7 ms·

I think additional part of the problem is that men are starting to realize that they really don't have anything to gain by being married. And they are so afraid

• time_management 18y ago
  And they are so afraid of having to go through a divorce that can wipe them out, that they don't feel like trying. Yep. It's an utterly broken system where the wife can decide she's not into her husband any more and walk away with half of his shit. Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. I think this is far from universal. You seem to know some really unhappy married people. It seems like this is more often the case among less educated couples who marry too young. Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street. Why European? My observation is that E. European, Asian, Latin American, and African women are around the same level of quality: very high, because the educated women from those areas are cultured and would be at the pinnacle of refinement by the US standard. Next is W. Europe, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest. Urban sophisticate and minority American women are probably at the same level as Pacific NW ladies: not bad, and not nearly as bad as the reputation of American women would suggest. However, the suburban-bred office cows, raised on Sex and the City and burned out on college casual sex, are at the cellulite-ridden, lumpy, bottom. They're the ones who give American women a bad name. In truth, you can find quality women anywhere, even in the US... it's just much harder in some places. There seems to be a criticality situation regarding the number of decent women in a given nationality. What might be at root a 2% shortage (in quality American women vs. men) blows up, on account of some sort of a positive feedback loop. The advantage conferred by the shortage causes (some) women to become spoiled, which further erodes the quality of the women, leading to more shortage, and so on.
  • eru 18y ago
    Are you always that critical of your female compatriots?
  • ahpeeyem 18y ago
    "suburban-bred office cows" that is gold :)
    • dgabriel 18y ago
      So how do we refer to the low quality suburban men? Or is this thread limited to woman-bashing?
      • time_management 18y ago
        No, there definitely needs to be a term for such men. Lumberghs, perhaps? (This would be after Bill Lumbergh, the idiot middle-manager in Office Space.) I would say that, whatever the term is, it should evoke the image of a middle-manager petty tyrant who takes his emasculation (both in the home/family sphere, and by nature of his being subordinate to upper management) out on his underlings.
        • bitwize 18y ago
          "Well... _Lumbergh_ fucked her!" "Ohhh, ohh yeah, that's terrific..."
      • ahpeeyem 18y ago
        Bash away. I'm not saying I agree with the phrase's sentiment, it's just funny. Moo.
        • time_management 18y ago
          There's also no reason why the phrase "suburban-bred office cow" can't refer to a man. The word "bitch" is often used to describe an emasculated male, so this use of "cow" is not without precedent.
• angstrom 18y ago
  As one married coworker of mine recently put it "I don't care if I get a raise or a bonus because my wife will just spend it and I can't divorce her because that's just as expensive. The only joy she can't take away from me is writing clean, fast code."
• tlb 18y ago
  Assuming you're in the US, you see a biased sample. That is, you see a complete cross section of American women, but only a select group of ambitious European women who emigrated as adults. They are here because they are serious about their careers, so they are more likely to believe in working hard to get ahead rather than getting by on their looks.
  • chadmalik 18y ago
    Thats a great point and thats why I always take glorification of whatever society immigrants come from with a grain of salt. Immigrants are almost by definition more motivated than the normal people in whatever society they come from.
  • vaksel 18y ago
    I'm not really talking about immigrants. They can be even worse, if they came here before they were 20-25. Why? Because they pick up the way to act by watching MTV.
• inglorian 18y ago
  I'm always surprised to see the extreme bitterness that comes out on these threads. >>Every single married guy I know is MISERABLE. The sex pretty much stops within the first couple of years. And the woman gains mega weight, because now that they "got" you, they don't need to keep in shape. And then the whole bitchy wife comes out treating the guy as a second class citizen. You do seem to know an awful lot of extremely unhappy couples. That's not my experience at all. For example, my parents are in their fifties and still have sex 3+ times a week, a fact I wish I didn't know. I know many other very happily married couples. Obviously, my anecdotal evidence is just as useless as yours...I don't see how we can generalize that there is nothing to gain by being married. The divorce rate is 50%...but the failure rate of startups is even higher. Starting a startup and failing can also ruin you financially and burn you out -- should we then assume that it is a stupid idea to start one? >>Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. I am not an American girl, though I recently moved to the states. I am European myself -- and I have met just as many cultured, intelligent, kind American women as European ones. Why do you hate American women so much? Perhaps by "nice European girl" you are imagining an especially submissive woman? Perhaps your experience with American women only extends to suburban princesses and soccer moms? Either way, I can assure you that your explicit hatred of American women ensures that you will never meet one that you will like.
  • tlb 18y ago
    > The divorce rate is 50%...but the failure rate of startups is even higher. I'm not sure it is. When you see a high figure like 80% quoted for small companies failing, that's mainly due to restaurants. Serious startups founded by serious people rarely fail. (Getting acquired by a public company is like staying married your whole life.) The failure rate of relationships is very high. If you date 20 people before getting married, that's a 95% failure rate. But it's still worth it.
    • trapper 18y ago
      Where do you get your figures?
  • Xichekolas 18y ago
• whacked_new 18y ago
  > Marrying an American woman is pretty much the worst decision you can make. If you really want to get married, go find a nice European girl to marry, unlike American women, at least they know that marriage is not a one way street. I'm very interested in, comparatively speaking, the pros and cons of marrying an American man. If a society produces X kind of stereotypical woman, we may look for a Y kind of stereotypical man, which would be what?
  • electromagnetic 18y ago
    From a European perspective I'll give a guess. I've known girls from France, Spain, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and IIRC Romania, and I'm from the UK. The general consensus is that the American Male are 'fat, ugly idiots'. The only thing an American male has going for them in Europe is a foreign accent, currently being American is a con not a pro. I've known many nice, intelligent and attractive Americans (both male and female) so I disagree with this point, but I'm sorry to say it's a common stereotype and not entirely inaccurate. It doesn't help that most tourists from America that I've met in Europe are very ignorant of everything. I saw an American couple in a bistro in Paris getting the bitchiest treatment I've ever seen from a Parisian waiter, I've never even known them to be rude to a person before. I know where the stereotype is from though, they didn't know a single word of French and expected the waiter to know perfect English because they couldn't understand him speaking English. Well I get the same waiter, I try ordering in French and the man all but refuses to let me speak it and addresses me in English, reading me the specials and giving me better service than I ever had when I visited the USA. Honestly, the French are magnificent waiters and polite to everyone if you show them respect. Even just saying bonjour and they'll be polite because you acknowledged the fact that you're sat in the heart of Paris and that they're French. The only rude person I met in 2 weeks was in a little cafe-restaurant on Boulevard Garibaldi, it was the Chef and I was trying to work out what he was saying because he wasn't even French so his accent was bizarre and after like 30 seconds the owner of the store came out back and started apologizing in perfect English.
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• dannyj 18y ago
  You sir, are an idiot..
  • mynameishere 18y ago
    "and" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22you+sir+are+and+idiot%22&btnG=Search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22you+sir+are+and+...
• Jem 18y ago
  Nice stereotyping.
• dgabriel 18y ago
  Do you think that no American women read this site? Or do you think that you are so superior to us that your blanket statements, no matter how ignorant and harmful, are more important than treating us as if we were actual human beings? Do all men stay in shape their whole marriage? Is pettiness always limited to the female partner? Please. I work hard, I have always worked, and every woman I know works (aside from the ones still in school). I pay money to my ex-husband, NOT the other way around. Who are you, and how dare you?
  • whacked_new 18y ago
    In his defense, he's merely speaking out of Bayesian consequences. There's nothing to dare or not dare about. If you hear people get mugged in a neighborhood more than another, you'd avoid it and possibly speak out against it, but as a consequence, violate all the good people in the neighborhood. What I feel is lacking, and very much so, is the other side of the perspective. (and by that I don't mean by merely pointing out that opinion is disrespectful; I mean by showing evidence for the opposite of the opinion)
    • dgabriel 18y ago
      Really? He didn't present any evidence, aside from some anecdotal stories about "everyone he knows," and instead presented a series of terrible stereotypes. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat2.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat2.pdf More than half of women work, and while that number is lower than the percentage of men who work (74%), it's hard to tell from the data presented whether or not advanced age affects the numbers. http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/families_households/003118.html http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/fa... Out of 49 million women between the ages of 21 and 44, there are only 5.4 million stay-at-home moms (98,000 dads, possibly not including the temporarily unemployed). Honestly, I don't feel like debunking everything. I feel like the onus is on me to disprove specious claims, rather than the other way around. It's akin to arguing with a creationist.
      • vaksel 18y ago
• wynand 18y ago
  While we're on anecdotes, I might as well add mine: I was in an almost 4 year relationship. During the last year I thought my girlfriend fit the mold described above perfectly. She was often downright unpleasant in ways that I never was. I don't believe that in every quarrel, both parties are to blame. But in the months after that relationship I realized that I had at least as much of a stake in the pain as she did. It's a mistake to think that bitchiness is the only thing that hurts deeply. Neglect and intellectual intimidation and letting my body go were my sins and having experienced the first two myself (from another relationship) convinced me that there are many ways to make someone feel worthless. Given that we men are humans who are as prone to irrationality, is there any reason why women should think better of marriage than we do?
  • ahoyhere 18y ago
    Big props to you for realizing your part, and having the guts to admit it. That is the #1 indicator of a valuable human being.
• electromagnetic 18y ago
  Your argument is laughable. Your first paragraph is entirely about you, that's patently obvious, so my question is why are you so fundamentally afraid of getting married and failing? You're on a site about start ups, hello more businesses than marriages fail and you can lose a lot more through bankruptcy than you can through alimony. Oh and guess what, there's prenups. I'm married and I've never been happier. Since getting married I go out more, spend more time with friends and in fact have a lot more sex than I ever did before I met my wife. Do you even know if your married friends are actually miserable, or is that your assumption from the outside? Do you even know their spouse? Have you ever even spent time out with them when they're out with other married couples? You simply state they're miserable, with quite dramatic emphasis but not even a single piece of anecdotal evidence to back it up. Your comments are entirely clichéd and stereotyped. Honestly, when I see a bitchy wife I also see a very spineless, ball-less husband. Also for the few wives that gain 'mega' weight, I also see far more husbands who are fat lazy pigs. Oh and I am from Europe, if American males have problems with American females, they're going to be fucking dominated by European women. The divorce rate is lower in europe, only because it's socially unacceptable and in Italy your wife has the legal right to lie to police to protect an affair! I mean sure, marry a nice Italian girl, they're basically raised that if they're not getting it at home it's okay to get it somewhere else, so yeah don't worry you wont get divorced, but you certainly won't be the one having sex in that marriage either! Please don't spout BS about Europe unless you actually know the cultures. Every European country has either a near 50% divorce rate, or you simply will not get divorced because your family and friends would cast you out. Losing 'everything' isn't the risk of losing 50% of your monetary value or income, losing everything is when you lose 50% of your money, your family, your friends and every person hence forth who you meet will judge you because you're divorced.
• maxawaytoolong 18y ago
  Europe is a big and diverse place. At least 10 European countries have higher divorce rates than the USA, and many others are about the same. The cultural mores regarding marriage are much different in Italy than they are in Sweden. Thus it doesn't seem like finding a "nice european girl" is going to statistically help you avoid divorce. European countries with low divorce rates generally have conservative laws regarding divorce. Spain was one of these. It was financially and legally prohibitive to get a divorce in Spain until 2007. When Spain liberalized its divorce laws, it had the highest divorce rate in Europe almost overnight. On a side note, the divorce rate in the USA is lower than it has been in 40 years.
  • electromagnetic 18y ago
    IIRC it was last year (2008) that a judge in Italy ruled it legally acceptable for a wife to lie to the police to cover up adultery. I believe the police had to pay damages or something due to her adultery being revealed and ending her marriage. I mean "nice european girl" is a fallacy. All the advertising on TV I see from the US uses Europe as an advertisement piece. I mean those BS high-definition sunglasses with 'modern european styling'... I'm sorry, I don't know a single European to wear anything that even looks like it and most wouldn't be seen dead in them. Then there's all the crap named 'Europe's finest', I'm sorry my fruit when I still lived in Europe came from South America! There's this widely held perception in the US that European = Good, or at least thats what the advertisements explicitly state. It's a completely false perception. The only problem with Americans is problems Americans caused. I mean the mere fact that Ayn Rand is universally known in the USA, and I'd never heard of her until I took a sociology course and she was highlighted in the US politics section and I believe my sociology teacher said "where america went wrong" after mentioning her politics.
• ahoyhere 18y ago
  I'd like to note that bitching about no-good, do-nothing, deceptive, thieving, bitchy, fat women is like slapping on a sandwichboard sign that reads "Grade Z Beta Male Here!" Complaining about it on an online forum merely adds a flashing light to this ensemble. If every one of your friends married a woman like that, then maybe you need better friends. And you should look at yourself, too, because people are typically friends with people of the same social standing as themselves. I long for a day when more people realize that while you may think that you're waving a flaming sword of righteousness, everybody else understands that such complaining just means you are too weak to do anything to change it.