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The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.
Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.
Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.
Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.
While I agree with much of the rest of your analysis, this part is wrong.
It is not, however, a direct threat to the system. No incel army is going to rise up to start executing the girls who rejected them or handmaid's tail-ing them.
Think about this from an incentives and game theoretic perspective. Your modal incel is conformist and meek. They generally act however the "median basic guy" is supposed to act (until they hit their incel-dom initiation or whatever). If that group of males is dropping out of the social system, then the only males you have remaining are either the Andrew Tate types or the totally progressive bought-in types. I've seen the latter referred to as "cuttlefish." The problem is that both of these groups of males are anti-social and net-negatives to women. The Andrew Tates for pretty obvious reasons, but the progressive "men" too because they contribute to more unstable family structures.
A stable society has a large amount of men - perhaps most - who live very stable and predictable lives. Nothing glamorous, not a lot of risk taking. But they are dependable and reliable. A rational society would valorize that kind of behavior. You see some efforts towards this with the Grill Pill set, but it used to be far more front and center. Think Jimmy Stewart movies. This also presents an uncomfortable reality - a lot of the "good men" of yesteryear would probably be lumped in with the incels of today.
The danger that's emerging now is that incel-dom is moving up the chain. I had a post recently on an observation I've started to make on objectively successful, impressive, and highly competent men choosing effective celibacy (even if they don't term it that themselves nor do it for a religious reason). Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter.
It's been said on this forum a thousand times, but the primary victims of third wave to present feminism are women.
Most guys do get laid and have relationships, without being Tate-types/Chads or simps. There are lot of normal dudes with normal romantic lives out there.
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This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.
I think the underlying problem might be not so much that women find stable reliable guys unattractive, it's that largely because of economic changes, it's become harder to become a stable reliable guy than it used to be. It is hard to be stable and reliable if you are struggling just to get a decent job and pay the rent. These days you can't just go to the factory and shake the foreman's hand, now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades. In my experience of observing incel forums, it seems to me that being an incel is highly correlated with also having economic problems. The two share some common underlying causes, like mental illness and shyness. Hence the stereotype of the incel who lives in his parents' basement. Of course, physically attractive people also find it easier to get good jobs, which does not help the truly physically unattractive subset of the incel population.
Our society obviously values stable reliable guys less than it did several decades ago, but stable reliable guys still do get pretty consistently valorized in pop culture. Most commercials target stereotypical suburban family units, just more racially and sexually diverse than the ones of decades ago. Of course they do this mainly because those people have money to spend, but still. And the movie industry still churns out plenty of movies that have conventional nice guy heroes who do what they do not because they are adrenaline junkies, but because they decide to put aside their self-interest for what they consider to be a higher cause.
I'm skeptical there's much of a correlation between economic stability and sexual success (at least at the levels of wealth that account for more than 99% of us i.e. not a millionaire). There's a reason the stereotype of the broke, loser man who cheats on his wife/has children with multiple women he owes child support to exists and it suggests that for all their problems, getting laid isn't the main problem for this kind of figure.
The reality is that most guys, reliable or not, are getting laid (at least during some periods of their lives). Genuine incels are a small group and people talk about them as if they have much more impact than they do (case in point, the suggested UK policies that this whole thread is discussing).
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I don't think you even have to "really succeed" in the trades. You can get a very solid job, and most places are even willing to train you on their dime, without being anyone amazing. Now, if you wanted to say that the trades are culturally looked down on by a lot of people regardless of the stability/income they provide, that's a different matter.
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This is almost definitely not due to a small sample bias, but rather selection bias. How many stable reliable guys who have such small social presence that they're literally invisible to you do you know? Given that "being noticeable" is correlated with (some, including myself, would argue causally) "being attractive," whatever observations of people you notice are observations about a population that's more attractive than average.
I figure that most stable, reliable guys at least participate in the workforce. The fraction of them who are independently wealthy or have joined a monastic order is very small. So if there is a large number of stable, reliable guys who are incels I figure that I would be encountering more of them in the workforce, at least in Zoom calls, and in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work. I could be wrong, though.
If an otherwise stable, reliable guy is introverted, has little social skills and has no girlfriend/wife, he's unlikely to be embedded into your social circle to the extent that you have a mental awareness of him even existing. You'll "know" him but you won't know him.
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Zoom calls and in the workforce, perhaps, but this seems like a leap. The group of guys with such small social presence being talked about would be the ones to disproportionately not go to these work-tangential events and/or spend minimal time in those. And even in those settings, the ones you actually are able to talk to enough to say that you actually "know" these people would likely be disproportionately not from that group. Same would go for other social spaces and clubs and such.
Yeah, the idea that one can judge the fraction of the workforce that’s single and lonely based on who goes to trendy bars after work is ludicrous. Like determining what fraction of the population is religious based on a D&D campaign. (But jokes on all of us, my friends who play D&D — I don’t — are Baptists.)
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I don't understand your post's relevance to the topics I raised.
I am just questioning the idea that there are a lot of stable, reliable guys out there today who are incels. To be fair, what is an incel? The term is poorly defined. Are you an incel if you have not had sex ever? If you have not had sex in the last year? Pretty obviously some Chad who got laid yesterday but went out tonight and didn't get laid, and is frustrated about it, is not an incel by any reasonable sense of the term even if he is technically speaking involuntarily celibate today. I think that probably most stable, reliable guys at least get laid occasionally in random hookups, or they are in long-term relationships, even if they are not getting laid all the time with new women when they go out. Like I said on the other post, I could be wrong, though.
Appreciate the clarification.
"Incel" is, at this point, only a term of self-identification. These are very online guys who have little or no romantic luck and are so embittered by it that they adopt the online moniker (incel) and launch jeremiads against women as an entire class of people. I truly think they are very, very few in number but have been signal boosted by internet echo chambers. There are more men who may say something online that "sounds" "incel like." They are often pilloried for it. It's much the same function that led to shunning of some of the HBD'ers and even mainstream academics - Murray chief among them.
Beyond that tiny subgroup, however, somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 men in America will go sexless this year. Of those, I think there's a certain percentage that are effectively celibate, meaning they've chosen to deprioritize sex and dating altogether. I don't have a grand unified theory for why. My original post was about how this state of affairs will negatively impact women.
So, how many Men am I talking about? Eh, all in, call it 4 -8 %. It may not seem like a lot, but when you have country level gender imbalances past 5% weird things start happening. If America effectively has 4 - 8 % less men in the dating pool than assumed, that's a problem. If a not insignificant % of that group also happen to be in possession of lots of pro-social and industrious character traits, I think it could create a demographic snowball effect that puts the country at large into a risky spot.
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" Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter."
What is the difference? They got "tricked" into "sub-par" mating with someone they aren't having kids with anyway? That would dump them the same way?
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Care to elaborate?
A cadre of men capable of mimicking the dominant ideology sure sounds stable and predictable. At least, I assume that’s what “cuttlefish” is supposed to imply. It sounds like someone is fishing for ways in which the successful thing is actually
cringeproblematic.More generally, I’m not seeing evidence that stability and reliability are out of fashion. We live in a post-Rhett Butler, post-Don Draper narrative.
A > 50% divorce rate. The majority of Black American children being born out of wedlock. All time highs of dissatisfaction with mating and courtship. Do you want me to go out and cite the sources?
Not if that dominant ideology is both a) counter to family formation and community support and b) actively hostile to most / all male interests.
It sounds like we have different rubrics for success.
Going by your other responses, I’ve misunderstood what you meant by “cuttlefish.” I suspect you’re conflating several very different groups on the basis that they all vote Democrat.
Did you know that the states with the lowest divorce rates tend to swing blue?
And those red states tend to have really high crime rates and welfare usage, despite supposed conservative advocacy for law, order and self-reliance! Do you think there could be any confounding factors being left out of your analysis?
Agreed. In this case, the giant confounder is probably marriage rates. Can’t get divorced if you’re only ever living in sin!
I mentioned the gap to point out how “>50% divorce rate” isn’t measuring what he says it is. I think it’s a mistake to describe the extremely online population (which generates most of what could be called “incels,” as well as most of the "cuttlefish") with statistics from the disproportionately black, urban poor.
Did you know most people who get divorced, will get remarried?
The overall picture is that stability has crashed. Also, I hope you learned your lesson / enjoyed the reminder about blue vs red state demographics..
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I feel like I might be being baited, but, if I recall correctly, you're a mod, so that seems less than likely.
Let me be specific so as to relieve your suspicions. The primary demographic I'm referring to are PMC Males who have pride flags next to their twitter handle, a COEXIST bumps sticker on their subaru, and have never been part of an organized sport in their lives. These are men who gain sexual access to women by hyper flattering their cultural and social biases. They often get friend zoned. They make awful husbands and say things like, "My wife's boyfriend drives a truck life that!"
Men have always lied in order to convince women to sleep with them. A lot of it is hamfisted bragging and exaggeration. Women have fantastic bullshit detectors and so, mostly, avoid those goofballs. The specific problem for the cuttelfish-dudes (aka White Dudes for Harris) are they they're exploiting all of the worst parts of third wave feminism to inject themselves as, wait for it, "good guys." And that's why I have a problem with them more so than the typical dude-at-a-bar talking about how he's "pretty good friends with an NFL player, actually. Can't say his name in public, tho." Convincing a woman you share her deeply held beliefs only as far as carnal knowledge lasts is a particularly cowardly and dirty tactic.
I've read your comments on here many times. They're almost always high quality. You and I disagree on things, but I have respect for your intellectual rigor and honesty. Do better here. It's not about the artificial boundaries of states, it's about demographics. The divorce rate follows a lot of other anti-social outcomes - it's higher among the less educated, the earlier pregnant, the socioeconomically lower class. That California, New York, and Illinois have a huge amount of Rich White People who stay married out of stubbornness and a fear of divorce attorney fees doesn't mean that "blue states" have some sort of amazing marriage magic contained within their borders.
Thanks. I swear I'm not baiting.
I tossed out that trite red/blue divorce fact to ask: if you're taking aim at woke, white techbros, why use those divorce stats? Which parts are supposed to reflect on PMC culture?
If "cuttlefish" were causing instability, unreliability, etc., I would expect the places where they're most represented and most influential to show more of those trends. But divorce trends are driven to other regions. They're worst where people are poorer, less educated, even just older, since we're talking about cumulative numbers.
That suggests cuttlefish aren't doing what you think they're doing. Hell, I don't think many exist, not in the form you describe. It's easy to find men who lie, especially for sex. It's harder to find ones who play that game poorly enough to get friendzoned, cucked, and divorced, possibly simultaneously. And it's really hard to point at such a group and claim they pose a credible threat to women's class interest.
I think you've excluded another category. Men neither exciting enough to be chads, psychopathic enough to be Tates, repulsive enough to be incels, nor passive enough to be soyboys. The good men of yesteryear still outnumber them all. Even though they're building wealth, getting married, having kids, they're not spicy enough to trend on social media or feature in a thinkpiece. A real silent majority.
SNL Keeps hinting at it.
(Those are four separate thinks)
I'm not a a fan of SNL today nor do I watch it, but those clips seem to me to suggest some level of quiet dissatisfaction amongst the PMC with their intimate lives.
Again, it isn't about divorce rates as the ultimate metric. It's about realizing that current, mainstream dating, courtship, and marriage patterns are not working for families and increasingly look unattractive to women. The stats on Men I've cited show that 30% or so of them have already decided "no thanks." This entire situation does not bode will for a society. You need happy, prosperous, and above replacement level families at the core of your society. What's more, you can't hack your way to it - Hungary has spent about 5% of its GDP on increasing its overall fertility rate. It has failed. And in that failure, may have put itself one step closer to insolvency.
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We agree about a lot of things, even on this issue, but this is just intense boo outgroup without any useful content. "The men who disagree with me are liars, cheaters, and weaklings who women hate, they have to play pretend to get laid, they make awful husbands and they're cucks," is barely distinct from "The men who disagree with me are liars, cheaters, and weaklings who women hate, they have to play pretend to get laid, they make awful husbands and they're misogynists," which is precisely the way that the left talks about incels.
I don't disagree that there are some lefty men who dissemble or exaggerate their progressive opinions to appeal to progressive women. But there are, of course, righty men who dissemble or exaggerate their religiosity to appeal to devout women. That was particularly true when religion was more important in society, as wokeness is now.
Playing the game of "find new and creative ways to call the opposition sexually-revolting losers" is particularly ironic when the topic of discussion is the demonization of lonely men, as it is with the incel policies.
Fair points made, I think there is unnecessary generalization occuring.
However, anecdotally, when my liberal friend calls Elon Musk an evil bastard, he takes a glance at his girlfriends reaction while going on the tirade.
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Don't read too far into it. I indulged in some flowery language because I was / am of the mind the netstack was baiting me.
The rest of my previous post is heavier on content.
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If they dump her on the third day, she'll never find that out, since the actual Chads often do the same thing.
But did young women ever do so? I suspect mostly they did not, they only settled for that type of guy. Who turned out to be what they wanted... AFTER they settled down and had kids.
Good point.
The reframing of "this partner will make me happy in a relationship" to "in this relationship, I can make myself happy with this partner" would be powerful. What is required is a heck of a lot of social normative pressure. I doubt we're every going back to an abolition of no fault divorce, however. I think that's a good thing. It would stand to reason, then, that marriages are going to continue to be more temporary and more rare.
The big question is how this effects children and child rearing. The sociological bete-noire is that single-parent households have worse outcomes on most life success and satisfaction ratings across the board. Sure, with divorced households where both parents are still involved, the results are far more mixed. Still, I see danger ahead.
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The part about these "cuttlefish" is foreign to me - can you explain why they are called that, and what they do that's contributing to relationship instability?
I’m reminded of a video I saw of an abortion protest one time- there were a bunch of women, and a greasy looking dude staring at one of them’s ass.
A guy who pretends to be super duper progressive to get laid(and I’m not convinced there’s just tons and tons of them) is probably a bad partner.
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Literal cuttlefish males "take on female coloration, hide their masculine fourth arms, and hold the rest of their arms in the posture of an egg-laying female, in a bid to sidle up to a guarded female." Source
This is used in rough analogy to human males who pretend to be passionately interested in the social / cultural causes of women in order to present themselves as "worthy" dates. In reality, even if they aren't actually antagonistic to those beliefs and causes, they aren't at all genuinely invested. Obviously, this would create a lot of trust issue in a relationship but the deeper problem is that a male who is willing to compromise and deceive like this is probably also a poor performer from a provider perspective. Women end up with a guy who's sort of a milquetoast loser who says all of the right things but isn't able to perform in the relationship, in his career, etc. You can see how that would end in a tense marriage at best and more likely divorce.
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I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?
In a patriarchal society where early marriage and monogamy are the norm, this would be generally the case indeed.
A man leading a large group of men will be automatically be attractive to women and will either go fuck them or be a volcel. Albeit a larger count of incel followers than average men would be needed.
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If a man is sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a leader of men, he is also sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a fucker of women.
You're aware that the male attributes that gain the respect of other men and those that sexually attract women are normally rather different, aren't you?
They actually aren’t, though.
For one, there’s the halo effect: i.e. it’s natural for humans of both genders to assume that a person successful in one field is also successful in another. So ‘success as a leader of men’ will prejudice women positively towards such a man on other axes, and ‘success as a c(h)ad’ will prejudice men positively towards such a man on other axes, symmetrically. I’ve been reading a history of Italy lately, and this is pretty much Berlusconi’s entire (winning) strategy both in politics and in Bunga Bunga.
But we don’t even require such a Fully General Argument as the halo effect to demonstrate the thesis - assessing it in detail also makes it seem like there’ll be general “popularity” skills rather than gender-audience specific ones. Being a good conversationalist, being extroverted, openness to new experiences, gregariousness - all traits which will improve one’s success both as a leader and as a lover.
I don’t dispute that some traits like “Autistic knowledge of Gundam anime” is male leadership material in specific (one might say contrived) situations, like choosing a team captain when entering a Gundam trivia quiz, but in the vast majority of cases, Chad gets both the girl and the crown because both genders want the same thing.
That's probably true - although I'm not sure about the 'symmetrically' part - but that's a different matter. Yes, the observable results of one's attractiveness to women will likely prejudice men in such ways. That doesn't mean that the traits that sexually attract women in the first place will socially attract men as followers as well.
I'm not sure where the snark related to Gundam comes from, but anyway, that's very obviously not what I had in mind. I'd say the traits that gain the respect of other men and attract them as followers are roughly:
Why are leaders of men disproportionately physically attractive and tall (relative to the general male population, adjusting for age etc) then? This is true even when these men are selected overwhelmingly by other men, as with male CEOs of companies where a large majority of board seats are occupied by men.
I'm not sure that this is true.
http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2014/06/09/tall-ceos-how-height-helps/
https://wol.iza.org/press-releases/does-it-pay-to-be-beautiful
This is pretty well known and studied. Though it may be confounded by a negative effect on the other end, truly ugly people are often dysfunctional on other points as well.
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I'd turn the whole thing around and say the act of leading men is in itself enough to make one attractive to women.
Russia's most known "incel", Alexei Podnebesny had multiple women (probably will get jail time for something)
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I think that's what they said about Caesar back in the day. "Can't get a date, can't buy land, economic crisis forced a ton of people in the countryside into the cities, but a military career can not only make you rich but the State is obligated to give you land if you survive" is why you join the army in the first place.
Of course, Caesar had Gaul to campaign in before turning that personal military loyalty against the rest of the Roman state. The grandchildren of those soldiers (though importantly, not their children, and certainly not Caesar) would make out relatively well by comparison.
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You know, as an actual literal tradcon I can say that this guy just shouldn't be dating- the man pays in relationships, that's part and parcel of rejecting modern gender roles.
I more or less agree with your point. Incels are by definition men who are thoroughly cowed by the system- obviously not the chads that are natural leaders, but not the lumpenproles that take drastic action at the drop of a hat either.
Does your tradcon ideology include any prescriptions at all that constitute the rejection of modern gender roles but at the same time do not disadvantage men, or at least do disadvantage men and women to the same degree?
Yes. We simply do not have very many doctrinaire feminists on the motte for me to argue with.
Ok, so "yes". Such as, what?
I don’t think women and girls should be encouraged to have jobs or seek higher education. I probably wouldn’t vote to reauthorize the 19th if it came up. I think rape laws should have differing burdens of proof for lack of consent depending on the victim’s sexual history, similar to old-style seduction laws. Should I go on?
These topics don’t come up on the motte often, because I A) don’t make that many top level posts and B) there are few other motteizeans that support old school patriarchy(which contrary to popular beliefs does not seem to generally advantage young men- it’s the rule of fathers not men in general, and might be more accurately painted as the rule of the old over the young rather than men over women).
I’ve posted before that there seems to be a sex-negative feminist/sex-positive feminist/tradcon/frat boy four way division, not a feminist/red pill one. I don’t inherently sympathize with frat boys over sex negative feminists- I don’t agree with either, and there’s no reason for me to pick one as my ingroup versus the other. That I don’t sympathize much with the young male desire for casual sex doesn’t mean I sympathize with feminism.
I guess what you mean is that so-called rape shield laws should be repealed?
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But society should do its best to make it possible for men to fill those roles. I think OP is right to suggest that the British government is setting out to avoid this responsibility more or less explicitly.
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Descriptively, I agree that a man who can't pay for dates would be much better served by getting to the point where he can pay for dates than by other areas to put effort in.
As to what should be, I'm neutral. A point I would make is that trad and modern male gender roles aren't a rejection of each other: they're largely the same, at least in terms of what women find attractive for a suitable partner. Here, it's the man pays. Even feminists have taken to justifying the norm with references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk.
What incels see is that the male gender role has the same responsibilities put on it as before, but with a weakened social basis for men to fulfill it. The hollowing out of the middle class, the fetishization of bureaucratic over productive roles, various cultural norms.
And, without the ability to achieve enough masculinity to attract a mate, they give up altogether and turn into passive, pathetic creatures. Who won't be leading a revolution or even stochastic violence higher than noise level.
Certainly there are many women who insist on men paying for dates using this formula, but I believe the sort of women who make references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk as reasons for men to pay for everything on dates are too self-oriented and men who have self-respect should not date them. I say the same for men who complain about paying for dates, excepting situtations in which the sorts of dates women are expecting are genuinely excessive -- particularly when it's excessive for their social class. Worthwhile women do not whine about men not paying for dates, and worthwhile men do not whine about paying for them.
Men and women who care about each other should each pay a portion towards their dates in accordance with their ability to pay and interest in a particular subject. Going to a woman's favorite restaurant on her birthday? Maybe treat her to it. Going to see Cheesy Romantic Comedy 8? Maybe she should buy his ticket. Watching Action Sci-Fi 11? He should buy. But ultimately if you're breaking your relationship down into a list of debts that must be transactionally repaid, your relationship is worth shit, and you should either make it worth more than that or end it. Love pays debts, owing nothing; forgives debts, losing nothing.
As a more moderate socialcon, I'm a strong proponent of partnership-based relationships, where the people in them view each other as fundamentally teammates in facing the highs and the lows of life -- you know, "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer." @ProfQuirrell had a wonderful description of how such a partnership should operate. (And I hope his marriage is better than his namesake's partnership with his, um, other half.)
My view would be that men and women need to contribute towards their relationship in meaningful ways. That can be they both pitch in monetarily, that can be one tends to pay and the other tends to the garden, that can be one cooks and the other sweeps the floor, that can be one works a 9-5 and the other watches the kids. It depends on the couple, their strengths and their needs.
Obviously this is a bit of conservatism being liberalism driving the speed limit. But we're at a point where even the normal and healthy give-and-take that characterizes healthy human relationships is missing from people's expectations. And that's wrong, terribly wrong, horrifically wrong, daemonically wrong. We crossed a line that isn't just non-traditional, it's actively destructive.
Find someone who doesn't see you as a piggy bank or a cum depository. If you can't do that, you're either dating too 'high' or dating in the wrong place. Kind, caring, warm people exist. But the unfortunate thing for people dating later in life is this group is usually taken early, because their standards are realistic and their approach to relationships invites commitment.
I liked your reply and the link to @ProfQuirrell's post.
The key truth in both, I think, can be distilled to "prioritize the collective success of the marriage above your own day-to-day wants." Excellent and actionable advice.
My concern is that society is now insanely hyper-individualized with focus on direct personal success. It's one of those things that so endemic it's almost hard to notice (fish in water sort of thing) and then, once one does notice, its ubiquity is mind boggling.
Corporations are boiled down to a single CEO making everything happen. Political candidates are portrayed as singularly responsible not only for their own success but for driving the success of their party. Forget celebrities and sports starts - not even worth it.
I think the sad fact of the matter is that in the majority of western marriages, a rocky patch is seen by one or both partners as the other person becoming an albatross to individual success and/or happiness in life. It isn't "we're messing up our marriage," it's "Bob/Alice is now an adversary to my happy life journey." Once that thinking tanks root, divorce is just a timestamp away.
This is my biggest problem with anglosphere society, and I believe it's rooted in the broader sense of individualism and freedom that people often praise in America. I wonder very frequently whether these are actually the factors that have made America wealthy, or if it's actually just the privileged economic and military position of the country due to the World Wars. Individualism and freedom are destructive to community and purpose. Say what you will about the socialist realists, but at least they had an ethos!
There was a scene in The Crown where they dramatized what they thought might have been the conversation between Queen Elizabeth and (then the) Duke of Edinburgh Philip. This conversation took place after some alleged infidelity on the part of Philip, which the dramatization was incredibly coy about. Not sure what the reality looked like, but I'm specifically talking about the dramatization and would make the same point even if the story were entirely fictional. It went like this:
Without endorsing (fictionalized) Philip's misconduct that got them into this situation, I'd say there's a real kernel of value in this -- if you see your marriage as indissoluble, you begin to see fixing your marriage as a task you must collaborate on and compromise in order to accomplish. Obviously this requires that both parties are actually discussing in good faith, want to fix the marraige, and anyone who has done wrong is willing to make amends; in situations where there is no remorse, no respect, and no resolution, there must be dissolution. If the ring won't fit, you two must split. If they're both out to plunder, let it be torn asunder.
But I firmly believe there are far fewer of those than most people, in our "divorce is adult breakup" age, believe. And the reasons for ending such a significant long-term relationship, on the part of both men and women, are often incredibly petty. Marital therapy often serves not to let both partners release their goblins and find a path forward, but for one partner to ally with a sympathetic authority figure in order to bully the other into submission. And that's not a marriage, it's a sublimated cuck(old)(queen) fantasy.
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I think this is just conservatism flat out being liberalism, as in "secure personalities that will insist upon their own idiosyncrasies, but in the context of any given relationship spend their time more interested in the other's well-being than themselves".
Which in turn leads to "driving the speed limit" phenomenon, because these people also tend to take time to investigate corruption rather than have a fast-path moral stance that rejects it on its face. Because that's what they'd do for anyone else. (Of course, that ability to have a moral stance also creates corruption on its own, so you get one or the other- which is why we notice that the further from 'secure human being' we get, the faster they are to moralize... which is not generally meaningfully distinct from just looking out for number one in the way they do this).
The more I think about this, the more I think transactionality of this type is optimistically cargo-culting the want to worry you're not contributing enough, or more cynically going through the motions. I also think that this is one of those things that people who already do this as second nature (i.e. making sure I'm not pulling too hard on the relationship's finances) probably shouldn't talk about openly, since if you describe doing this to someone who doesn't have love backing it up/informing their choices it's likely going to damage [what little of] the relationship they had by implementing this.
And some people are going to be more attentive to this than others, because that's just the way they are (this is what I hear in the "Paul bemoans men getting married because they'll be more focused on pleasing their wives than pleasing God" [if I'm remembering that correctly]- I figure he must be talking about these kinds of people since traditionalist men don't truly prioritize what will please their wife [as an end] to begin with, and vice versa for progressive women), and conversely some people are going to be more interested/invested in what society says about that than reality. What's worse is that it's going to generally be incumbent on the partner that society currently privileges to countermand that messaging, so currently it's going to be harder on the woman when it comes to developing the man and his sons [pressure enforced by peers] than vice versa.
We used to be richer. When some non-secure personalities are given financial stability it tends to make them into better people, or rather, allow their better traits to be expressed. (This can also happen if you give them a goal.)
We're poorer now, so we can't afford that, hence we get more pathological/corrupt behavior. The power imbalance favors women this time, which is why "see men as piggy banks" dominates "see women as cum depositories" in popular messaging.
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