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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18480 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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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

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?

And the biological father will always be in the mix, too.

Not neccesarilly, and some people are genetics deniers.

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:

  1. 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.)

  2. 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.

Widows are not single mothers. They are widows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

increasing the chances that [single-mom] women continue to be lonely...

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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