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Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets ha

Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket. It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it. So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups. If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions." [0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-because-its-bad https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...

itake 1y ago
thanks for sharing! I have definitely heard the "waiting for a stable career" from a few partners, despite me having a great situation. I will take a look at your linke tho
acdha 1y ago
One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.
fc417fc802 1y ago
You pose an interesting theory. That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays. I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble? I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.
- itake 1y ago
  > Single women are simply better catches than single men. Whether we’re talking about intelligence, looks, happiness, social skills, or health, the average single woman marrying the average single man would be “marrying down” across nearly every measurable dimension. omg... yeah, this author is not credible at all.
  - positr0n 1y ago
    https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-blowjob-that-blew-up-my-life https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-blowjob-that-blew... Seems like a nice person

itake 1y ago

thanks for sharing! I have definitely heard the "waiting for a stable career" from a few partners, despite me having a great situation. I will take a look at your linke tho

acdha 1y ago

One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.

fc417fc802 1y ago

You pose an interesting theory. That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays. I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble? I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.

itake 1y ago
> Single women are simply better catches than single men. Whether we’re talking about intelligence, looks, happiness, social skills, or health, the average single woman marrying the average single man would be “marrying down” across nearly every measurable dimension. omg... yeah, this author is not credible at all.
- positr0n 1y ago
  https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-blowjob-that-blew-up-my-life https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-blowjob-that-blew... Seems like a nice person