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A particular large category in my friend groups is single-parent women with one kid. A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid (as indicated by thousands upon thousands of memes on this topic on the Internet), and many of the rest will be of the kind that any sane mother would keep away from their kid's vicinity.
As @jeroboam mentioned below, it's not just that. There are other relevant factors also usually at play. I don't agree that the sire / biological father is always in the mix with various potential disadvantages and risks the new husband faces, but often he is. Also, his (the husband's) entire social circle is likely to look down on him as a loser, usually for a good reason. His wife is also likely to see him basically as a spare of secondary importance.
Well, yes, exactly; it's not just down to people's individual preferences, there's an entire tendency in culture that's making people even less likely to consider single moms as a partner than otherwise.
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That’s whitepilling and a case for optimism, if there’s a huge amount of Western men out there with some sense of self-respect and self-preservation. Hopefully, this will translate into other aspects of their worldviews in the coming years/decades.
If women’s feelings are valid when they get the ick from short, awkward, or low status men, men’s feelings are valid when they get the ick from single mothers. Men aren’t entitled to sex; women aren’t entitled to relationships. His body; his choice—a single mother already made hers when she had some other man’s kid(s).
Well, insofar as the original point that it's not just women who make the choice regarding fertility goes, QED?
Which original point? For example, I was responding to your comment in isolation and not to, say, @Tree's remark about "There are no highly fertile people, only highly fertile women. Women alone make the decision, not couples," which I didn't read at the time but I went back to find just now.
I wouldn't necessarily agree with that statement by the letter. The world is a big place; I'm sure there there are couples out there where the wife wanted more children but the husband didn't. However, directionally and qualitatively it's true, that women are the gatekeepers of sex and children.
Ironically, though, your anecdote about the women in your friend groups supports @Tree's remark rather than rebuts it. Your single mother acquaintances made their reproductive choices: while they were younger, fresher, and childless, they chose to bear the children of men who preferred not to commit to them and/or the children that resulted. The "huge amount of men," or subset thereof, that would had otherwise come along later and be among the potential pool of suitors had nothing to do with it.
If in my town I put up a used car for sale at the asking price of a new car, and expected the buyer would help payoff loans I secured using the car as collateral when it was new, it wouldn't surprise me if my townspeople didn't see my totally generous offer as adding to the choices available in the town's automobile market, and would at most be interested in taking my car out for a test-drive for their amusement. I'd understand if they preferred to wait for new cars to open up in the marketplace, or opted to continue renting cars, or walking or biking in the meanwhile instead. QED, indeed.
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When dating, I also considered single mothers out of the question. Their allegiances will (rightly) be with their children rather than their new partner. And the biological father will always be in the mix, too. Mostly I wanted my own kids, not to parent someone else's. Why is that wrong?
Not neccesarilly, and some people are genetics deniers.
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There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.
The former is historically common and is a great situation for all around, this is a person who took til death do us part seriously and probably retains, despite her loss, the character and personality to maintain a healthy relationship.
In the latter two cases, there’s tremendous baggage, and a strong suggestion of poor relationship characteristics. If she couldn’t work things out with the father of her children, who’s to say she’ll be able to work things out with you when things get tough?
Spousal abuse and infidelity mix things up, and it really depends on how exactly that went down. But I suspect most cases of single motherhood in adults young enough to continue to have children have to do with poor relationship behaviors and poor character, things that should give someone pause even if children weren’t in the mix.
Widows are a tiny percentage of single mothers. The vast majority of single mothers fall into two categories:
Women who had sex with a man whom any fucking idiot could have told you would be unwilling or unable to marry her and work hard to provide for the kids (criminal thugs, homeless drifters, married men, etc.)
Women who divorced a perfectly adequate man for the crime of not being Chad, excusing their decision to destroy their own lives, their husbands' lives, and their children's lives by saying they were unhappy.
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Widows are not single mothers. They are widows.
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Granted, but the number of dating age single mother widows is to within an epsilon of zero compared to the number of dating age single mother high-time-preference-poor-planning-out-of-wedlock-dumpster-fires.
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I don’t think it’s wrong, it just is. People take what they can get. One interesting thing, though, is that parenting another man’s child is probably less common today than it’s ever been, if only because historically orphanhood and widowhood were much more common, such that 150 years ago it would have been quite common in very large families to have one or two kids around who weren’t biological descendants of the patriarch, or perhaps related to him at all. My grandfather told me about his parents growing up around various orphans and so on in the family, people would come in and out.
Widows produce better outcomes than never married single moms.
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I don't think anyone's individual decision to refrain from dating anyone is wrong, per se. The bigger problem is that there's a whole memetic culture built around the idea that if you date a single mom then you've lost the game, increasing the chances that such women continue to be lonely (and without a chance to have more kids, which many of them do desire).
The original question wasn't about rights and wrongs anyway, it was about whether the fertility decision was women's and women's alone.
The vast majority of such women were not involuntarily thrust into the status of single mother without a partner; there is a living male out there who fathered that child, with whom the woman cannot or will not maintain a satisfactory relationship. Some times that's for good reasons (though it does call into question the woman's judgment in procreating with such a guy to begin with), but most of the time it's a mixed-to-negative signal at best.
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I think in the classes in which single motherhood is most common, having a ‘baby momma’ who already has a kid (or three) with another man or other men is pretty common. Also not hugely unusual in very bohemian circles, actors and theater people and whatnot. For the regular middle classes, I think many get divorced after they’ve had 2 or 3 kids, and in the case of 1 they can usually find an older man (usually 10 years older, possibly a kid or two of his own) to marry and have one more with.
I have heard that in the Nordics it is more common for respectable, non-bohemian people to have kids without marriage (still looked down upon in the Anglo world), though, and that couples will do things like live together for 10 years, have one kid, then split.
Anecdotally, Scandinavians don't feel the need to marry to form stable relationships. The better Scandi cohabitations are more stable than the worse American marriages. I don't know whether anyone has looked at the overall stability of Scandinavian vs US couples.
Yes, it's generally true. In Finnish, while marriage is called avioliitto, a stable live-in relationship is termed avoliitto, and the closeness of the two words seems pretty deliberate. Generally speaking people in stable live-in relationships with kids get married at some point, but it can take quite a long time for them to do so.
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