other than adultery, he says, “When is what Jesus said ever wrong?!!”
He advocates separation to fix things, not divorce.
He pulls no punches. hope you enjoy listening him and he helps you out.
Listen men
If you dislike or hate ugly, fat bitches then ugly, fat bitches will dislike or hate men. It’s simple really.
Just like men claim feminism is for women who can’t get a man, aka, the fuglies, therefore hate men then logically it would make sense that since men hate fugly bitches that fugly bitches hate men.
Right? Men hate feminism and feminism hates men. Feminism is made up of ugly women, which men do NOT like, and so in return ugly women don’t like men.
Regardless if a woman is a feminist or not, if she doesn’t give you men a boner then you won’t give her the time of day.
So said woman creates feminism. Men complain that she’s complaining about not being treated well by men, which is true because we all know what happens when men don’t like someone.men claims she hates men because since men don’t like ugly bitches they think ugly bitches don’t like men, aka, feminism.
Here’s some Swedish data about how the shacking up family formation works. Förgymnasial = 9 years school, graduation around 19, Gymnasial = 3-4 more years of high school, more or less, Eftergymnasial = college degree.
http://www.scb.se/sv_/Hitta-statistik/Artiklar/Vanligast-att-hon-flyttar-in-hos-honom/
College degree women on average shack up at 26 and have a child at 30.
The figures are for couples who had their first child in 2000. You probably have to add a year for 2013.
Someone I know plotted with a young girl to marry her a few weeks after she turned 18.
The amount of pressure on them not to do was intense.
If he’d just banged her, there would have been no pressure on either of them to stop.
The modern Christian prefers that our daughters fornicate than marry.
I think this is one of the worst things I’ve read, in the sense that it is both true and deeply disturbing. I, and many others, are raised with the twin mindsets of 1) “test drive the car before you buy it”, and 2) it is the worst thing a woman can do to marry early and have children at a young age. I hear people in my family cluck over a young woman marrying but never have I heard them make the same to-do about a young woman having sex at an early age.
Regarding whether or not a 18-20 year old woman is ready for marriage, I think that many are. However, I believe that socializing young men and women by age group in high school and college contributes to the women leaving behind their feminine instincts to instead have fun “like the boys.” MANY young women would be thrilled to have a young man they love propose to them. But the men in their peer group are not ready to be husbands at that age–for some right reasons, and for some wrong reasons. For instance, I knew a man who said he met a woman in college who had *everything* he wanted, but he wanted to sow his oats and wouldn’t commit. He tried dating her again later in her 20s, and by that time she told him she was having fun being single (she hopped on the carousel). But when she was 18-20, she was all ready to be serious. Yet she learned that the men around her weren’t and *learned* not to prioritize marriage.
Also, because socialization is primarily with same-age young men, those young women also learn that older men are “weird” or creepy (heaven forbid he be 30) and also just don’t know how to relate to them. I always liked older men better, but when I was in college, that was kind of a strange thing. No other woman I knew expressed a similar preference. In the manosphere, people talk as if men in their 30s can easily date women in their early 20s. It’s just not socially acceptable in most circles. This is partly why I do agree more with robert yates’ point that the data seems to point more toward delayed marriage (and where is the data for the men?). As someone who is still “on the ground” in her 20s, women marrying in their late 20s and early to mid 30s is common. Men in their 30s marrying women in their early-mid 20s, not at all.
Also, I wonder if commenters recognize the fact that young women are born into a world with values they did not create, and a society that they did not form. Many, if not most, are pushed into a lifestyle as the assumed path they should take. Where are the parents? Where are the fathers? If you have such an issue with women pursuing education and careers, then how should she support herself? Fathers today *do not* expect to support their daughters into adulthood. They expect independence–which means she is forced to figure out how to do for herself. And if she should desire to get married, then how will she know to choose well? If the adults in her life have not taught her, she will spend her 20s trying to figure it out. No one seems to acknowledge that many young people freely admit that they have no clue what makes a good marriage–understandably, they will avoid it until they feel like they are more sure.
This is why I absolutely love Guy over at What Women Never Hear. He is doing a lot to help women find their way.
’m sorry FH. I have friends who are ugly, they are in their 40s and will never be married. This life on this planet is going to suck for you, I understand. It’s kind of like that for Aaron Clarey/Captain Captialism because he is so “short.” Women probably wont give a man that short (who later develop’s short-man’s-syndrome) the time of day.”
I know ugly men that have had a few gfs, and some of them were ok looking. How tall is Aaron Clarey? I’m only five six but had plenty of opportunities with women. Shorter men have to put in the effort most of the time though, unless the woman is of much lower SMV.
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Some of the symptoms described in this post’s comments section and in the comments on other postings are actually symptoms of narcissistic delusional thinking founded on wish-fulfillment, e.g., thinking along the lines of being “entitled” the marry a tall rich man because one has spent years wishing for it to happen. Of course, there is less than zero demand among high-status men for delusional women…..
Richard Saunders,author, “Old Maid Syndrome”
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