Men need to stop feeling like they need things. We don't need anything. If we needed any one thing on this planet, it's to stop feeling like we need things. We don't. Not toys with four, knobby wheels that fling mud. Not sports on TV. Not even relationships.
Yes, I know that there's an Incel community that would have everyone believe that any man who ever says they don't need a woman is a bitter, overweight gamer who lives in their mother's basement. But I think part of that is the natural evolution of the human brain to gravitate toward social interaction. Hormones pretty much do the rest and have left a solid history of pipe-laying clam conquerors claiming to lead the way for anyone presuming to have a pair of testicles.
But there's been a lot of backlash in the relational community lately about the complications in the dating game, and I think intrinsically, without any outside influence, men are finding out that it's just not worth the hassle.
Firstly, dating is not what it used to be. Apps have long since taken over the job of bridging the gap between having little time or interest in bars. And with a huge decline in shared activities and community interaction, apps seemed like the likely place to find someone with similar interests.
But there apps are riddled with problems. First up is the problem of creating and whittling down your entire life to five pictures and 300 words to not only describe yourself, but also not coming off as a braggadocios asshat.
The social expectations for photos, too, is always vague and always changing. And even if they weren't, it still comes down to personal preference. Some women like shirtless selfies, others think they're classless and swipe-worthy. Do you smile? Do you share a photo of you on top of a mountain, or is it too obvious that it was taken by your old girlfriend?
Then, once you've got it dialed in to find that balance between cocky and confident, there's the huge hurdle of wading through seemingly endless close-misses and butter-faces.
Let's just forego that nightmare and assume that you have plenty of matches. What then? No one wants to meet. They say they do, but three weeks of lackluster texting after finally getting over the initial hurdle of finding an adequate match, makes all the beauty and desire in the world about as useful and temporary as your favorite porn channel.
But even all this isn't' even the worst part.
The worst part: that's actually the good news! For those poor bastards who actually got roped into marriage after finding "the one" on a digital version of a soulmate window-shopping service, they're more likely to leave the relationship in short order. I could my next book about the nightmare stories I've heard from friends who've actually gone on dates with girls they've met on an app. I'll suffice this part of the discussion to say that dating in the second decade of this century simply sucks.
If you've already found that out, or have simply chosen to stay single because it got weird enough to GTFO before it got any weirder, you're not alone. In fact, according to the Census Bureau, you're actually making history. Men choosing to remain single is at an all-time high throughout the entirety of documented statistics in this country. And it's obvious that it's men choosing this track, because we beat out the stats on women in every, single age group for the decade between 2006 and the latest census data taken in 2016.
Rest assured, however, that even married people are still having a hard go of it. So, even if you were already married by now, the jury is still out on whether or not you're actually any happier with your life.
From their November 29, 2021 report on America's Family Living Arrangements, not only have there been an additional six million divorces every year for that last ten years on top of the norm for the previous decade, living alone became much more common as well. It states that an uptick to 15% of the entire marriage-aged population was living single by the time of publication. That's 37 million people, aged 18 and up, nationwide. And this was up 14% from the decade prior.
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In researching this article, I did an internet search for "what a woman brings to a relationship." I suggest you do the same thing. What you'll find will surprise you probably as much as what you won't find. What you won't find is probably more interesting. For instance, you won't find a single article about what a woman actually does bring to the table, which I find not only extremely telling of how our culture sees a woman's role in a marriage. It's also very limiting in that vein as well. Is it sex? Is that what they bring? Because, outside of that, there's no easily accessible literature available on the subject.
What I did find was perhaps just as revealing - though, on a different scale.
Below is the list of the 10 articles that appeared for the search:
A 2018 article from the Conversation.com, The secret to a happy marriage, which described how men could be flexible in their husbandly roles;
PsychologyToday's How Do Gender Roles Impact Marriage, which only compares recent marriages to traditional ones and says absolutely nothing about what women should bring to the table;
Dr. James Dobson's counseling guidance termed, True Love in Marriage: We all carry relational wounds, which ;
an article that opens up to a sad looking woman in a wedding gown, titled Is Marriage Really Bad for Women's Happiness,
Forbes' Top 10 Traits Women Want In A Husband, which more or less is self-explanitory;
a PDF from Healthy Marriage Info detailing a trends of gender attitudes in underrepresented couples;
WebMD's article, Only Happy Marriage Is Healthy for Women, which is again self-explanitory;
HBR.org's Does a Woman's High-Status Career Hurt Her Marriage, that clearly only focuses on socioeconomics of marrying under a woman's paygrade; and
an article by a church in Ohio that delineates the biblical directives of marriage roles (I was honestly surprised that one came in last).
The rest of the articles for three pages (which is when I finally just gave up looking for anything that even pretended to give half-a-shit about what men get out of a marriage) are a mixed bag posing questions of whether "women should stay single," and discussing "marriage and motherhood," and "independent women."
In fact, the only article that I found that suggested that women should contribute anything whatsoever to the relationship, from Mom Junction, listed things like, "be faithful," and "respect him," and "don't criticize or talk negatively about your husband to your family."
While the other articles listed obvious action items with very clearly stated objectives that men should be top earners, and provide constant affection, and be industrious, with strong ambitions, to maintain friendships with her friends and family, and be educated and spend time with children.
I should mention that I don't think that any of these activities and qualities are bad. Well, maybe save for the ones dictating that you actually have to be friends with her friends or that you have to sit at the head of your company.
The point is that there are no clear objectives, no hard and fast list of action items, nothing whatsoever to hold women to the same standard to which men are held by them.
In fact, of all the 17 Things To Do For A Happy Marriage, the only one that actually suggested involving the woman at all in his life was. Everything else was basically telling women to refrain from things (like being catty and disrespectful) or to do things that don't require any interaction with him at all (like "be responsible" and "be patient.")
These, of course, don't suggest a single actionable item within the relationship itself - the man doesn't even need to be present for women to do these things.
From all this information, a few very reasonable assumptions can be drawn. Firstly, men's happiness in relationships is clearly not even a factor for consideration in a marriage. This may have already hit some of you husbands out there who realized about the second week into the wedding planning process when your duties were relegated to finding a tux that didn't clash with the bride's maids' dresses.
Secondly, it also seems clear that, in addition to men not being a consideration in a marriage, women, women's health, women's happiness, women's support groups and about a thousand other things that involve, support or simply discuss women (while simultaneously, by association, decline to discuss any of these factors for men), are the first and only consideration.
Thirdly, while this is more of an projection of the facts, the vast majority of the information available, such that it focuses on women's issues in marriage, is likely also a precursor to why women are favored in divorce proceedings, child custody hearings, domestic abuse cases. I'm sure it's also not limited to the courts.
Women do a lot of great things in the world. But the only thing that women are expected to provide specifically to men is intercourse. And that's a problem - not just for the hormonal cavemen this ideology makes us out to be. But also for the minimizing it must be doing to the value women have in terms of attraction.
In other words, this mentality not only cheapens the efforts men make in being good people and tosses them into an inescapable void where their efforts will never be good enough. It also minimizes the efforts of the good women out there in the other amazing things they might bring to a marriage.
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I've heard podcasts where MGTOW Monks admit champing at the bit waiting for AI sex dolls to hit the market. That's not really my thing, and I'm happy to never think about what that situation actually looks like in reality. But I can bet that there are plenty of women who will feel very threatened by that invention. I think for many women, this probably represents a bigger, uglier truth that might actually be revealed in this generation: that men really, truly, actually do not need women.
Am I wrong in assuming that the evidence is already out there? I cited plenty of focus articles and relevant, eye-opening Census Bureau statistics. But it doesn't take a genius to look around and see all the single mothers out there. Could it be true that men have only ever needed one thing from women, and once they've gotten it, nothing will keep them around? Not even their kids?
A parting thought: when I went researching for the topic of neediness in relationships, I came across this video by a channel called the Ministry of Attraction. I haven't watched it, so I'm not endorsing it. I just skipped around in it. Maybe you can watch it and let me know if it's worth the 45 minutes.
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