You should renegotiate. You’re always saying you’re a businessman. Stand up for yourself!
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How exactly? Everything I typed applies to women as well? How is advising men to care more about the substance of the person they are dating than their appearance misogyny??
I’m so confused lol.
I kind of read that too, but I don’t think he meant it that way. I hope I am not coming off that way, I am just speaking my truth - but if anything I said was misogynistic I would like to correct it.
Same, i thought maybe he meant that the woman settled or something but it would obviously apply to a man in that situation as well.
I accept your faulty perception of me and the conversation. I have no right to try to control how you see things. Thank you for backing off and cutting it out.
Not how that actually works lol. I basically never renegotiate anything unless something major changes by the way. I made the deal I made when I made it and it worked out really well for my wife. I’m not sorry I did it, but I’m not going to pretend like marriage is about romance instead of practicality. It’s too big of a deal for something as arbitrary as oxytocin to determine whether it’s good or not.
My wife basically agrees with all of this by the way.
To be very very clear renegotiation is what you do when the other person has breached the contract but you want to keep the relationship intact. Every time you renegotiate the other person should be grateful. You renegotiating something out of the blue without any cause is you being a scumbag full stop. I have no respect for people who do this and generally I end every relationship ASAP when the other person tries to renegotiate out of principle. Long run there’s no reason to have people like that in your orbit.
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On the subject of misogyny I think there are two major inefficiencies in the dating market today:
The first is that capital S Society tells men that their personal worth and happiness are hugely correlated with how attractive their spouse is. This causes them to massively overvalue physical attractiveness.
The second is that Society tells women that their personal worth and happiness are hugely correlated with how much money their spouse brings in. This causes them to massively overvalue financial stuff even when that’s not even a little close to what they need from a spouse. This point seems slightly misogynistic on the surface, but I think it’s important because it’s partially responsible for the gender gap in earnings.
That seems like a huge reach and I’m not convinced you aren’t being a misogynist you say. Here’s my logic: When it comes to total earnings in the economy very high earners are taking home a pretty hefty cut of the total pie. One thing high earning professions mostly have in common is that they are male dominated, and culturally huge (and I do mean huge) hours are expected. Women face insane difficulties in holding these types of jobs and raising a family because of the conflict between what society expects from them wrt gender roles when it comes to household duties (which are a burden mostly dumped on women) and what their male dominated industries expect to be possible time commitment wise (these time commitments were created by wealthy men with stay at home spouses who weren’t expected to raise a finger around the house with housework or childcare) at work. This is why the mommy track exists. Don’t get me wrong the mommy track at big law or investment banking still pays pretty good, but nobody is going to make a billion dollars off of it and it doesn’t take too many billionaires to move the stats quite a bit.
Obviously this isn’t the entire cause of the gender pay gap, but it’s a substantial one because of the type of people it most heavily impacts. When a woman who could have been a senior big law partner has her entire career earning potential bent downward it moves the aggregate stats a lot more than when a female manager gets paid 10-30% less than her male peers at a restaurant chain. Its statistical relevance is an indictment of wealth inequality more than anything.
The solution of course is for future big law partners of both genders to have stay at home spouses because no family with one paycheck that big needs a second one. The only way the power couple model works generally is if you have no kids or are planning to pay someone to raise the kids… which is one way so many rich kids turn out so badly (many also have terrible parents and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree). Turns out throwing money at this problem doesn’t actually fix it all that well.
I’m also finding this discussion very off-putting. Like, talking about trade offs and inefficiencies and differing strategies when you’re dating (yeah, fuck crazy hot girls wooooo!) vs when you’re looking for marriage (find a nice uggo with values, which a crazy hot girl would obviously never have), men want hot women/women want rich men… how is this not objectifying? You’re talking about women like they’re a fucking commodity.
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he said society tells them that no?
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People are the commodity being traded in the dating market. Seeing it as some kind of transcendent soul mate situation and expecting a fairy tale is insanely toxic, as is not being clear with your partner about exactly what you want/need to be happy in the relationship. If you think that I don’t think there are good looking men who women might want to have sex with but should never ever be in a relationship with you’re hugely mistaken. Attractive but toxic is a fairly common profile in the dating market in both genders. The reason why is obvious but I’ll explain it… they aren’t ever leaving the market because all their relationships last 3-12 months… and the attractive + awesome person is in crazy high demand and can pick a different attractive + awesome person to pair with for a pretty easy path to a happier life than most.
I look at life in a very transactional way and I always have. Everyone is different and has different preferences, but what impacts a persons social worth is what everyone else thinks about them. On survey after survey men value looks over everything and women value wealth over everything. They’re willing to make compromises on both for other stuff (usually because there’s something odious about the person that they can’t tolerate even if they are marriage material on paper), but these are the prevailing values of the culture.
This kind of thing gets on my nerves. I’m busy describing the state of play complete with warts and all… and you guys are acting like I’m saying that’s the way it should be. I’m saying that’s how it is and in the case of these two things society tells people they should do I’m very much in the anti camp on both because I think they are major distortions that cause a lot of unhappiness.
I’m only speaking of straight dating market dynamics because it’s the only market I have any experience with, and I don’t pretend to know what the cultural values are in the other orientations dating markets in any deep way. The straight dating market though I was very active in for six years and I’ve been in a committed relationship with my wife for thirteen years. I have as much experience on this particular subject as I do on any other, and this whole thing started when jmakin strongly implied that I was in a better spot in life than he is because I am married so I decided to have the conversation.
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I think it’s a discussion worth having but it needs to be moved.
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Yes absolutely.
The way I see it the original post had nothing to do with looks and ‘toxicity’. The phrase high standards was not tied to looks in particular, and while I think there’s some truth in what you’re saying in general you seem to massively overstate the role that physically attractive unpleasant people play and make them a feature of every post.
The way I see it, this thread is a particularly poor choice to derail.
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I’ve seen too many friends (and myself when a lot younger) date some version of that in both genders. My theory for why they come up a lot is that they enter the dating pool and basically stay there for life which means they take up a disproportionately large number of dating pool years vs the general population. Their looks make them more successful at getting short term matches and their toxicity guarantees they’ll remain in the pool. This is why most of the people I know go through a few bad relationships and then find someone who doesn’t suck and gratefully pair up. The people who they go through bad relationships with are probably single and looking to mingle right now.
I asked for an excise in the Log of Key Moderator actions thread, but maybe that’s the wrong place.
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Guilty as charged. To be fair I am speaking exclusively of the US dating culture during my time in it which would be 2002-2008 as a single person and from then on in a long term relationship.
I’m open to being totally wrong about this stuff, but I’ve got stats to back my thinking up on nearly everything and have given it a lot of thought. If I’m wrong I’m wrong though.
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This is how it is all relevant to the thread purpose.
So, what does a viable coping strategy look like? boredsocial advocates for a strategy that views relationships as transactions. One can view it as the man viewing the woman as a commodity (and vice versa and all sorts of yadda yadda about non-hetero relationships) or one can view it as two people treating each other as business partners, maybe equal maybe not. Using this lens, one can accept being alone by noting that the alternative is a worse deal.
We can say this approach contains misogyny. I think more that it is open to misogyny, but that it is possible (with a lot of effort) to avoid that trap. But let’s not forget the purpose of this exercise. Someone struggling with these issues is looking for a way to avoid going down a dark hole. And they may decide that being a bit objectifying is worth not ending up in that place.
It isn’t helpful to be critical of BS’s approach unless you offer up an alternative coping strategy. And a transactional view of society is going to be immensely powerful for certain people.
TIL i’m toxic because all my relationships last 3-12 months
Yea this should be excised. Sorry everyone.
I have no comment other than the dating game has vastly, vastly changed in the last 10 years with the introduction of tinder and other turbo charged, meat market dating apps. I know people who have found spouses on these apps and I have had a lot of dates with them, but it makes everything very superficial and these days success in that game depends very much on how you appear and not so much who you actually are.
I am a decent human being, but for whatever reason none of my relationships seem to last more than a year (my record is 2) and they always seem to cheat on me. I’m probably making bad choices, as someone said earlier that the person who immediately says yes is not necessarily the best choice. Maybe that is going on. I don’t want to think it’s just that I’m a fundamentally shitty person but my track record so far is full of people who got very full doses of me and decided to find happiness elsewhere.
It’s not 100%, and it has gone the other way where people have been crazy about me and I just wasnt as interested in them so I ended it. But every time that happened it was fairly early in the relationship and I’m pretty certain if they got to know me like the rest, then they would’ve changed their minds.
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