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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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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.

If they dump her on the third day, she'll never find that out, since the actual Chads often do the same thing.

Nothing glamorous, not a lot of risk taking. But they are dependable and reliable. A rational society would valorize that kind of behavior.

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.