Women in Trouble

[kimberlysteele]

In a past life, I made the devastating claim that women had it easy compared to men. I was male at the time and it was one of those lifetimes that I began to become acquainted with the most common condition of our era: etheric starvation. Perhaps because I felt my wife was not able to provide the etheric bounty of the home I thought I deserved, I got snippy and made a rather universal pronouncement that I have been paying for ever since.

In this lifetime, I have had my nose ground into the sand of why women do not have it easy compared to men. For one, my period was a doozy. I began having it shortly after turning 12. It was a debacle nearly the whole time -- there were lots of almost-funny moments where I drank vodka screwdrivers at 3am while my sheets did a turn in the washing machine, which were a far better alternative to whimpering while in a fetal position in the bathtub between waves of gore and pain. Also not easy was the mystery surrounding the circumstances of my birth. I was told from a young age that I would have access to my birth records as an adoptee when I turned 18. This was a patent lie and I still do not know the name or identity of my birthfather.

Women do not have it easy, not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it is time that women stopped using our burdens as an excuse to make the world a far worse and more hideous place.

Girls Behaving Badly

If I had a dollar for every chubby, ill-kept, slovenly, high-riding, entitled single woman I have met who thinks she is owed her own Christian Grey, I would be writing this article from my country manor while my cook prepared a delicious breakfast. Just as the male equivalent of a frog should not expect supermodels to bear his children, there are a bunch of women who need a reality check. Yes, I get it that they have been told all their lives that they are princesses who deserve the best of everything, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too on this one. I am grateful for age because it gives me the ability to see that during the prime of my youth (age 21) I was at best an 8 on the 1-10 scale. As I age, this number slides ever downward, along with my jowls and my breasts. I would not have it any other way. One of the worst examples of nasty behavior I saw in my younger years was when a married woman in my circle made a rather public pass at a single man who was somewhat of an It Boy in our small pond of locals. She openly threw herself at the It Boy with her husband forced to watch. Luckily (?) for her husband, she was not much to look at and the It Boy took no interest. Perhaps that was the plan all along -- to some degree her outburst seemed like it was designed to fail. I have never understood why she dragged her husband into it by making her fantasies known.

Most people have unrealistic expectations -- that is the human condition. My argument is that it is worse in our era than in previous ones. Plenty of women are groomed to believe they can do it all; that would be me. Somewhere, doing it all gets confused with being provided for by a man, and I have battled that divide many times. I define etheric labor as any kind of work that improves the etheric plane, usually by drawing and transmuting energy from the surrounding astral and physical planes. Women do most of the indoor etheric labor in any given home and have been expected to do this form of labor since the beginning of the human race. Cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping are etheric labor. Teaching, feeding, and nurturing children is etheric labor. Traditionally male forms of etheric labor include farm work, mowing the lawn, routing out the pipes, and building. Men do etheric labor as well, but traditionally, men are expected to do the heavy lifting, often in the most literal sense.


Sigh, Go Get My Purse

The traditional marriage or co-habitation agreement tacitly states that the man will bring in the lion's share of the money and that the woman will take on most of the inside etheric labor. In Asian cultures, she usually controls the money the man brings in and is given the duty of being the house's accountant along with its maid, chef, and tutor. Nowadays, this arrangement has been thrown out with the bathwater. Women are often forced to bring in most if not all of the money, donating whatever they can make to a spendthrift man who wastes it far faster than she can make it. That is where the "Sigh, go get my purse" meme comes from: the dependent, lazy wastrel of a man who banks upon his limited sexual appeal and his woman's good nature in order to subsist a little longer as a financial parasite.

If there is an exact meme that encapsulates the female equivalent of Go Get My Purse, I have yet to find it and would appreciate your suggestions. The opposite pole of Go Get My Purse is an unemployed, spendthrift woman who does little to no etheric labor while expecting to be pampered and coddled with restaurant food, a beautiful and spacious home, and a handsome husband who is completely faithful and enslaved to her despite her own lack of effort. The advent of cheap petroleum seems to make this lifestyle possible if you don't look underneath the hood. This toxic feminine ideal is what drives so-called romance novels like 50 Shades of Grey.

Ugh, 50 Shades of Here We Go

True confessions: I have not read 50 Shades of Grey or its sequels in their entirety. I have not seen any of the films. I am going to come off as a major snob here: they were too insulting to my intelligence to read or watch. Keep in mind I will read and watch just about anything and that one of my favorite movies of all time is Spaceballs and I have read The Nanny Diaries several times. I don't hate 50 Shades of Grey because it is lowbrow or bourgeois. I hate it because it insults my intelligence.

When I wrote my own spoof of 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight, Shadeylight: Vella the Vegan Vampire in 2015, I found that I could not bear to read the source material (the third sequel to 50 Shades was published in 2012) for reasons mentioned earlier. Ditto for the Twilight sequels. Instead of reading them, I read reviews and went on bizarre flights of fancy that resulted in a very strange book indeed. In effect, the stereotypes of women and men in 50 Shades made me so angry, I decided it was easier to attempt to be funny when dealing with them.

There is a film called Book Club from 2018 that is little more than a flimsy marketing vehicle to sell the 50 Shades of Grey series. The "plot" of the film depicts four aging harridans -- a lineup of the usual actresses playing themselves: Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candace Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen -- who read the 50 Shades series on a lark and find that it transforms their lives and relationships. According to the creators of Book Club, we older women should be obsessed with straight male peen. Just as we are coming into our own, throwing off the yoke of reproduction, and entering into an era when we must forge our identities outside of being objects of desire, Book Club attempts to throw us right back into the "YOU MUST BE PRETTY AND SEXUALLY APPEALING TO MEN IN ORDER TO BE FULFILLED" cauldron. No thanks. Spoiler alert: all of the characters either end up happily paired off with an ideal dude or in hot pursuit of one. Second spoiler alert: if you are a man who has the misfortune to watch Book Club, expect some utterly ridiculous caricatures of maleness such as rich, hair-plugged men being hot to trot for old 70-something harpies for no apparent reason.

The Cliques, the God-Forsaken Cliques

We women are supposed to band together and be friendly. For me, this has always been a tall order. At age four, I distinctly remember walking to the back of the bus that took me to a fancy pre-school and being stonewalled by a pair of girls who told me I could not sit back there. I sat up in the front of the bus, alone and near the bus driver. The same women most likely became mothers themselves and would have been outraged if their children were treated the way they treated me at age 4 -- karma is funny like that, isn't it?

If it weren't for the legions of women who decided to wear masks and get experimental vaccines, we would not have had the Coronapocalypse shut downs that decimated the middle class and ushered in the era of deadly MRNA quaxxines. Women are also responsible for the sickening infiltration of public schools by outright groomers who wear badges of faux-oppression and who seek access to children for reasons far outside enlightenment. Women were the protective wall that stood between all of these forces and the sanctity of the home, and they let the demons in while spreading their legs and offering up their kids.

In order not to feel as bad about the obvious immorality of kowtowing to the Latest Thing, they threaten anyone with a spine with removal and shunning from the clique. In their world where Slavery is Freedom and Weakness is Strength, it's far easier to try to punish a dissenter than to face their own evilness and lack of character in the mirror.

Women have roles to play outside the traditional, of course, and I'm all there for the Georges Sands and the K.D. Langs. I myself am not the traditional wife with children; I have no children by choice and I am the primary breadwinner of my humble homestead. That said, many of us women need to grow hell up and figure out what we are going to do with our short lives. I suppose I had better go first.

Comments

A sad and painful subject

[(Anonymous)]

Nice post. I've always found it patently silly when anyone claims for one sex the title of most unfortunate. We are, after all, only one sex and one individual at a time; we really cannot know whether the other sex or other individuals truly have it better or worse. It's a blindingly, one might even say absurdly obvious fact, but then, Chesterton put it well when he said that civilizations die by forgetting the obvious.

Your appreciation of your own sexes downfall is harsh, accurate, and very sorrowful indeed. Of course, women aren't alone in that, given our plutonian times. As a reasonably healthy man, I instinctively cherish women, and I find the current state women even more bewildering than that of men.
Good luck to all of you ladies; I fear we men will be no help in navigating this minefield, as many of us are resentful after being very deeply hurt by you. It is not at all good of us to sit back like this, but karma is not fair. We didn't do very well at navigating the karma of our fathers who treated women like dim maidservants for so long, so I hope you deal better with the karma of your mothers who reacted against men. May Lady Luna shine silver upon your (and our) strong hearts, and may she be a lantern guiding us through this dark and sordid maze.

-Derpherder

[methylethyl]

Wow. Must be something in the ether today. I literally just replied to someone on a completely unrelated blog on... the exact same subject. It's just that they were talking about Chesterton rather than etheric work. Still... same conclusions, largely.

Women trying to do it all are overstretched, and everyone suffers as a result.

[methylethyl]

To clarify: I agree, women are supposed to be the social glue of a civilization. But when they're permanently overstretched by taking on too many roles-- hey, now not only are we going to compete with men in the workplace doing completely unnaturally symbolic tasks and separated from nature in the most sterile possible way (also not healthy for men!), we're *also* going to still be responsible for all the same stuff as before: raising kids into civilized adults, feeding everybody with physically and etherically nurturing food, running the household, and maintaining the social connections that make a community. Overstretched. Some of it's going to get done badly, some of it's going to not get done at all (Feral daycare kids, dead processed food, and who even manages a household when nobody actually lives there? It's not a home it's a crashpad). And I think as a result we find ourselves in a terrible, unintended situation where women, doing a lot of things inadequately, are extremely insecure. Without sexual norms, can you ever be truly secure in a relationship? Sure, but I think that kind of security is becoming less and less accessible to women. Talking to younger women about the current dating scene... holy crap. There's a meme going around that expresses it perfectly. Something to the effect of "Married GenXers watching GenZ dating: does anybody else feel like they got the last chopper out of 'Nam?"

Multiply that inescurity across every domain, every social hierarchy, that women belong to, and you get terrifying unbridled neurosis. No deviation, no eccentricity, can be tolerated... because absolutely everyone feels she is clinging by a thread to her social position, in every possible domain. Any day, she could be replaced at her job, in her relationship, in her home, in her friend network. Welcome to the neoliberal utopia: you are an interchangeable widget. And this makes women into ferocious howling monsters of social censure.

Any excursion through the "golden ages" of our history produces heaps of eccentrics on the leading edges of science, art, literature, and culture. This ain't a golden age for anything. It is a tyranny of untrammeled feminine insecurity: ten million constantly-changing unwritten rules which you can be socially assassinated for breaching. Used to be a women's problem (and even then limited by the absolute authority of men in some domains). Now it's everybody's problem. No dissent can be tolerated.

Re: A sad and painful subject

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you! You may have already guessed that an upcoming post will be an essay called Men in Trouble. The male role model is an even more elusive, endangered species than the female one, and that is truly saying something.

[kimberlysteele]

Weird! I was going to do a blog on a related subject, actually, but my Ogham suggested I do this one instead. Do you have a link to the blog about Chesterton?

[kimberlysteele]

Yes. I see the primary problem is that we women are acutely overstretched. Like Atlas, we are expected to carry the whole world, but we don't have his beefy arms or broad chest to hoist the weight. Bearing and raising kids is a HUGE job; that's why I opted out of it for this incarnation. Expecting a woman to carry a baby to term, suckle her infant, and go back to work in a matter of weeks like nothing happened is disgusting and obscene and speaks volumes about the way our culture actually treats women. Mothers are given plenty of lip service and no real service. Certain factions refuse to admit that women are better at selected skills. The reason we grow boobs at age 12 is because of motherhood. I did not have the instinct unless we are talking cats, but I do have other extremely feminine instincts. Women generally make better cooks, healers, teachers, and caregivers. We are far better at decorating because of our superior sense of the etheric plane and better perception of color. The modern paradigm tries to shoehorn us into its own sterile image of automated everything.

Ay yi yi, yes, I feel that way about marriage. Last chopper out of 'Nam, indeed. How could Gen Z date? That's the clandestine function of going to college, and those were in lockdown for three years. Now they have to deal with 6 out of 10 who have been quaxxed, and who knows what kind of infertility problems they will have or what hideous birth defects their children could be saddled with? As you well know, marriage ain't easy for us Xers or anyone else... it is a great deal harder when hubby is randomly shooting blanks, when wifey loses one or both ovaries to vax side effects nobody is allowed to talk about, and when they lose their only surviving infant to a mysterious stroke at 6 months old.

[randomactsofkarmasc]

Kimberley, I very much enjoyed this post.

Methylethyl, your comment about GenXers watching GenZ dating is funny and sad. My husband and I have been watching variations of manosphere and MGTOW to try to understand what is happening (my daughter is GenZ).

[methylethyl]

Here it is:

https://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/2023/05/17/chesterton-on-feminism

There is a certain synchronistic hilarity to you, and Mr. Moore (a very conservative Catholic) riffing on the same subject on the same day ;) Different angles, of course, but one squints and thinks it is the same sculpture being discussed.

[methylethyl]

...and that's on top of the neverending trainwreck-in-a-sewer that is the current "dating" scene. (terrified grimace goes here). At least we didn't have to date in an atmosphere where boys were sexually socialized by video porn from age 12-- we didn't get internet until I was 15, and it took several years for bandwidth to allow video. The worst thing my brother got into was printing photos of naked ladies (and selling them to classmates-oi!)-- no worse than you could see in any public art museum, albeit less aesthetic. I really hope that scene clears up, or that our religious subculture steps up to the matchmaking plate in a big way, by the time my kids reach adulthood. I can't even begin to tell them how to navigate that. I never had to.

The whole work+kids thing is a raw deal for women *and* kids. I have no idea how anyone does it, and I respect your decision to avoid it. I dodged the other way around: had kids, but accepted a certain degree of voluntary lifestyle austerity so that we could do it on one income. I think so many women out there doing what's expected of them are getting hammered on every side, and the result isn't a glamorous feminist utopia where we all have fulfilling jobs: for most it's more like forty+ hours at a job that sucks the life out of you, half-feral kids who are being raised by smartphones and tiktok celebrities, and nobody putting in the work to organize the potlucks and baby showers, because it's not like you know anybody outside your job anyway (and who knows when you'll change jobs?).

I feel like this is one of those fallacy-of-prior-investment problems: where you spend too much for a thing, it turns out to be crap, and what do you do? Keep pouring money into it and try to fix it? Or just admit it was a mistake, chuck it, and see if you can find something better? Feminism's been more insidious somehow. It told us we could have all the money, power, and status the men have, if we just give up on being women. We bought it. Now what?

Sadness

[(Anonymous)]

As a man with a competent mother and father both, I couldn't agree more. My dad holds the line and contributes almost equally; that is now shockingly rare among the people I know. He is also very chronically ill and my mother is not, an increasingly common pattern.

I honestly think this chemically, industrial, and socially toxic environment is going to kill vast amounts of men, and the neuroses and laziness and male dysfunction we see now is just a prelude to that culling, the proverbial limping of animals ready to be picked off. So unfortunately I don't see help for women coming any time soon, as I think men are just going to keep getting suckish and sicker until many of us are crippled or dead. We are collectively--if not always individually-- weaker than women, and that is not a good place to be nowadays. As a genz, I have worked for 6 years to get over chronic and persistent conditions with the help of decently well off parents, and have sort of, not really, kinda, gotten over them. I'd say a fifth to a third of my male peers are in a semi-similar situation to me back then, but without a good support system, and more heartbroken than I about society's demonization of manhood since they don't do banishing rituals and meditation. They are young yet, and cope badly if functionally, for now.

I will try to help, and I will try to get my male friends to as well. But this is, I think, not going to be solved except by women, which makes me feel terribly guilty as this technically IS our job as men.

Lastly, I really appreciate you and Kimberly being honest about the terrible social tyranny of femininity nowadays. It soothes my hurt and lets me be open to admit men's failings without clamming up. When women like you do this, I find that I can more easily let the SoP cleanse me of this old pain. Thank you, truly.

Godspeed, and may the powers to which you pray bless you.

-Derpherder

[kimberlysteele]

Wonderful! I look forward to reading this. Thank you!!

Re: Sadness

[(Anonymous)]

I am watching this process, with great consternation, among my family members. 20yo son of close family, looks and seems normal, but opted out of college, can't hold down a job, still lives with parents, and struggling to figure out how to work from home so he can stay near a toilet thanks to chronic digestive problems. Just deeply sad to watch. And he seems so, depressingly, typical of his age cohort. What the hell happened?

Like, in theory I have no objection whatsoever to skipping college and living with parents to avoid debt... while you pursue other goals for an independent future. This isn't what I'm seeing. Just no prospects for a future when parents aren't around to support.

[causticus]

I watch that content a lot, mostly for entertainment. And it's specifically reaction videos to terrible TikTok dating advice and complaints.

The more misogynistic end of the Manosphere/MGTOW scene though I can't relate to at all as a man, as I've always had generally good relations with women, whether they were friends or partners/lovers. I've never really been screwed over by women, like so many men these days are reporting. Then again, my prime "dating" years were before all of the smartphone/social media insanity became the primary means of matchmaking. "Back in my day" the dating pool was my own local friend/acquaintance circle, not the whole freakin' internet! As a man who was born on the cusp of GenX and Millennial generations, the whole "dating app" paradigm seems so utterly alien and grotesque from my outsider's perspective.

Overall, I think "dating" is terrible for everyone now, except for a small number top-tier (looks and status-wise) men who are able to use those apps to build a massive roster (i.e. unofficial harem) of easy hookups. However, the trail of tears they tend to leave behind is surely bound to produce some nasty karmic side-effects.

The "dating scene" now is eerily a lot like a typical large American corporation; massive "rewards" for a tiny number of players at the top, and all-around misery for everyone else.

[causticus]

Great post and a lot of great comments here. Beyond my sub-thread comment above, I don't have much else to add except some opinions on few quote snippets:

"If I had a dollar for every chubby, ill-kept, slovenly, high-riding, entitled single woman I have met who thinks she is owed her own Christian Grey, I would be writing this article from my country manor while my cook prepared a delicious breakfast. Just as the male equivalent of a frog should not expect supermodels to bear his children, there are a bunch of women who need a reality check."

Yeah, this is seriously a thing now and I believe social media is much to blame for this. On icky social platforms like FB and Instagram, even a sub-5/10 woman can get tons of sexual attention from random dudes. Because of terrible state of sex education in our culture, many of these women falsely believe that getting sexual attention from legions of drooling SIMPS means they're now suddenly "high-value" women in the looks department. LOL, no!! Getting sexual attention even from good looking men is no accomplishment at all, at least not on its own. The old joke goes that a sufficiently-horny man will boink anything that moves. They eventually learn the hard way that men normally out of their league (in terms of looks, status) will only hit them up for sex, and not much more.

There is now a whole TikTok "dating advice" subculture of women devoted to spreading and reinforcing the "I am owed my own Christian Grey" entitlement delusion you get at above. They keep telling one another to progressively up their "standards" + "requirements" ante, effectively pricing themselves out of the market of men who will realistically commit to them. The most toxic I've seen from the TikTok cringe is 35+ single women who are LARPing at their 21-year-old selves; they act like the kind of men who paid attention to them at 21 are the same men who must still be paying them attention. Many of these women have multiple divorces under their belts, and often children from multiple "baby daddies." I do realize this sample size here is limited to the kind of women who are willing to blab about their personal lives on TikTok to (potentially) millions of strangers. They're certainly not the kind of women I interacted with during my youthful prime.

"If there is an exact meme that encapsulates the female equivalent of Go Get My Purse, I have yet to find it and would appreciate your suggestions."

It's called the "Sugar Baby" and "Stay-at-home girlfriend" memes. And there's even a dating site that caters to the former, called "Seeking Arrangements". The site allows wealthy men, the "Sugar Daddy" to meet young women looking for easy money and free stuff. Essentially, rich men purchasing the company of young woman (nothing new under the sun). Sometimes the "arrangement" doesn't even involve sex; just men with a fetish for forking over their money to some spoiled brat half their age. The women involved don't have to lift a finger or provide anything of value. Their "value" is just sitting there looking pretty.

"Women have roles to play outside the traditional, of course, and I'm all there for the Georges Sands and the K.D. Langs. I myself am not the traditional wife with children; I have no children by choice and I am the primary breadwinner of my humble homestead. That said, many of us women need to grow hell up and figure out what we are going to do with our short lives. I suppose I had better go first."

This is where our polytheist mythologies and wisdom traditions really shine, IMHO. The Gods and Goddesses well-define traditional gender roles and make notable exceptions for those who have outlier personalities. For "normie" women there's Juno and Venus. And for women who don't fit the normal mold, there's Minerva and Diana, among others. Same with men and the Gods like Jupiter, Mars, Vulcan, ect. Things associated with Mercury are fair-game for both sexes, as he is typically depicted in a rather androgynous manner.

I think a lot of the "gender wars" clusterfrack we're dealing with today is (in addition to social media and soulless techno-consumer culture) a product of the utter disorientation that is the post-Christian relations between the sexes here in the West. Augustine-inflected Western Christianity was IMHO responsible for a lot of comforting fairy tales and outright falsehoods about human sexuality. With mass secularization, the covers have now been torn off and we collectively haven't found anything coherent to replace those tall tales with. The raw reality of human evolutionary mating strategies is kind of gross (for both sexes) if we're to be brutally honest. On that, I find the old raucous pagan cosmic soap operas to be closer to reality, tbh.

[(Anonymous)]

I think your description of the dynamic you're seeing between men and women as described in your meme above only holds true in the sense that it's always held true. Men who are sufficiently physically attractive and charming have always been able to attract a woman who will put up with endless amounts of headache because she'll take him on as a project in order to change him. He's got the looks so why not try to change the rest to get the total package? For a man without the looks and charm he most assuredly does still need to out earn the woman regardless of her own income or education, and if he hits a tough spot or a layoff she can easily leave him since he lost his one factor of attraction.

It's in hyperdrive today but I think the dynamic isn't a new one.

[kimberlysteele]

Just read it... fascinating. And thanks for your comment on it, because Chesterton is difficult to parse. I would not have had a chance of understanding the passage without your comment.

[kimberlysteele]

Dating in the modern age the competition egregore gone hog wild. All to fund a bunch of insane industries sustained by hallucination and froth: real estate, plastic surgery, luxury cars. If I were Gen Z, I'd plan on being single my whole life, hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

Re: Sadness

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you Derpherder. I think the healthiest thing would be for Western society to destigmatize teenage pregnancy. The issue underneath all of the rest of these issues is that women are having children when they are much too old. This is the real reason boys have become so feminized and lacking in manly characteristics: literal feminization at the genetic level. Add a cocktail of other feminizers such as pollutants and plastic chemicals permeating everything we eat, drink, or breathe and you end up with cucks. And now with the addition of MRNA quaxxines, it's anybody's guess if any female human of childbearing age will be able to reliably get pregnant in the next 50 years. The antinatalists may be cheering at the prospect, but they only do so because they are stupid and have not thought things through.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks for this! Oooh boy, the Sugar Daddy and the Stay-at-Home Girlfriend memes... ugh, it's all so much worse than I thought. The Sugar Daddy scenario was always problematic -- unless Sugar Baby is socking away money in a well-hidden account and using her free time between lattes and laundry to learn a viable skill, she's just pissed away the most productive part of her life. Many of these women are 20-something. Time to have a baby if that's what you want out of life, and of course Sugar Daddy does not want children; that would ruin all the fun. For me, it was the time I spent becoming a great teacher instead of just a good one and learning how to run a business. Admittedly I had the body at age 26 to become a Sugar Baby, though I doubt I could have snagged a billionaire without getting a bunch of stuff fixed with plastic surgery. Loafing in a pretty apartment would have been a great deal more fun than learning how to make teaching schedules, administer Music Teacher association tests, and reach inside the minds of autistic kids. At age 36 and 46, however, I had a career that I will most likely have at 56. Not so much for the gorgeous influencer/trophy, who is quickly thrown away for the younger cutie.

[kimberlysteele]

Good point. Like the Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby dynamic Causticus mentions in the comment above, it's the same old same old but on steroids. I think most of the reason women take on the He Got No Money guy is because other women want him. Women always want what other women want -- that's why there is often an average looking sloppy guy who ends up being a gigolo, because nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. And of course guys being guys, the average looking dude who believes in his own magnetism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as males can easily fool themselves into thinking they are better looking than they actually are.

[causticus]

This is mostly a modern thing. In prior ages, and across cultures all over the world, that young hot guy would have likely been married off (or died in a war) before he had the chance to prowl the town and cycle though a roster of women who each thought they were landing prince charming.

[causticus]

Yes, competition egregore gone hog wild! Like all these other wonderful American delights, dating in the age of social media narcissism is a bubble. And of course all bubbles will eventually burst. I certainly don't want to be around for the mass-resentment fallout when that happens!

I do feel bad for all the GenZ'ers who will probably never experience any romance, much less being able to start a family. I guess I should consider myself lucky I had my fill relationships and casual dating in my youth. I'm now 42 and I think I'll probably stay single for the rest of my life. I'm an introvert and have enough spiritual and intellectual interests to keep myself busy for the next 3 lifetimes at least.

[causticus]

Sounds like you took the Saturnine option (being cognizant of Father Time) and it paid off many times over.

[methylethyl]

Watching loved ones try to date in the "app age" I very much get the impression that trying to date the "whole freakin' internet" is, in fact, the problem. Back when the limit was the people you knew at work/school/church/friends-of-friends... how many eligible people was that? Like maybe 20 at the high end, if you were a really really socially outgoing person. When you're looking at a dating pool of 20 people or less, you don't make the same judgements, or the same decisions. People are able to realistically assess-- do I like any of these men/women? Are they decent people? What do my friends think of them? Have I got any chance with them? And once you've answered *those* questions, the field is pretty dang small. Maybe one. Which means you're going to ask that person out, or flirt with that person, *even if they're not perfect*, because really who else is there? This isn't settling for less. This was SANE AND NORMAL until five minutes ago. Perfect doesn't exist, and if it did, you and I wouldn't be eligible.

The apps give the illusion of infinite choice. Which we aren't built for, and which cripples our brains.


People get on there and see 800 "eligible" matches in their area, and heck, why settle for someone who's just OK when there are 150 extremely hot, talented, well-dressed people they could connect with. Except they're not. Those are like the apartment listings in our old town: pure illusion, once you actually try to contact them. Maybe they're bots. Maybe they're old listings and not available. Maybe the rent's too high. The photos were from the demo model. There's no vacancies but you can get on a 6-month waitlist. But you already gave up on the one or two adequate people you actually know because the app made you think you could do better. And maybe they did the same to you. It's a mindf*ck where everyone ends up miserable.

What I'm delighted to see is that the young folks in my church community are skipping the apps, getting married, and seem happy and well-adjusted. How are they meeting each other? Well... at church. They narrow the field way, way, down by just... not gonna date outside their religion.

They're doing the same thing everybody used to do: no apps (though from what I hear, Discord groupchats may be involved for meeting prospects outside your local parish). Look in your community (whether that's geographical or religious community). Be clear about your standards. Limit with extreme prejudice to people you're willing to raise kids with. Seems to work.

Not sure if anything similar can be made to work in the secular scene, but I'd bet there's a way. Obviously a religious culture that emphasizes marriage and family is helpful. Perhaps not necessary?

I'm not seeing it though. Outside the church scene... what I'm seeing is absolute carnage.

Re: Sadness

[methylethyl]

"destigmatize teenage pregnancy"

Amen.

FWIW, if we could destigmatize teen marriage while we're at it, that'd probably help, too ;)... and provide more community support for young families where a parent is still doing college or vocational training to be able to support his or her own family. But also, bring back the old Catholic family system: that family with 9 kids? The youngest kid or two are just as likely to be grandkids. I mean, after you've had seven already, it's no big deal to slot in another one, when your teenager gets knocked up. Wasn't even a huge shameful secret-- just how things were done.

At the same time, we should make it easier for consenting adults to get sterilized. Some people don't want kids, and we shouldn't put obstacles in their way. Might even be good to offer the surgery free at the public expense. Will some of them regret it? Absolutely. At the same time, The women I know who didn't want kids while young, but had second thoughts as they approached menopause still single... universally were right in their first assessment. They would not have been good parents. Hormones giving you second thoughts at forty doesn't change that, and you can still be a totally awesome auntie, uncle, foster parent, mentor, etc. without ever having kids of your own. There used to be lots more of those around, and a lot of kids with subpar bio-parents got a second shot at a good life because of them.