Our slow drift away from marriage.

Johnycomelately asks:

I’m just wondering what will happen when the clock chimes and men collectively realise the game has changed and that ‘marriage’ really is just a temporary enterprise.

Will that ever happen or will the fem collective continue to maintain the wool over the eyes of men?

What will marriage 3.0 look like?

I don’t think it will happen that way. What I think we will see, and what we can already see, is a slow drift of the culture away from marriage. All of these people I’m quoting, from FotF to the new age marriage counselor are very loudly explaining that marriage has no moral meaning. This isn’t a new message, although the volume and intensity does seem to have increased over the last few decades. This along with the corresponding message that married men and fathers are at best buffoons not to be respected, and at worst more despicable than murders and rapists is having a natural impact. Add to this an ever increasing age at which women start to marry. All of this together, the church, the law, the culture, etc are teaching young men that marriage and fatherhood is for fools and knaves, or at the very least irrelevant and not worth preparing for.

Over time this has and will continue to erode young men’s perceptions of marriage as well as their desire to signal provider status. We already see this in the surveys of Millennials where marriage is less important, as is having children. For Millennial women this change is happening due to feminist messages of empowerment, but for men it is happening for the reasons we are discussing. The part that should frighten policy makers is the very inertia that made it seem like we could gut marriage and still have it work is going to work against us on the other side. You won’t be negotiating with an individual man or even a band of men “on strike”, but with a culture. And even worse, by the time women want to marry at 30ish, a large portion of the men they are looking to as husbands and providers will have coasted for a decade or more. These “Peter Pan” men can’t go back and dedicate their teens and twenties to education and career advancement any more than their would be brides can go back and undo the ravages of time, their student loan/cc debt, and a decade and a half of slutting around before looking for a husband.