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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35577 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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What if I'm not just looking to get laid, though? What if I'm looking for a stable marriage and 2-3 kids with someone whose company I can tolerate, and whose appearance I'm not repulsed by/who I wouldn't be embarrassed to introduce to my friends? That, to me, feels like an almost impossible ask today, despite having been the norm several decades ago.

Especially as the pathway to finding that stability seems to involve having to play the hookup game for a bit and then picking from what you can 'score' from that

Weird, to me that feels much much easier than getting laid (by someone I'm not repulsed by). Less than a tenth of the women I've slept with wouldn't have gladly taken things farther or been more committed together. And I figure that would generalize, the modal motte characteristics all scream "take him home to mama" more than "drunk food."

Like assuming you had all the economic ducks in a row, the non gender aspects of marriageability, there's way more demand for committed men than there is supply. At churches/masjids/etc especially.

Why do you think it's harder?

I think those requirements are more onerous than they might appear. Wanting a good chance at having 3ish kids alone probably leaves you with an age cap of ~27-28, if you plan to have them 2-3 years apart, and if you need some time to actually get to know them first.

For context, I'm a man, turning 30 this year, and a recently appointed assistant professor in a computational department at a reasonably good school (probably ranked 10th or so in my field). I'm making much less than I would be in industry, but with no debts, and a nontrivial amount of savings, I'd still count that as financially squared away. I'm a few years younger than the average new faculty, so I'm ahead of the curve for my career track.

It's hard to say what's due to sheer bad luck, my individual circumstances, or the broader trend of society, but I've never been particularly romantically successful. but I must be below average in appearance, because online has never yielded any tangible results for me, and the vast majority of rejection I've experienced in real life comes before they've had any real opportunity to know my qualities as a person. There were some worthwhile experiences that in another universe could have led to my desired outcome, along with some terrible and regrettable ones, but I bungled at least some due to immaturity or inexperience. Yet despite having developed as a person, and accruing more accomplishments, wealth, and status, I feel that opportunities like that are growing harder to come by than before. I do agree with the above poster that the game is getting harder to play.

Maybe I should start going to church again, though I've been an apostate my entire adult life.

I'm a man, turning 30 this year, and a recently appointed assistant professor in a computational department at a reasonably good school (probably ranked 10th or so in my field). I'm making much less than I would be in industry, but with no debts, and a nontrivial amount of savings, I'd still count that as financially squared away. I'm a few years younger than the average new faculty, so I'm ahead of the curve for my career track.

I'm once again astonished at how awesome and accomplished the people on here are. You sound like the definition of "take him home to mamma" and in every way the opposite of "drunk food" in my spectrum. Basically I figure there are traits that make a one night stand fun, and traits you look for in a long term partner, you have way more of the stable long-term partner ones, a 23 year old woman looking for a husband is probably looking for exactly you. I would predict that basically the majority of women who would want to sleep with a young STEM professor would be happy to marry him, sexual attraction is more likely to be your limiting factor in the whole process. Are you explicitly looking for marriage, or still in the "see what happens" dating style?

Then again, I'm only a year older and I've been married for six years, so what the fuck do I know. Different worlds.

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