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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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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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