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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I don't think that either of those claims really defeat the argument being made - but I didn't provide any evidence myself so good enough. I think that men being more likely to remarry reflects the difference in "relationship market value" between the two. Men who are high quality enough to have already married and then lost a wife to disease or accident are much more valuable than women who already have children and other obligations, who are most likely going to have a harder time finding a partner.

That marriage is good in the longer term for men is a more difficult question, and one that I don't think you can really quantify statistically - but even if you did, saying that it would be optimal for men to marry doesn't actually make them more likely to marry. You could apply the same logic to drug addicts - being a heroin addict is extremely bad for your quality of life, and the optimal decision is to stop being a heroin addict immediately... but we don't actually see that happening and heroin addicts still exist.

I should have specified further that not only do men remarry more, they also express a desire to remarry more. This could of course be a sour grapes type situation where women claim to not want to remarry because they're aware they'd have difficulty doing so if they wanted it.

In any case, if anyone has statistics about desire for a first marriage among men vs women it would be interesting to see numbers.

I really don't think it is possible to get a statistical answer for this - there's also the hypothesis that women get married to secure resources, and a divorced woman still has access to her partner's resources and hence does not actually need to remarry (while the man, who is no longer getting any action, does need to get into a new relationship to meet his needs). There are a lot of confounding factors, although if there is real and rigorous data on this I'd love to see it.

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