But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The journalists never seem interested in asking whether modern Western women are marriage material? Degrees don't make you marriage material. Are men still attracted to feminine women, and are there enough feminine women? Are there potential reasons why Western men find it risky to commit to Western women? Do Western women have realistic standards? Do Western women need to be less picky about superficial characteristics? Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women, could women in a lot of instances be ending relationships and wrecking their own homes over trivial matters?

The mainstream coverage of this topic is usually very one sided/gynocentric. Women questioning the value of modern men is acceptable, while men questioning the value of modern women will often get you labeled a misogynist/woman hating incel.

This imbalance/lack of discussing what men want in women/lack of criticism of some aspects of modern women really hurts marriage minded women as well, because a lot of women are growing up without hearing what men want in a woman to marry.

Hey, there's actually a study [1] about this!

> The author uses a new longitudinal study of relationships in the US, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys, to examine the gender of who wanted the breakup for both marital and nonmarital heterosexual relationships for the first time. The results show that only in marriages are the majority of breakups wanted by the female partner. Men and women in nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the US are equally likely to want to break up. Furthermore, wives report lower relationship quality than husbands, while men and women in nonmarital relationships report more similar relationship quality.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_gender_of_break...

Incidentally, the courts generally don't get involved in the later sort of breakup. If a for-profit industry were made for nonmarital breakups as divorce attorneys have made for marital breakups, I bet this discrepancy would narrow.

This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life.

Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.

If a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office), then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman? Maybe intimacy, but that feeling will wear off after a few years. A vagina? Well, that's kind of depressing on its own. Expecting men to love and accept women who serve the exact same role they do in life is like wondering why companies aren't run entirely by managers, or entirely by assembly line workers. Men can already make a bunch of money and find intellectual stimulation from other men, and a woman has to compete with that. So what does a woman necessarily provide a man in that case?

Related to that, an intellectual woman probably isn't going to have a lot of time for anything outside of a few hours of eating food, watching Netflix, and maybe sex. That's all fine and good, except there's a kind of relationship that already fulfills those things, and it's called friends with benefits. Why make a contract with the state that gives half your possessions to the opposite party if things go wrong when you can get the benefits without any of that baggage?

No offense, but it can be really astounding how people simply can't understand that the programming they received about college degrees can be wrong. Man spent millions of years mating with women who didn't have a college degree (and vise versa!). A woman with a college degree does little more than what the man already can do with his own college degree.

It's just like the field of software engineering. No one really wants to work with a jerk with credentials. They want someone with good qualities that they can get along with.

Also, if one's particular interesting in learning extends to longterm travels, immersing oneself in foreign countries to study the languages or aspects of culture there, your male friends are probably not going to accompany you for more than a brief time. When people go on longterm travels, it is their partners that they rely on for companionship. (That holds, of course, for non-intellectual people traveling, too, as anyone in the bikepacking or overlanding scenes can tell you.)

For a bookish person, being in a relationship with a partner who merely has "good qualities", but who doesn't share that basic context, can mean feeling like one is not truly understood and there is a barrier between you. There is nothing worse than being in a relationship yet feeling alone.

I personally think that the more educated people a society has, the more interesting people there are to meet.

While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.

In many ways education makes us more homogeneous. To an extent this can help make each other seem more interesting because it gives us common language and intellectual frameworks to have discussions, it dispenses with some boring preliminaries. But beyond that point, I think sharing common education makes people actually less interesting, not more.

Particularly, that kind of feeling inadequate in spite of success is a likely a form of imposter syndrome. Many other people experience it, including people with degrees (there is always someone else with more or more illustrious degrees). Many people feel better just knowing that other, even obviously super-accomplished people, have felt that way and many people seem to more or less age out of it.

While I can't refute the existence of that social stigma, at least I found that there isn't much of that in actuality... but that doesn't prevent it from existing in your head. Of course, there are people who always find something to be snooty about. If it's not the pedigree of your academic credentials it'll be about the brand of your sneakers. Surrounding yourself with thoughtful and emotionally healthy people can help.

At least that is what I experienced and heard from others.

Cheers

> Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull

I meant precisely what I said. I don't intend to make a broad statistical statement based on my limited personal annecdotes.

> While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.

I don't have a college degree. There are many thing I don't know about, which is why I like talking to educated people.

> In many ways education makes us more homogeneous.

I strongly disagree. ”Education” only creates homogeneity to the degree to which educational institutions focus on indoctrination over education.

I strongly support enouraging education for people of all genders, ethnicities, intelligences and socio-economic backgrounds because I think it will make the world a more interesting (and better) place.

I have to be perfectly honest, but to me, this is entrepreneurialism, not intellectualism. Someone might go to college and get some massive degrees to become i.e a lawyer or a senior dev, or a doctor, but ... those are trade skills. There's a fair amount of overlap, but to me, intellectualism is something distinct.

For many of us, intellectualism is the "philo" part of "philosophy"; the love of knowledge. Not knowledge as a means to an end; as a means to a high-powered, eat-your whole-day career. But rather; knowledge for its own sake - knowledge that exists as a sort of purpose for life (whether secular or spiritual, it's practically the pursuit of curiosity and knowledge-seeking as a sort of borderline religious calling).

Guys like that are looking for a woman (or man, if they're so inclined) they can have fulfilling conversations with, every day, for the rest of their life. And it's not something you can do with your "pals"; there are some of these conversations you can only have with a soul mate. Hell, there are some of them you can only have with your lover - not a friend-with-benefits (which, sadly, includes a lot of spouses), but someone you've been willing to be truly vulnerable with and expose the depths of your soul to.

But yeah; for a lot of us, they have to have the same deep love of knowledge, curiosity, and sense of wonder about life - or there can't be love, there.

I chuckled a little at your comment because you are sort of the anti Henry Higgins, the character who sings "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" in the famous play set in 1917

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY

Jack Donovan has a great corollary to this in "The Way Of Men" where he says that society is nowadays trying to "fix" men as if they are "imperfect women."

I started copying and pasting lines and responding to them but on edit it seems pointless.

I would just say that good relationships work in both directions, 1+1=3 idiom, and come in vastly many forms.

Intimacy doesn't fade in a good relationship it grows stronger.

For sure the type of women you seem to be looking for exist and enjoy that type of relationship.

But a lot of people, of all genders and orientations, find the things you don't seem to think are good qualities, are in fact the things 'that they can get along with.'

And I would maybe suggest instead looking more at the 'programming' of gender and roles.

Women aren't simply a transaction or variable in your equation of an ideal relationship.

> what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman?

What a strange and confused perspective, to pose such a question.

Sure one can pay for a child care center, but that's not covering the whole cleaning and doing the chores around the house. Its also only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

An at-home caregiver (note: I didn't say wife either spouse can do) can provide an immense amount of value.

10 hours a month doesn't cover doing a full time job. What world do you live in where one can do a full-time job for 10 hours a month?

It's not that the PhD doesn't add to the attractiveness. It's just not the most important variable for most men. You might differ, but unusually intellectually curious men on HN aren't really representative. Most people have very little intellectual curiosity.

For a life partner i would and did pick the PhD tho

I don't even know what to say to this. Is [picks from list] speech pathologist, dental hygienist, nurse, payroll clerk or hairdresser NOT a job that involves a fair amount of knowledge, training, and skill?

Just because it's not EE or CS doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of technical and scientific understanding (or even just an understanding of the legal environment) going on behind the scenes of a profession.

So you're probably not going to find a girl who has exactly the same job as you and wants to date you -- but if you ask them to explain their profession to you, you might just learn there's a lot going on under the hood.

"they have to settle with women they have little in common with"

Again, this is just a lack of imagination. I studied a bit of chemistry, my wife studied a lot of chemistry, we appreciate that chemistry is cool. Just because I went with computers and she went with medicine doesn't mean we have "little in common"; we just find other topics to geek-out about.

"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't." ― Bill Nye

[1] list was https://fourpillarfreedom.com/visualizing-u-s-occupational-e...

that's basically it: debt is not attractive.

They were as physically attractive as they were emotionally shallow. There is much much more to a person than an education.

The common male complaint I see isn't "all these women I date are simply not going to fulfill what I need," it's "no women will date me at all" which points at a breakdown in the process way before the point of "what are these men looking for." Hard to imagine these men even have any idea of what they're actually looking for in a relationship, with that lack of experience. You only find out one way...

And for that situation, a woman complaining "so few of these men I see have their shit together" and a man complaining "so few of these women are willing to date me at all" are two sides of the same coin. I think at a societal level, though, you'd be hard pressed to push the view "everyone should simply give up on contributing to society in traditional ways" so the coverage is going to look negatively at the "freeloaders" in the same way it disapproved of someone like Paris Hilton. You see it through a lens of sexism, I see it through a lens of it being hard to sympathize with someone drifting through life chatting meaninglessly on the internet and playing games. BATNA comes into play, too - the person with no options at all seems to be the one with the incentive to make changes. (While for the women here, and the men they are currently dating while ignoring these stay-at-home-and-do-nothing men, there's other, plenty-well-trod advice about compromise being necessary, etc, that's been repeated to death in media of all sorts.)

Maybe we should encourage these men to go become nannies for a few years, to both give them a job and boost their dating profile that way AND to prepare them for being a full-time homemaker if traditional employment simply isn't what they want! I certainly think that should be an option for both genders.

> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women

Citation please? I would LOVE to know if your number here also includes stuff like "he slept with me and then ghosted me," too.

I suspect what the poster meant to write was that most divorces are initiated by women. Which is a different statistic but still somewhat relevant. It's actually true, it's around 69% that are initiated by women. Here's the study i quickly found for it which seems credible https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-mor...

Interestingly it explicitly states that there's no large difference for non-marital relationships. So the poster is incorrect about breakups in general.

Speaking anecdotally from my own experience, there is a pervasive fear of marriage and raising children amongst men. Most believe that if you get divorced you'll be left destroyed financially and denied access to your children regardless of the circumstances and that getting divorced is extremely likely. Whether that's actually true or not, I don't actually know, but it's still widely believed and influencing men's behavior/plans all the same. I suspect that's a big factor in the frequency of men who don't seem to care about having their shit together. From my own observation of divorces within my extended family and those of my close friends, it does seem to be true to me. Many divorces I've been privy to, seem to almost always end with the man living a much lower standard of living by himself with restricted access to children, while the mother lives in the family home with a higher standard of living that the ex-husband pays for. Totally anecdotal of course, but it certainly makes me extremely cautious when considering marriage and it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of young men don't even consider it.

On average I think it's probably not true. Most men probably stay married, and most divorces probably aren't ruinous. I say "most", but I don't mean a comfortable majority. The ruinous divorces happen a lot. I've seen it destroy more men I know/knew than alcohol or any drug. Even if it only happens one in six times, that's Russian Roulette odds. Those are bad odds.

Where men ask for custody, they tend to get it. But they are less likely to ask.

Also, alimony for adult women are more of rare. Where they exist they are time limited and awarded only if she stayed at home for multiple years. As in, in double income situation they wont happen.

But isn't that the parent poster's point? They don't make decisions that make them more attractive for marriage, therefore they're less likely to end up married.

The same argument applies to men too. Men don't have to do things that make them more attractive to women, but they shouldn't be all that surprised when they end up not being attractive to women.

The men unable to get a date at all clearly have some work to do - even when there's so many unhappy women, there is something they're still doing or not doing that makes them even less appealing.

The unhappy women and the men they're currently dating are a more curious situation. Are the men unsatisfied with them in particular, and so these women have work to do to convince a man they're "marriage material"? Or are the men simply not looking for anything that serious at all?

The general position of the media coverage is that it's the latter: the women can't "make themselves good enough for marriage" because the men just want the casual merry-go-round to continue. And there are certainly men quoted in articles about this who feel exactly that, but I can't say for certain that we're missing another group who just finds these women lacking.

My personal view is that we've shifted a bit, so the "growing up" that would've normally happened for these men in their early 20s is now ten years behind or so, but I see it happening in my cohort now as everyone is in their mid-30s. So I'm not too concerned for that side of things.

The idea that only some small fraction of men get any dates at all flies in the face of everything I've seen. Is there any solid demographic data suppporting this idea that only 1 in 4, or 1 in 10, or whatever, men is actively dating or in a relationship? Not message data from a dating app, because there's a LONG process between "sent a message on a dating app" and "in a relationship" but actual data on relationships. In the world as its being described here, you'd have a huge perpetually-single population...

I believe the actual "can't find a date to save my life" crowd is much smaller and less representative than it thinks it is. The internet is very perspective-distorting here. These are all surface-level-plausible claims that don't seem to hold up to any real scrutiny.

And ultimately women have to settle, as you say the math doesn't work out and in the end they want a relationship. But that doesn't help the young men who aren't old enough to be in the strike zone of more mature women. And since the women felt they settled when they went with this man of course it is they who initiate divorce and end the relationship since they always felt that they could do better.

"Live, try things out, settle down when you're ready to" sounds fine to me, since again, these groups of unhappy women and undateable men tend to be loud but I see no evidence that they're demographically dominant percentages. Way too many ... not-the-most-attractive... dudes out there getting married for the math to add up...

Why are you making this about sides? I don't have a low opinion of either side, I'm just making observations. Stop looking for a fight.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

We are not doing that. There is a lot of discussion about men who cant find partners. The common assumption in those is that women are never single if they dont want it. There is occasional pearl clutching about women who dont seek stable long term partner.

On HN, there is basically no discussion about what women think or want. And where such discussion is, what women say is ignored and instead male guesses are taken as gospel - even if man making those guesses interacts exclusively with males and dont know any woman close enough for her to tell him what she thinks.

I also seriously doubt that the claims about women not living up to some standard of attractiveness or femininity are true, misogynistic or not.

Alternative talk shows like Kevin Samuels are gaining traction.

The queen is naked.

The displacement of men from the labor markets has created a lack of stable patrimonial family formation, which is consistent with the Marxian doctrine’s intellectually revolutionary advocacy and its propagation into the American educational institutions over the last century in time. See the top cited references in the last century in the Western World for corroboration.

[For those unaware, Marx was violently opposed to family creation as necessarily female enslavement (see the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto).]

Patrimony has natural merit for creating principled savings and investments demonstrative in civilized record. Yet most American children are educated by the Nanny State and lack the proper tools to learn how to survive and thrive at being human - a universally patrilineal hereditary trait known as culture.

This form of culture is distinct from one which is unnaturally formed, such as by profit-motivations or ultimately temporal, metabolic functions rather than spiritual contemplation. This is seen consistent with decline in the American population’s affirmation of a transcendental existence conferred by the rise of an Atheistic population. What quantity of atheists were raised not simply with a spiritual life, but a natural one, existing outside of the metabolic motivations of federally legislated education? How does this correspond with the growth of Marxian publications in Academia compared to British Enlightenment literature including the great works of the Occident, such as Aristotle? We ought to be able to compare catalogs over time of the shift and denial of Western Patrimony as good. And I believe the shift exists, demonstrating a disintegrated sexually dimorphic society with transsexual cultural phenomenon as manufactured. Viz, unnaturally formed and therefore biologically morbid. See the overweight phenomenon as further evidence of the morbid nature of the civil authorities.

The audience here is (wrongly) responding to you by thinking that you're somehow targeting women in your questioning, but I get what you're trying to say - you see a strange imbalance of personalities being portrayed in popular media and it's setting off alarms in your head, like someone is trying to sell you something or they're trying to push an agenda on you that you don't quite buy into. They are, but you're resisting. Keep doing this. Eventually, find out who the owners are of all these channels and products that are being pushed on you. What do they have in common, and what would they stand to gain from this. Follow the money.

I don't know why it's different for some people, but it is. I have to think it's something we just don't put emphasis on in our education system or by parents. So pop culture does it for us. When I was a kid everyone wanted to be someone famous; a singer, an athlete, an actor, etc. Today is no different, everyone wants to be an influencer, a streamer, etc.

I think we need to make it a point for kids to understand from a young age that not everyone can be the famous person, neither should everyone want to be. There are so many other options, they only want fame because they don't know anything else.

People pick degrees based on the advice of counselors who seem to know of 8 kinds of job, and half of them are not something you can advise a kid in a striving high school to follow (binman, factory worker, etc) .

It's actually nuts how people will do an internship and then decide this is the thing they want to do. Or they get a visit from someone at school and now they're gonna be an author.

If there's one thing we need in society, it's experiential information about jobs.

For instance I've known many people who went into management consulting. None of them think it has any value. If I was a kid I'd want to know that.

Accountants come across many types of business and are employable in many types of firms. The job is closer to a lawyer than many people expect, esp irl to tax. Your math degree is minimally useful.

Recruiters talk to people all day and are paid in proportion to the salary of the placed person.

Anyway those are just jobs that I don't do, and I know a tiny bit about them through contact with real world people.

Kids need these contacts.

In case anyone is wondering, I didn't become a Ninja Turtle.

I suspect quite a few people are looking at the odds of achieving various goals, and simply changing the goals. Such as owning a home in desirable areas, or having kids if you cannot afford a food school district or a job that allows you to be home for dinner.

Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world. I probably would not have if I did not find a spouse with income in the top two quintiles. Not that there’s nothing wrong with the alternative, but different people have different risk tolerances and higher (perceived) volatility can be a cause for change in some population wide changed we are seeing.

Yet poorer developing nations have higher birth rates than developed nations. Is it because they have lower expectations for what their children need to live a "good" life, that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow, or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?

The adults pay the "fixed costs" to keep the farm running so each additional child produces more in labor than they consume in resources. They're too poor to hire other adults for labor because they have their own "fixed costs" that are much higher than a child in the family.

Yes, I think the minimally acceptable quality of life is certainly relative.

> that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow

Possibly, if everyone around you is on an upward trajectory, I can see that changing people’s calculus.

> or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?

I think a big factor is how (financially) independent women are and what kind of access to birth control (especially IUDs) they have. I suspect many of the women who have or had 3+ children would not have if they had similar options to those in developed countries today.

You have to reciprocate which is completelt ignored on HN. They do help you with kids and you have to help them with kids, elder care, sick care house fixing amd what not. You also dont get to make that many individualistic decisions either and many people have to accept their decisions made for them.

if I don't provide for my children in America, I enter the legal system.

US is on its way sideways or down for many of its citizens.

The developing world is on its way up.

Even for those with money, self-imposed targets are so high that having children seems like a distraction. Too much work, not enough time.

The second order effects get a bit complicated though...

In developing countries, more likely than not. But there's also the factors that make people choose to use condoms when they become available. Condom availability has no effect without the whole marketing/education/social pressure around why people should use condoms.

I didn't say that. Many, many other things affect the reproductive rate. However the availability of contraception (and other tools for family planning) has a significant and obvious impact on the size of those effects.

As in, when people are able to reliably plan children, they have less of them.

Do you have a solution to this? (I've been thinking about it for a while and I don't know)

We can also draw inspiration from the cultural change that we have seen for women. How often do you see in movie a person say to a woman "Are you happy? Is this really what you want...". Lifting personal motivation as an actually question is a early good step towards making people think about it.

There seems to also be a possible error in how people perceive the problem. In the absent of video games you would not suddenly get motivation. Even if you would throw them out on the street with no money, food or shelter, the result would not be a sudden aspiration to become what society expect men to be.

Finding what motivate oneself can either be done through the help by others, or alone. It not as much of a question about what is easier as all hobbies are more work than no hobby at all.