If you go over to the neighborhood google machine and enter “women less happy” you get 284 million results. When you enter “men less happy” you get 246 million results, but it quickly becomes apparent that most of the results are the same as the first search. Scanning through the first dozen or so pages of both queries reveals that the result sets are almost exclusively about women being less happy than men and less happy today than at some point in the dark past.
There was a big study on this half a dozen years ago. This being the modern age, researchers are required to first eliminate the most obvious answers and instead focus on those causes that reinforce the tenets of the One True Faith. These days, the social justice warrior phenomenon where angry young women make a nuisance of themselves, is explained away as the fault of the pale penis people. The fat, blue-haired girl with the face full of fishing tackle may have been born that way, but it’s still your fault.
The truth is, feminism is and was toxic nonsense. A century ago feminism could make some claims to rationality. After all, women in the West did have a strong position in society. Encoding that into the social and political institutions made some sense. By the 1950’s, the happiest period for women in modern history, feminism was at best a stupid fad and at worst, what we have experienced, a suicide cult promising to immiserate women at a scale the Muslims could never imagine.
That’s a good thing to keep in mind. If a woman wants to maximize her happiness, looking back to the 50’s and 60’s is a good place to start. Women in that age got married early. By early, I mean young adulthood, either after high school or after college. Instead of waiting until their life was full of restraints and complexity, they found a husband, with whom they could develop those restraints and complexity.
It turns out that married women are twice as happy as single women. This is a biological fact of life. The females of our species are wired to seek out a high status male, with whom they build a life-long bond. From the point of view of nature, this guarantees the greatest chance of reproductive success. Since it is vastly easier for a young adult female to land a suitable mate than it is for a middle-aged female, getting married early makes the most sense. Sure, the man could be a dud, but there are no guarantees in life.
Similarly, women should try to have their babies by the time they reach thirty. Child bearing is tough on the woman’s body so getting it done in peak physical years makes the most sense. There’s also the fact that chasing around after a ten year old is easier at 30 than it is at 40 or 50. Kids will wear out even the most fit person so having them when you are at your most fit means you get the most out of being a mom.
That’s the other thing. I’ve met so many women who seem to think they should not enjoy being a mom. They race off to work as soon as they can drop the kids off to daycare and they carry on like their kids are a burden. A woman’s reason for being on earth is to be a mother. That’s pretty much their only reason to be alive. A smart and happy woman will enjoy it as much as possible as life will not be any better than those years as a mother.
Now, the reality of life is that many marriages end in divorce. This is why getting married early makes sense. Finding a replacement man at 35 is easier than at 45 or 55. It’s going to be even easier if you’re not fat. It’s easy to develop bad habits when married, but a woman is going to be happier if she works to keep her figure and look as close to her wedding picture as possible. Letting yourself go is a good way to end up a divorced, bitter middle-aged hen.
This is not just about planning for being a swinging divorcee. Your job as a woman is to make your man happy. Part of that is keeping yourself sexually attractive. This is ground floor biology. By trying to look as close to your wedding photo as possible, you will remind your husband every day why he married you. The main reason men cheat on their wives is sex so a good way to keep your man around is remove that problem from the mix.
Finally, one thing every man in middle-aged and older knows is that women often go bonkers in their middle years. The kids gain independence and suddenly mom has no purpose. The mid-life crisis is far more common for woman than men and it is due to simple biology. The female is here to bear and raise children. Once that is done, finding a suitable reason to get up every morning is not always obvious. Plan for this reality.
Why is it so impossible to say, women led significant and valuable lives. Women have been tested and demonstarted their intelliegence and fortitude and succeeded well beyond what men expected in many fields. Hats off to you ladies – well done we applaud your achievements and are proud of you. Men and women are strongest standing together in defence of our way of life ….but men and women are complements not duplicates. Men also have a powerful trajectory and some of the battles ahead of us will be brutal. All men whether consciously or not know they must prepare for this death struggle all our lives. We need to stand together now at our darkest hour and believe in each other.Men without women make no sense. The biggest fraud is the that our destiny is divergent.
I often tell my DH that our 1+1 = 3. How’s that for “feminism”?
Amen, blue hat, amen
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Been thinking about this a bit more today. Why don’t we tell people that they need to marry and stay married to do well financially? We all know that it’s almost impossible to make it on a single income. Yet the media pushes the idea that you should get a divorce for personal freedom. It’s crazy. I talked to a customer that couldn’t afford to pay her full internet bill because she’s a single mom. I don’t know what happened to her marriage but it seems to me that they all lose.
Women naturally want love, marriage and children and I can’t disagree with much that Zman wrote. That being said, there are a few points of contention. While I realize we’re talking about biological imperatives here, viewing women as primarily breeders whose “only reason to be alive is to be a mother” does not make marriage seem particularly appealing to women. “Now, the reality of life is that many marriages end in divorce. This is why getting married early makes sense.” No, this is why careerism makes sense. When there is a high risk of divorce, it makes sense for women to develop financial self-sufficiency since most women’s income plummets after divorce. One might argue that women are as at risk in marriage as men, especially in a traditional marriage. And if a woman works outside the home, she will pull double duty for life since the bulk of child rearing and household chores still fall to her unless her job is very high income. The financial benefits of marriage do apply, but only in the absence of divorce and that has a good chance of happening these days. Many of today’s young women have experienced it first hand in their mothers’ lives and felt its effects as children.
When I was in my teens and early twenties, I figured that women would mature and become easier to deal with as they got older.
Imagine my surprise when, after being out of the dating pool for almost 20 years, it turned out that these now-older women were mostly neurotic, depressed basket-cases who hated men and, yet, were desperate to find another one to latch on to.
— If a woman wants to maximize her happiness, looking back to the 50’s and 60’s is a good place to start. Women in that age got married early. By early, I mean young adulthood, either after high school or after college. Instead of waiting until their life was full of restraints and complexity, they found a husband, with whom they could develop those restraints and complexity. —
The feminists will try to explain this away as “false consciousness” or “Stockholm Syndrome.” No amount of evidence will suffice to sway them, as theirs is a religious belief.
By way of ordinary least squares, here are the multiple regression coefficients from the GSS with happiness for nine variables that are, in the conventional wisdom, putative predictors of happiness, with the obligatory qualifier that some component of sunniness, of yet undefined magnitude, is innate. For contemporary relevance and to avoid racial confounding, responses are from 2000 onward and only non-Hispanic whites are included.
Marital status — .26* (marriage = happiness)
Class — .24* (higher status = happiness)
Education — .23* (more education = happiness)
Age — .18* (youth = happiness)
Church attendance — .09* (worship = happiness)
Children — .05 (procreation = happiness)
Political orientation — (.03) (liberalism = happiness)
Number of male partners — .03 (fewer partners = happiness)
IQ (wordsum) — .00 (no relationship at all)
Did you check for multicollinearity in the variables? Seems to me there predictor set would be badly infested with it.
These are multiple regression coefficients so the other dependent variables are all “controlled” for in each of the correlation. This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but it does explain why younger people tend to express less happiness than older people do. Youth itself is a predictor of happiness, but many of these other variables that correlate with happiness are predictors of older age.
It sseems likely that there would be a significant interaction between Children and Marriage status. Unmarried women might find children reduce happiness, while married women might find children increase happiness. That might explain the low coefficient on Children. Try re-running your regression with that interaction term.
Teeheeheee. Thank you for confirming my reality and smiling at my choices. I’m turning 50 this summer, my oldest child is 26 and she is married with three children (and planning for a couple more before she turns 30, so she says) and my youngest just turned 20. Ahhhhh, now…what to do with my happy self? Excuse me, I have a garden to grow, pysanky to write, dinners to plan and grandbabies to gallop, gallop, gallop
Successful traditional marriage demands more from both sexes. Some men seem to think it just means make me a sammich.
Agreed. It’s “make me a sammich” and “Iron my shirt!”
I kid, I kid.
Ya, well if it goes dark as the cultural marxists hope, and chaos rules the night, what Man is going to come to the rescue of these wimmen? Will Men be willing to risk limb and life to defend wimmen from savages? Too late are these wimmen going to find out why Men and Women have figured out through century’s of tradition there are viable and valid reasons for patriarchy and roles each have?
Are they going to expect pajama boys to aid them and protect them? Diversity makes for a terrible shield. Feminism is a dull sword with a broken point. Shelter from the storm is not in female empowerment. Ask the Kurdish Yazidis women, the swedes, Germans, Austrian’s, they can say what it is like to be without men folk to defend and protect them from the likes of ISIS, and through history. Reality trumps feelings and ideology, (and yes racism, because that is what feminism is, bigotry), every time. Could you imagine as a Man, risking your life, and your own devoted and loving spouse and your children’s safety, to defend these bigots with a vagina, to defend them after the conscious efforts to destroy the very cultural imperatives of our Christian Western civilization ? I know the proper duty and gallant thing as a man is to protect the fairer sex, yet I know there is a line here, and it involves risking ones life for a cause that has meaning and value. But nobody made these bigots with a vagina choose to willingly partake in every cultural marxist ruse from abortion to Special Forces solder as a lever to destroy the timeless value of man and wife. They chose, key word here is choice. And double standards only work for cultural marxists and its adherents.
We may get an idea of how repressed and unfulfilled American women were back in the day by reading Tocqueville. “An American girl, whatever age, rarely suffers from childish shyness or ignorance. I have often been taken aback and almost scared by the unusual skill and lucky boldness with which these American girls could steer their thoughts through the reefs of lively conversations; a philosopher would have stumbled a hundred times along the narrow path they negotiated with ease and without mishap. If I am asked how we should account for the unusual prosperity and growing strength of this nation, I would reply that they must be attributed to the superiority of their women.”
Apart from what Arthur Shopenhauer wrote in his timeless essay “On Women” (an absolute must read for *ALL* men, widely available online) here’s a great take on the state of marriage in America (and the West in general) today.
“Matrimony, Holy or Otherwise: A Movable Concentration Camp”
Here’s a snippet:
*****
Is there any practical advantage at all?
For you, I mean. For her, the advantages are considerable, and the drawbacks few. Your salary will allow her an upscale house, something more important to her than to you, which on the odds she will get in the divorce. Marriage locks-in child support. Since men die younger, she will get to pick your bones. For her, it is a good deal.
For you, no. Marriage has one purpose only, which is to get her legal hooks into you. Do not forget that American women, under the evanescent ivory skin, are eternally adolescent spoiled brats, feminine as a wrestler’s jockstrap and primed, as soon as life’s inevitable shocks come, to blame men for their unhappinesses. That means you.
*****
And another:
*****
If you look at marriage analytically, you see that it is designed entirely to benefit her, not you. It is a raw deal. In return for bad sex, you tie yourself to a rapidly aging, plumping member of a sex that doesn’t like you, has little in common with you, and will control every aspect of your life until the breakup.
*****
As they say, read the whole thing. It’s short and sweet.
URL: http://www.fredoneverything.net/DontMarry.shtml
I could have written some of this so will not reprise. You’re mostly right. Somewhere along the line, dropping “broads” would be a good thing, though!
Add to the attributes you describe and what is important: Resiliency. I don’t mean mousey, mushy always going along to get along, but the ability to roll with what life presents – good or bad – because any life worth living will have some of each along the way, and probably in multiples.
Keeping oneself reasonably attractive is not vanity. It is self-respect. A woman must care about herself if she is to be able to care for and about others. Keeping one’s mind active.
Then find a man whose values are the same as one’s own. Character is a fix. One has it or one doesn’t.
Now it’s time for men to read your article and think about what they should be doing to keep the woman in their life happy. To take care of their health so that she won’t have to. To maintain their appearance so that they look like that wedding photo. That will have a lot to do with that good sex …
You really have no idea that you’re post is riddled with feminist ideas, do you?
No. I come from a long line of strong women. Wives, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. The trendy label “feminist”, with all that that now entails (particularly among men), is a fairly recent construct. I abhor it. It is possible to be strong, to take care of oneself, and to love and care for others. Including men. And to be a contented person.
You are right to say “find a man whose values are the same as your own. I ran across stats one time that indicated the more alike two people are, the more successful and happy the marriage.
Google “women less happy:” 284 million
Google “women MORE happy:” 356 million.
I agree with your main point, but you probably shouldn’t refer to this Google search as substantiation. It’s mostly irrelevant anyway, even Google admits after the first hundred they just make it up.
On a completely unrelated note, I tried to comment with Facebook: error. I tried to comment with Google+: error. I finally got here with Discus, Maybe it’s just my system, but it makes commenting a bit harder.
Thanks. I’ll look into the FB and Google issue. I was unaware of a problem.
Why did so many women in the west move away from this obvious and natural fact of life? What happened?
There was a lot of propaganda in the 1970s denigrating housewifery and whooping up the joys and fulfillments of getting sucked into the workforce vortex. Women bought it, wholesale.
Results, among others: lower wages because of increased labor supply making everybody have to work longer and harder, lower reproduction rates, kids raised in institutions from infant daycare through college, millions of unhappy older women and femimist rationalizations that all of the above have “liberated” women.
In both WW1 and WW2 a lot of women went to work, and not surprisingly many of them ended up doing jobs that the men would have done. When both wars were over the women went back to a “normal” life, perhaps happily. Freedom was not having to pour explosives into metal hollows. Making shells or ploughing fields — even, as I read in a woman’s memoirs of ’39-’45, flying aircraft from factory to airfield without maps or radios in the UK and having to memorise where landmarks were — was understandably either tedious and onerous and with it often dangerous.
For some twenty years or so until ‘the summer of love’ and other hippy joys of the ‘sixties came along it was fine. Then, rapidly, people were free to talk not about duty or obligations or even (*shudder*) patriotism and dedication, but ‘freedom.’ Of course the freedom being sold to the post-war young was shapeless: do whatever you want and enjoy. Look, girls, now you can stand up and bare your chests in public and everyone loves it. Plus, make sure you burn your bras because your bits will never go south…
Better still, we would now have perpetual peace because we could love everyone and only the young knew how to do that. One can tell oneself that the young in Hanoi or Moscow not only were just as lovely as those in San Francisco but they wanted the same peace we did. Their young would poke flowers down the barrel of a gun just as ours did, and the yoof could agree the old people knew only how to make war, not love. After all, old people had never been in love and wisdom wasn’t doing things and experiencing things it was wearing flowers in your hair and reading books about zen (even if it was all meaningless unless you had — er — experience.)
So out of that confusion we got the end of real freedom to choose and replaced it with an artificial freedom to follow in a herd. However,a s it was a grinning, chanting, bare-breasted herd it was okay.
Don’t forget the zero population stuff. That was another factor. I still argue with young women that think the 50s were hell for women.
My mom talks about getting blasted with “Zero Population Growth” propaganda at a semi-southern women’s college in 1961-1965. Some girls listened, most had enough brains not to. She had three kids — but then dutifully raised us to regard reproduction as a personal catastrophe. She’s still trying to figure out why God cursed her with only two grandchildren, one of them defective.
God didn’t put her on this Earth to think; it’s not her fault it was required of her.
The eugenicists left pretty clear tracks . A lot of the ideology came from the cultural Marxists and a lot of the tactical-level messaging and interaction (proselytizing?) came from the Freudians (we forget the Freudians, now rendered obsolete by psychotropic drugs and tossed aside without much fanfare). But the money and organization came from the eugenicists. When the elites believe that the world is going to breed itself into oblivion, getting whales to cough up cold cash isn’t hard.
The cost of raising children got problematic. From a financial standpoint, kids went from being an advantage to being a liability.
The alt right harps a lot on having kids young, but a simple reality of having a bunch of kids is that you’re unlikely to have all your children when you’re young. Childbearing seems to delay the aging of the reproductive tract and women in high fertility cultures can easily have kids at later ages than some career lady trying for her first at 38.
Traditional Catholic women routinely have children (multiple children) in their forties after starting reproducing in their twenties. Many Orthodox Jewish women in their forties take contraceptives so they don’t have a sixth or seventh child. Decades of fertility is perfectly normal for a healthy women who starts having babies young and doesn’t contracept.
It works out nicely. Right around the time that final baby you had at forty two isn’t really needy any more, your eldest children should be starting to give you grandchildren.
We spread our six over 12 years, and it pretty much worked out the way you describe. Moreover, when the grand kids grow up, the great grand kids come along to keep things lively. Keeps you focused on the future – it’s something to live for in your mid-eighties. I don’t recommend this for the timid or neurotic (which seems to apply to a lot of today’s youngsters), but it has worked for us