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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33260 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Are unmarried men taken seriously in business and life?

I listened to Charles Haywood’s latest essay on entrepreneurship and he bluntly suggested that single men are not taken seriously in business. This is something I’ve long suspected, but rarely heard articulated. The only other time I can think of hearing this in media is Alec Baldwins character in The Departed saying something to the effect that you need to be married to: “let your bosses know your not a fag and that at least one woman can tolerate you”.

It seems completely obvious to me and was a source of anxiety for many years. I married in my mid 30s. It’s also completely antithetical to the dominant narrative and I reckon you’d find countless news and opinion articles arguing the opposite.

I also wonder how kids factor into this. I recall reading an analysis of honor culture and the three Ps: provide, protect, and procreate. I don’t have enough background to fully explain this theory but the just of it is that in order to be a man that is fully accepted in a honor culture, you must be competent to excel in one or multiple Ps. I suspect that this is linked to my original question and that having a wife and kids demonstrates competence in all of these dimensions.

I don't think "Taken seriously" is the right framing, but there is something there.

A wife is like debt. The system wants you to have buy-in, something to lose.

A single man is much harder to control if he doesn't owe anyone money and doesn't have a family. Why, he could do damn near anything.

My understudy at work is a guy who is closing in on the end of his Guard term and expresses a lot of "Haha, just kidding" ideation about leaving his wife to live in a cave and play League of Legends.

It is mildly concerning, because replacing him will be a hassle and almost certainly come up short.

Man do I feel that. Living with more responsibility is certainly better but it would be so easy to just give up and spend the rest of my life in an engagement box. I already catch myself making that decision on a smaller scale pretty much every day.

Somewhat tangentiall, but at least one Canadian bank calculated an index for each employee which specifically included marriage / family status:

People with more obligations, more dependents, less flexiblity of job change are valued higher, because they can be used more effectively; you can work them harder without the risk of them quitting on your for greener pastures.

I had dinner the other night with a friend of mine, a former investment banker and derivatives jock for the Toronto Dominion Bank. He grew sufficiently wealthy to retire years ago — while still in his thirties — and has since been managing hedge funds for widows and environmentalists to make up for his past life of crime.

Actually, more of that is true than you might expect. I’ve only taken one or two liberties; for example, when I say “retired” I mean “forced out in a palace coup”, and when I say “sufficiently wealthy” I mean “had so much dirt on so many higher-ups that they gave him a shitload of hush money on his way out the door.”

He had, you see, a low “Vulnerability Index”.

This is not just a piece of banker’s slang. This is an honest-to-god numerical index that TD calculates for every one of its employees; it is used to determine how egregiously they can afford to fuck their people over. There is a list, with a series of check boxes. If you have children, you get a check. If you have a mortgage, you get a check. (If you have a mortgage with the Toronto Dominion Bank, you get a whole lot of checks.) The greater the number of check marks, the more tightly TD has you by the balls.

I wouldn't overlook the possibility that the people in charge of promotions (who are likely to be married men themselves) might give preferable treatment to a married man, thinking to themselves, "this person has a family to support and needs the extra money more than a single man (or woman)". They might also think that a married man is more likely to prefer stability to opportunity and is therefore less likely to quit and move across the country to take another job.

Having been in the supervisor position myself, this was my first thought as well.

ITT: amateur psychoanalysis, aka projection. I’m not going to put much stock in evopsych guesses about risk assessment or competition for mates.

With that said…yeah, sounds plausible. Most of the higher-ups I know are married. Maybe generational, but the few climbers with whom I work are married too.

Of course this has so many confounders! Are go-getters more likely to get that ring? Are gold diggers more likely to ID and pounce on up-and-coming men? Note: that does not match my coworkers…not as far as I can tell.

Among my cohort, there’s definitely a perception that you can boost your career by spending a couple years miserable in Silicon Valley. Then you take your pay cut and still make bank in Huntsville thanks to the SpaceX or Google on your resume. I bet a lot of these guys aren’t married—but I don’t know, because they all moved to Mountain View instead of coming back to the Dallas suburbs.

It’s also worth noting that the West is a little short on honor cultures. Though the listed attributes seem pretty general, and I would expect them to show up as status symbols in any decently-sized society.

Also ITT is a lot of speculation about motives or causes without characterizing the thing itself, or the scale. If being married affects your career choices ... by how much? "Putting a number/probability on it" is worse than directly characterizing the relevance, but at least it's something, and "this takes off [3%] vs [20%] of the career-potential of unmarried men in [x position]" might clarify some of the claims about 'social status'

The only other time I can think of hearing this in media is Alec Baldwins character in The Departed saying something to the effect that you need to be married to: “let your bosses know your not a fag and that at least one woman can tolerate you”.

This of course was adapted from a scene in the Hong Kong original, where the Baldwin and Damon equivalents are at a driving range facing Kowloon. The boss is hitting balls towards the mainland, saying that life will be better after you settle down. It will be more stable, your standing will improve, you will have a chance at promotion. This was all rather pointedly a metaphor for Hong Kong's wedding to the PRC. Doesn't really have the same significance in the American version (especially with respect to golf as a status symbol).

Not sure. Doesn't feel to be the case in software development. Though I haven't run across any middle managers who were single, but that's management. Seems like a lot of famous founders were/are single.

Socially, of course, I treat married men differently to other single men, so I wouldn't be shocked if that carried over to business.

Socially, of course, I treat married men differently to other single men, so I wouldn't be shocked if that carried over to business.

different how?

Just certain things you can't do with married men and vice versa. It's weird to discover how many social events are completely centered around getting with women, but that's what you do when you have friends who are married. There's also time commitments and constraints that married men have that single ones don't.

I dunno but having even a shitty job is a good way of getting out of social obligations.

what if you marry and then live apart? This confers the social status and benefits of marriage but without some of the downside too.

the problem with marriage is the losing your stuff and loss of autonomy aspect. being single give you more choice, options. But probably would get boring or lonely too.

I have a friend in this exact magnificent arrangement. He's married to a woman in southeast Asia whose Muslim family was getting on her case for getting up there in age and still single, but he remains stateside with none of the typical

married guy obligations. They both get to say they're married and reap the benefits (though no sex; indeed he goes without sex as much as any single on average guy does). Greater for her than him (though the OP here suggests it benefits him as well).

Anecdotally, my husband's salary doubled within two years of marrying me (after having been around the same for the five years before marrying me.) He works for a family-owned business with over 200 employees. He gets the impression that he's taken more seriously as an employee now that he has a wife and kids.

Whether we can turn anecdote into data probably depends on what you mean by 'serious.' It would be nice if it were all easily trackable by pay. But oftentimes it's simply an attitude, being brought on work lunches to meet clients, being brought into meetings, how people interact during the meeting.

You'd have to be careful about causality, I specifically worked to improve my career prospects because I got married, I was fine with kind of coasting until I had other people depending on me.

Yes, I am sure that plays a huge part in it, too. Once upon a time my husband put in his two weeks without having anything else lined up (he made it a few rounds into an interview and was feeling overconfident, and something at work made him angry.) He would be much less likely to do something like that now!

People treat their social peers differently than their social betters or inferiors. This is true.

Marriage turns you into a mister, pretty much the most obvious example of moving up a social level.

I've noticed something of the reverse in that single men are perceived as having fewer distractions and responsibilities outside of work and thus can be expected to work longer hours, take on larger, more complex projects, and generally commit more to the company, assuming they are compensated well for their time and effort.

It is that sigma male grindset, after all.

Now, these guys are often not placed into positions of high trust, so perhaps the argument is that they're just viewed as expendable and replaceable and will never be promoted as highly as they would otherwise.

I think the view in the past, which may or may not have lingered on into today, is that married men in a job have a stake. They're mature, they're settled down, and they won't rock the boat because they need to provide for their family. A single guy is generally younger and can up and leave if they're not happy, because they don't have financial obligations tying them down.

In the past, when firms valued employee loyalty, having a visible sign of commitment was valuable. Today, I think it's expected or at least tolerated that you'll move every few years if you're in the type of job where going to a new employer means a promotion and a raise. Sticking around at the same level is seen as being not up to scratch. And so I imagine single people of both sexes are seen as exploitable; maybe they'll leave after a couple of years, but during those couple of years you can extract the maximum value out of them by asking them to work longer hours and take on more responsibility, as they don't have "spouse and kids I need to get home to".

For management, I wonder if it still is a sign of maturity and commitment, where you want them to stick around if they are being productive.

This is all great for an employee. I'm suggesting that being married is an advantage for being invited to senior leadership.

Yes, that's a hypothesis I find believable and would like to see analyzed.

It is also very easy for them to relocate at a moments notice with no kids in schools that would need to be moved, no wives to convince that it's time to uproot. So that expendability works both ways, which is partly why I imagine they don't rise the ranks as easily.

Solid point.

It's handy to have guys you can move around almost at will as the company grows or it's needs change.

But those same guys are more prone to chase a better opportunity where-ever it might lie.

A married man may have hidden envy of an attractive single man, especially if he is being paid a lot. So a study must be done to compare the relative “takens seriously” of attractive versus unattractive single men, as well as men married to attractive women versus unattractive women. We may for instance find that unattractive men married to unattractive women are taken the most seriously.

A single man can be more flexible as an employee, but he's also unreliable in the sense that he's more likely to leave if he thinks his bosses are screwing him over. Maybe that's what you're referring to?

Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might persuade him to it, - marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer - were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.

-- Nietzsche

To this list we can of course add Nietzsche himself. Finding bachelors with eminent achievements in the sciences is not difficult either: Newton, Tesla, Turing (for obvious reasons).

I have never been comfortable with the notion of being "taken seriously". As a purely utilitarian consideration, I need people to take me seriously enough to pay me, but beyond that, I think there is something wrong with being overly-concerned with it. (I detect something peculiar in the notion of being "taken seriously" that is orthogonal to other notions that I do place a higher value on: the acceptance of responsibility, the fulfillment of obligations, perseverance in the face of adversity).

He said business, not general accomplishment, especially not in the sciences. I.E. He's asking if there is a *social *restriction in areas that aren't pursued solely through personal ability.

It should also be noted that Nietzsche here is very much speaking in the Aristotlean and Te Tocquevillean paradigm of gentlemen scholars working alone, rather than the modern science-as-business (one might argue) where there is a greater focus on gruntwork and ready intellectual liquidity in the system, rather than a focus on individual genius, which would thus be more likely to have possible social impediments to achievement.

Wasn't Socrates married twice? And within the Cynic tradition Crates and Hipparchia famously had a "dog marriage" and lived as philosophers in the streets as is the Cynic way. And Pythagoras was married as well, come to think of it.

While I do agree that the "bachelor genius" is a notable archetype within humanity, there are plenty of examples of married geniuses as well.

there are plenty of examples of married geniuses as well.

Certainly. Marx, Grothendieck, Gauss, Gödel, just to name a few.

It’s probably worth noting that all of those high achieving men were huge weirdos.

Absolutely. I don’t doubt that there is a correlation between the two things.

Being taken seriously was poor phrasing. I was referring to a general advantage that married men might have in successful business relationships or other social interactions. I have no doubt that there are domains where marriage is not helpful. Perhaps 99th percentile philosophers or physicists are two examples. There are no doubt more.

One would expect that successfully navigating business relationships/social interactions would track closely with navigating successful romantic relationships, not to mention simply being exposed to more opportunities to meet and pursue potential love interests.

Yeah. I wasn't trying to criticize you or anything; just musing about a concept that other people do bring up relatively often.

I do agree that it would be a benefit in certain domains to be married, as you've observed yourself.

In they Army they used to say of COs: “Subalterns cannot marry, Captains may marry, Majors should marry, Colonels must marry”

I wonder if they still say this.

Is this kind of thing common knowledge that is just left unsaid? Was I just in some sort of bubble where I dont hear it, but everyone knows it?

It's less common and it may not be that exact phrasing, but I heard that sentiment be murmured on the periphery of things.

The only other time I can think of hearing this in media is Alec Baldwins character in The Departed

There's also a common meme on 4chan's /tv/ board where a character says: "Past a certain age, a man without a family can be a bad thing." (Humorous exaggerations sometimes are added: "Past the age of 22, a man without three kids, a 300-k$ house, a mistress...") The source of the meme apparently is the True Detective series.

The sentiment is considerably older than that.

...I am firmly of the opinion that a large number of unmarried men, over the age of twenty-four years, is a dangerous element in any community, and an element upon which society should look with a jealous eye.

--- George Q. Cannon

The quote "Men above the age of 25 and aren’t married are a menace to society", is usually spuriously attributed to Brigham Young (who was hogging all the women anyway), and I would guess was a paraphrase of this one.

Men are suspicious of single men because they have less to lose and so are more likely to take risks, to screw you over, to walk out of a job without a notice period, not to mention higher risk behavior like to fuck their coworkers, to commit a crime that gets the company into hot water, to attempt a high risk strategy to usurp you and so on and so on. The more deep social links someone has in a community, the less likely they are to be unpredictable or break any rules, written or unwritten.

I think this has the best explaining power behind OP's heuristic unless the businessmen OP is referring to are the baseball scouts from Moneyball.

I wish there was a guide for retards like me that listed out all the translations of "When they say X social/personal attributes is bad/good because of set(Y), they actually mean set(Z)". These are not groundbreaking revelations by any means intellectually, but they still catch me off guard because they don't come naturally to me.

I live in Dubai and recently I attended a talk by a woman from PWC about how the MENA region is the next Silicon Valley because tech startups secured 4B USD in funding. That is a pittance FYI. It was immediately obvious to me that this lady with a big-name accounting degree from the UK is committing the base rate fallacy in a very data visualization filled presentation, she did not justify her next silicon valley statement with "the MENA region has more funding than the past" or the "MENA region has more funding than other regions". Just that it has a "big" number digit of funding. Not only that her data analysis and visualizations lacked the most successful tech country in the MENA Region, Israel!

Then it hit me.. Her job isn't to speak the truth, the data are just there for decorations/pretense of credibility/deniability, it's to speak what people want to hear with plausible deniability (fancy UK masters degree), while not offending anyone as well (Excluding Israel because Arabs regardless of normalization of relationtions wouldn't like hearing Jews are doing better, even smart and rich Arabs). Her job is to Euler an audience on a decision predetermined by someone else already regardless of the data, it's a dog and pony show.

This lady had 100x the social sense that I had. Because my presentation would have spoken the truth about the tech sector of the MENA region (it sucks donkey dick) and included Israel. I would have lamented "oh but they told me to analyze the data and present on it, I did that! why did I get fired??".

I did think I could embarrass her by pointing those things out, but I would just mark myself as a troublemaker.

Her job isn't to speak the truth, the data are just there for decorations/pretense of credibility/deniability, it's to speak what people want to hear with plausible deniability

Her job is to land fat consultancy fees for PWC contracting for the MENA governments hoping to turn the oil money (before it runs out) into something high-value that will replace it. Hence the dream of being Silicon Valley (and they're not alone, a lot of European governments - including my own - are trying to get their own Silicon Whatever off the ground).

PWC know there's a snowball in hell's chance of that happening. But do they care? No, they care about "can we get a multi-million contract out of these pigeons to waste a couple of years pretending to build their toy tech start-up centre". That's what she was there for, and it's good that you eventually realised that. You wouldn't have embarrassed her, you would have embarrassed yourself as not being clued-in enough to realise the game being played.

I'm also suspicious of single men (after a certain age) because it suggests that there's something flat out wrong with them. Whether it's inability to find a good partner or lack of willingness to keep one, they're doing something that's going to make me trust and respect them less. I don't know that I've met a man in his 30s that is loyal, smart, and likeable that isn't married. The best you're going to get in most cases is two of the above.

I don't know that I've met a man in his 30s that is loyal, smart, and likeable that isn't married.

That can easily happen if you're like 5'4" and unwilling to be with someone twice your weight. And that is one of the better things that can happen to short guys looking for partners: I've heard stories about short highly driven competent professional dudes winding up with assholes that...let's leave it at felony child abuse. Plenty of little doctors "married to medicine"; it's a euphemism and we all know it. Don't think that they're worse (or much worse) doctors for it.

You can have someone who's loyal, smart and likeable but not married because he has the wrong mindset to go into online dating and too little sociability to do it the normal way. A note here is that you systematically won't meet this kind of person offline (because they're not meeting anyone; that's why they're still single!), so assuming they don't really exist because you haven't run into any IRL is fallacious.

I have one friend who is a great guy, quite smart and funny, and quite willing to help out any of his friends at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, he has the misfortune of not being all that attractive. He's in his early thirties and single, and I don't think there is anything wrong with him. Some guys just have it hard.

some people can easily find a good partner but don't want to

I agree. And i think more men in my age cohort need to hear this. I know a number of single men in their 30s. I cant point to any character defects, but I agree that there must be something there.

I cant point to any character defects, but I agree that there must be something there

Maybe you should be looking for character defects in the women of their cohort.

If the men aren't married, but the defect doesn't lie in them, then by process of elimination...

This seems like the Principal Skinner meme brought to life. Sure, there are plenty of defective women as well, but if they all seem defective, that would suggest faulty evaluation. I am confident that there are plenty of high quality, marriageable women on the basis that many women are, in fact, married and stay married. My confidence is further increased by knowing quite a few of them.

I think this line of reasoning does not demonstrate what you think it demonstrates.

If 0% of the men are defective and 60% of the women are insufferably defective, then the 40% non-defective women get married to 40% of the men, leaving 60% of the men who can't find a woman that's not insufferable.

So you'd still get unmarried men despite there being no problem with them.

The sense that I get is that this can't possibly work that way, because women are the ones who define what "defective" means. By definition, 0% of women are defective, and X% of men are defective as determined by the judgments of the women which play out in whether or not one of the women chose to marry the man. I think this underlies most of the discussion on this topic, and trying to reason why those X% of men might have negative character traits is just a long-winded way of trying to avoid recognizing this. Those men are defective, by definition, but for whatever reason, people in our society don't like to think of ourselves as judging people as "defective" based purely on their romantic success, and so we come up with other reasons to justify this judgment that avoids the obvious answer.

What, Newton and Tesla are defective but the average drug dealer (or Scott's Henry) is an outstanding example of humanity? Somebody might be 'defective' until they receive their inheritance, at which point they become a first-class example of manhood?

The opinions of women should not define what it means to be defective as a man. If you define defective to mean purely what women think, then it loses meaning for any other use we might want it for. Women might not like math nerds with small shoulders but there are many applications that need them.

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For how long have you been a committed champion of the longhouse?

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I firmly disagree with both you and @Walterodim. I myself didn't marry until I was 32, but I assure you (patting myself on the back incoming) that I am both loyal and smart. It just so happened that I didn't meet a woman who would give me the time of day until I was in my 30s. Same goes for a good friend of mine. He's a good man in every way that matters, but he's never found a woman to settle down with. He would love to have one, but isn't having any luck with finding them. Same for a guy I grew up with in my church. He married in his 50s, but he's a good man who is very much worthy of respect. He just never met anyone before then.

The problem with the view you both are espousing is that there is a huge factor of luck in dating. You may simply never meet a person who you are attracted to, who is attracted to you, and who is good marriage material. You can tip the scales in various ways, but ultimately it's not in your control. Casting aspersions on someone when they could simply be an unfortunate victim of bad luck isn't a good thing to do, imo. It also kind of comes across as myopic - maybe you had the good fortune to meet someone who you could marry when you were in your 20s, but not everyone else is going to be so lucky and you should be sympathetic rather than judgmental.

The problem with the view you both are espousing is that there is a huge factor of luck in dating. You may simply never meet a person who you are attracted to, who is attracted to you, and who is good marriage material. You can tip the scales in various ways, but ultimately it's not in your control. Casting aspersions on someone when they could simply be an unfortunate victim of bad luck isn't a good thing to do, imo.

agree. i'd only want a significant other who is interested in the things I care about, which obv. limits my options but nothing is worse than no compatibility and dead air. Instead of relationship it would be more like a business partner.

In support of you, and contra @Rex and @Walterodim: Citing back to my informal survey of Mottizens on the topic* the norm seems to be about 1-3 strong marriage prospects across one's youth. When I think of my own response when thinking of the question, out of the 4 (I'm dropping one in this context), three of them I met under circumstances that were highly luck based and contingent, they could easily not have happened if I were "sick that day" or whatever. I can very easily imagine having gotten to 28 or so having met with only one strong marriage candidate, and failing to bag 1/1 is a pretty tough standard. It's not hard to imagine being in a position where contingent facts leave someone with few, or even no, real opportunities to get married across a lifetime.

On the other hand, in support of Rex and Walter's points, I gave this example to our friend GettingRadicalised before.

Deciding to propose is like deciding to go all-in during a night of poker. You get a good hand, you can judge the situation based on what you see around you and on the hands you've been dealt in the past, and your knowledge of what a good hand looks like. But you can't know what hands you'd be dealt in the future. Maybe if you fold 10-10 now you might get dealt Q-Q next hand! And you can't KNOW what anyone else is holding, you might go all in on A-A and some dipshit who went against you with 9-10 offsuit and got 9-10-2 on the flop beats you.

Going all-in is scary, you never know, you could lose everything. But Kipling tells us (by implication) that if you can't "make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss," then you will never be a man. That's what commitment is, going all-in on a gamble, and fearing commitment is thinking that you just want to see one more hand, another hand, one more hand, and maybe you'll get A-A or A-K on suit, then, THEN you'll bet. But if you never commit, if you're never willing to gamble on a good hand, you'll likely-as-not play all night, folding constantly, losing little bets and blinds and antes, and leave the table with your pockets lighter than when you came in.

So at age, let's say 35, you're judging a group of men on marriage choices, it's like judging guys coming out of a little poker tournament. Guys who never really gambled, who just lost small bets folding all night, will say they had weak hands all night. Maybe they really did just get crap pocket cards all night, and the great RNG in the sky was against them, and any second now they'll get the cards and be ready to gamble intelligently. But maybe when you see a guy who never gambled, he got the same hands everyone else did more-or-less, but he was too timid to gamble, always hoping that he'd get an even better hand, not willing to go all-in until he was absolutely mathematically certain he had the nuts at the table. That might not be a guy you judge highly, he needs more courage, more commitment.

And to carry the poker metaphor, you are highly unlikely to highly judge anyone positively if they walk out with their pockets emptied, the result if you go all-in and lose. Now, part of that might be luck, some might have gotten rivered on a great hand; but on a big enough average the ones who go broke probably gambled too aggressively on a bad hand, or folded too often and got themselves behind and had to go all-in on a mediocre hand to try to get back in the game and failed. These are your divorces and your patently-unhappy marriages. Society judges them, I think, more harshly than those never married at all. So you really are taking a social gamble when you get married, it's not all roses after you propose.

TLDR: To summarize all three points, marriage status indicates whether a man knows when to hold-em, when to fold-em, when to walk away, and when to run.

*Shoutout to @ZorbaTHut for making this easy for me to find, it only had two upvotes but a ton of children

Wow, great writeup. I'm in the middle of deciding this very question with my partner - this helped move me more towards committing. I've been waffling/worrying if it's the right choice, but this framing helped me realize it's always going to be a risk. (Almost) Nobody is 100% sure going into marriage it seems.

And what about those who draw terrible hands all night long - and choose to leave the game? The 5'4" doctor will wind up at best in a relationship with someone who is only using him for his money; at worst he will be a nurse and caretaker to a wife who is in and out of some kind of institution or other. Hospital, jail, rehab - he takes his pick, but if he wants a partner, the only real question is whether he will be treated as a walking ATM, or a nurse and caretaker.

Is it any wonder, then, that the short men I've known are all - with one exception, and he's a neurosurgery resident with enough charisma for a career in politics - have chosen to "focus on their career" or are "too busy to date"?

And what about those who draw terrible hands all night long - and choose to leave the game?

I have to lay my cards on the table, I'm an elitist: I fundamentally care less about people who truly get terrible hands than I do about others. We should do what we can to mitigate their suffering, but we can't reorient all of society around their problems.

The 5'4" doctor will wind up at best in a relationship with someone who is only using him for his money; at worst he will be a nurse and caretaker to a wife who is in and out of some kind of institution or other.

But I have to be honest, I don't see this as all that terrible a hand. Are there no women with similarly unfortunate sets of features? ((I'll admit to being a romantic, I once spent a month in undergrad trying to set up a date between a brilliant but blind friend and a friend with a 10/10 body and a face that was severely burned in an accident. Match made in Heaven!)) Being 5'4" sucks, I'm sure, but so do lots of other things, things that happen to women. Why does his height entitle him to a woman with attributes that are socially valued at a higher level than his own attributes are valued at? What you seem to be saying isn't "He can't find a partner" it's "He can't find the partner he thinks he deserves." And that tradeoff doesn't have to come in terms of morality or stability, it can come in looks! 5'4" makes you ugly, ok, you are ugly; date an ugly girl. That's how life works, has worked for a thousand generations.

All of which would stretch my poker metaphor well past the breaking point.

Ugliness is one thing. Watching your partner eat herself up to 500 pounds and then wind up in a nursing home age 43 after spraining her ankle is another. Or maybe it is a rehab, and drug abuse. 5'4" guys, unless they are genuinely remarkable, are deciding where they want the ambulances if they want partners. Is it better to be alone your whole life, or to be a nurse and caretaker? Is it better for this guy's female counterpart to date a cheating alcoholic, or to be alone? For quite a lot of people, there are no good options - only less bad ones. I suppose it might not be that bad to have to hire home health aides and stuff if your partner's disabled through no fault of her own. I will grant that. Like. There aren't enough physically deformed people out there for the short guys to marry...

I wonder why we do not simply cut the shit and expect unattractive people to be celibate for life. We need like truck drivers and oilfield workers in the middle of nowhere and shit.

I'm not saying "He can't find a partner" but rather "He can't find a partner that is better than being alone": would you rather be alone for life, or a nurse and caretaker? At some point it isn't about just ugliness but straight-up tragedy. Often made all the more terrible by the knowledge that it could absolutely have been prevented.

Perhaps the poker metaphor is dead, but some guys' best option is walking or running. In the bottom few percent...walking away from the poker table unhurt but with empty pockets ain't that bad. Good arguments to be made for these people not being at the table in the first place. Know when to run.

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I feel like the poker analogy is working against you here. Try asking around a table how people would feel open jamming TT with half their life savings and years of their life on the line, whilst only getting to play 3-4 sessions (in this case, marriages prospects).

It's a numbers game. No one wants to cash at a specific tournament, or win a specific cash game. They want to come out ahead over all tournaments and games they play. You put your money in good spots and let the law of large numbers take care of the rest. And there'll will always be those unfavored by Fortuna (or Lady Variance, if you prefer), getting it in with AA vs KKs 8 times and losing every time.

If anything, I'd say slot machines are a more apt allegory, a game rigged against you unless you understand their inner workings.

In the poker metaphor I was thinking tournament style poker night, where it's position rather than chips that matter at the end of the night (how we typically played). Because really, if you want to be a man with a trad family, commitment is the only game in town. There is no moneyball solution, you're gonna have to bet big on somebody, at some point.

I mean we can torture it to death and say maybe it's more like MtG because you get to set your deck up even if luck of the draw comes into it.

But at the end of the day, the survival of a nation requires a huge number of men to take what can be a sucker bet. Marriage is one, it might be a foolish bet but if nobody takes it there are no functional children and the country dies. Joining the military is another; you might get hit by artillery fire before you ever even see the enemy up close, but if nobody is willing to take that chance the country dies.

Well, I did say you could get two out of the three. I remain skeptical of the personal likeability of people that have never attracted a woman that's good marriage material (or their judgment if they just rule out 99% of women in their cohort as unmarriageable). At some point, it's a bit of a tautology and says more about the sort of people that I like than anything else, but I generally don't enjoy the company of men that have zero success with women.

It also kind of comes across as myopic - maybe you had the good fortune to meet someone who you could marry when you were in your 20s, but not everyone else is going to be so lucky and you should be sympathetic rather than judgmental.

I object to this being "good fortune". Many women are attractive, honest, and would be good wives if given the opportunity. My experience wasn't being sullenly single until I one day lucked into the woman of my dreams. Treating this as a mere product of luck is the kind of thing I'm referring to with regard to likeability.

Of course, none of these claims are absolutes, but they're the tendencies that I've seen around me. The topic of who is to blame when men fail to find partners has been done to death around this community and I have not been persuaded that they're not doing anything wrong.

I generally don't enjoy the company of men that have zero success with women.

I fall into the same category but I don't think that this necessarily maps onto whether a man gets married or not. I've known some total losers who had an arranged marriage, and some real winners who fucked a new girl every other week despite not being married.

The fact that you don't recognize your good fortune doesn't mean it wasn't there. Yeah, some guys don't know how to evaluate women and are overlooking good women. No argument there. But in at least two of the cases I mentioned (me and my friend who's my age, can't speak for my older friend from church), the issue isn't one of rejecting good women. It's a lack of women who are interested. And like I said, you can tip the scales in various ways (e.g. where you hang out, effort put into your personal appearance), there is no such thing as a guaranteed return on those efforts. You can do everything right, and still have no candidates to even reject or accept.

Which is the very heart of my point. In a world where someone doing everything right to try to attract women can still wind up attracting no women, it's not really fair to blame it on a person individually just because they happen to still be single. Lord knows that lots of men need to get a swift kick in the pants and get told to wake up, but definitely not all. And since it's not all, I don't think one should generalize a rule of thumb like you were talking about. Better to (temporarily) think too well of those who don't deserve it than to judge those who don't deserve it, imo.

I’m also not suggesting it’s fair. But I think @walterodim’s opinion is very common.

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