Over in the comments section of a Mangan post about the possible direct health and happiness benefits of marriage, The Anti-Gnostic writes (replying to another commenter),

The biggest upside for men of marriage over cohabitation is that breaking up is harder in a legally recognized union. Since most breakups/divorces are initiated by women, making it harder to separate benefits men more than women.

I’m going to venture a hypothesis that most break-ups of cohabitation arrangements are initiated by men, and most marriage break-ups are initiated by women.

Divorce itself is not hard. You file a paper that says the marriage is over. Women will get the children, because the man will have a harder job with longer hours, and most households don’t have enough net worth to fight over.

I’m not sure how you came to your conclusion.

CH is on record stating that the incentive structure of marriage has changed to favor women’s discretion. That is, wives are now incentivized to divorce by the alimony retirement plan racket, the anti-male divorce industrial complex, and the practical guarantee of child custody. The data — especially the “wives initiate 70% of divorces” figure — strongly suggest that the CH view is the correct one.

But constitutional white knights — you know who you are — claim that figure could just as easily mean that 70% of husbands are shitty spouses. Well, maybe. But that interpretation is no less speculative than the opposite, and in fact is less sustainable under scrutiny, because the simpler explanation for the 70% female divorce-initiation figure is that men and women are about equally represented among the crappy spouse demographic, but women initiate more divorces because they perceive that a host of benefits will accrue to them from severing their marriages. Husbands, in contrast, perceive no such benefits, and are thus more loathe to divorce even when their wives are insufferable.

One way to test this hypothesis, as The Anti-Gnostic implied above, is to look at which sex initiates more non-marital break-ups. If men really are crappier partners than women, then the break-up initiation rate will be roughly the same inside and outside of marriage. The break-up initiation rate should skew approximately 70% in favor of women in whatever form of relationship they’re in. The premise behind this assumption is that a person’s romantic character or “livability” traits are fairly constant throughout life.

Using the variable FAMPER3 (“During the last year, did you… 3. Break up with a steady boyfriend/girlfriend or fiance?”) from the General Social Survey (GSS) dataset, we find that men broke up their non-marital relationships almost twice as often as did women.

Surveys about people’s sex lives are distinctly untrustworthy, but the GSS does give us a peak behind the curtain at trends in relationship dynamics. As claimed here at the venerable Chateau, it would appear that women have more to lose from breaking up non-marital long-term relationships and more to gain from breaking up their marriages, (and vice versa for men.) This makes sense to any astute observers of the sexual and marital markets; women are on their best behavior prior to marriage, before they’ve gotten a boyfriend or fiancé to sign on the dotted line and tacitly forfeit HALF. A woman’s peak attractiveness window is much shorter relative to a man’s attractiveness window, and this incentivizes women to make nonmarital relationships work until such time that money has changed hands and kids have popped out.

Men, on the other hand, have a lot more to lose in divorce, and a lot less to lose in nonmarital breakups, and this male-peculiar incentive structure is seen in the differing rates of breakup initiations by sex in and out of marriage.

To put it in Heartistian terms…

Maxim #30: Men can leverage their commitment far longer than women can leverage their sex.

Skeptics may note that the GSS question as posed doesn’t specifically ask who initiated the breakup, but the wording strongly implies it. (Perhaps a Master GaSSer could fine tune the data at his pleasure?) But the very fact that there is a sex difference in breakup rates between nonmarital relationships and marriages is ample evidence that social and legal incentives can influence the motivations of men and women.

The substantiating evidence so far, in surveys and in the field, is that women are more responsible for the rise in divorce, and that their self-justification for divorce has gotten more fickle and more self-aggrandizing rather than less.

A final note: If you look closely, you’ll see emanations and penumbras of female hypergamy in the GSS results above.

Their body language is a dead giveaway. She’s leaning into him body and head, he’s leaning away from her. Charitably, he can’t support her weight. Uncharitably, he’s already withdrawing in preparation of the many years he has ahead to come to terms with his defeat.

The resolution isn’t strong enough to determine if his eyes betray the listless vacancy of a wed man walking.

There’s a lot of chatter among the cuntocracy about how men aren’t “manning up” and doing their duty to marry off all the single ladies. But maybe, just maybe, part of the reason for this male abdication of the sacred institution of marriage is the poor quality of the women on offer.

Just how bad is the marriageable American female market? Jay in DC writes,

‘Hot 99.5′ is basically the hippest and most relevant DC radio station in that it has the youngest listener demographic.

They are currently holding a contest for “new brides” to post their hottest photo to win the contest (1,000 dollar prize). Now granted, more intelligent chicks are probably NOT going to put their pic out there. But there are about 100 submissions up there already so this is a pretty good cross-section of not only DC, but really the US.

Behold men, and look upon your ruination. Betas WILL marry anything. ANYTHING, and this is what keeps the perpetual cycle of disgusting fat entitled average americunts reproducing.

I really advise you take the 15 minutes or so to REALLY look at every photo. This is our future. Out of those 100 photos there are FIVE women I would date, a few more I would fuck, and 3 I would marry if they had the classic femininity to go with their looks.

That is a SAD ASS RATIO. 97 to 3 in a pretty good statistical sample are marriageable? Welcome to the USSA.

http://www.hot995.com/contests/summer-bridal-showdown/297456/Vote/photoDetail/402513

p.s. Don’t bother posting comments, they will be shot down in seconds, just enjoy the grotesquery that is these women in bridal gowns.

Browsing the blushing attention whores, I’d have to concur with Jay’s assessment; the majority of the American East Coast brides are beastly. Beauty and the beast, inverted.

Beta males won’t marry anything. That is a stretch. Ugly, older, masculine, and fatter women DO pay marriage marketplace costs that you won’t be able to readily discern in their smiling wedding day photos. The hidden nature of the cost does not preclude its exorbitance.

And what is that exorbitant cost? Settling. It’s all of the better men with whom the post-prime, pre-Wall, porky-princess American bride had to give up hope of fettering to a marital contract. As age, size and attitude veer away from the feminine ideal beloved by the vast majority of men, women will find it harder — sometimes impossibly harder — to land the man of their dreams. They will have to settle for second, third, or even 30th best if they want to be married at all.

And so what you don’t see in those blushing blimp pics are the men they truly wanted who pumped and dumped them, or ignored them for their prettier friends. What you also don’t see are the hapless losers who vowed last-ditch lifelong monogamy to a land whale in exchange for avoiding the walking death of incel, as their hearts privately sank away in forlorn regret.

That is the individual, human dynamic. What about the big picture? Interesting — in the horrible sense of the word — things happen when the supply of attractive women drastically shrinks in proportion to the supply of megafauna, feminists, careerist shrikes, manjaws, and bitter spinsters. When the marriage market essentially become an outpost of Wal-Mart (Wall-Mart!) — cheap, throwaway, high fructose corn syrup goods — men experience what could be described as an exogenous “restriction of range” problem when they set out to find marriageable women.

Instead of a normally functioning sexual market where men are presented with many options among marriageable women of varying degrees of attractiveness (who nonetheless meet the men’s threshold for long-term commitment worthiness), what transpires in a shit market like what we have now is a massive limitation in men’s acceptably attractive mate choices and a replacement with a dichotomous mate choice system. In a dichotomous mate choice system, beta males no longer have the luxury of choosing between, say, a feminine slender 6 and a tomboyish slender 7. Now they’re restricted to choosing between involuntary celibacy and marriage to a ghastly apparition.

Unfortunately for the progress of the human species, the male sex drive is so strong that more than a few hard-up betas and omegas will choose the sad, dreary marriage to a circus sideshow over the soul-crushing solitude of sexlessness.

Beauty is truth. CH is among the greats in asserting the truism of this plea for an aesthetic sensibility, and for good reason. When ugliness of body is the norm, ugliness of character and, ultimately, of nation is sure to follow.

Related:

One of the more amusing private pains-turned-public spectacle to leak out of an internet pustule recently graced the combox of Reddit (/r/relationship). A sexually deprived married man (but I repeat myself) crafted a meticulous spreadsheet documenting the number of times his wife denied him sex and the excuses she gave each time. He then emailed this “unspread”sheet to his wife while she was away on business (red flag right there). She went public with it, hoping to both shame her thirsty hubby and to trawl for advice from male feminists that would rub the fur of her hamster with the grain.

at least she didn’t use “i have a headache”

For those keeping score, that’s three marital congresses out of twenty-eight attempts, for an 11% successful lay ratio.

An 11% lay ratio is pretty good for the average single beta male picking up girls (1 out of 10 approaches yields sex), but horrible for a married man who pledged his freedom, natural polygynous urge, and HALF to a woman who presumably loves her husband unto death, and who tacitly agreed by signing the marriage contract to offer her body on a regular basis to him.

But as visitors to Chateau Heartiste know, marriage is no respite from the perpetually clanking meat machine of the sexual market. If you recline into complacently dull beta maleness, you will lose your wife’s desire to please you as readily as you would lose a girlfriend’s, or a fling’s, desire. Worse, if you make the mistake of thinking that marriage will energize your wife’s sexual cravings beyond the limp gestures she had exhibited toward you pre-marriage, you’ll learn soon enough that the line that is dotted is not the ‘gine that is prodded.

No marriage contract in the world is sufficiently coercive to wrest sexual desire from the limbic node of a woman’s arousal center. Sexual desire is an animal instinct that predates legal fictions or social expectation. If the animal slumbers, “talking it out” or making it promises won’t rouse it to rutting; the animal must be confronted on its own terms, with equally primal cues that waken its instinct to mate.

The trope of the married man reduced to begging for sex from his wife stricken with yet another “headache” is a stereotype for a reason. These things hardly ever materialize out of thin air. But exactly how many married men labor in the purgatory known as the thirstzone? Numbers are hard to come by, although General Social Survey wizards have played the contrarian and dug up data suggesting married men have slightly more sex on average than unmarried men.

The problem with that survey data, beyond the inherent flaws of self-reporting and social expectation bias (and burning shame), is that the huge swell of omega and lesser beta single men who suffer involuntary celibate lives greatly skews the stats to promote an illusion that married men enjoy a cornucopia of sex (with one woman, let it be reminded). This incel ballast must be jettisoned to get a truer picture of what kind of sex lives married men actually enjoy. If the typical married man gets laid once per month (as our pubic flogging victim above has documented), then a more accurate assessment of his bounty would come from comparison to unmarried men who aren’t hopeless sex market rejects.

Compared to an incel, once per month married sex sounds like a pretty good deal. Compared to single men with girlfriends, fuck buddies, and flings tossed in for flavor, once per month sex sounds like painful blue balls. Ask any single man what a year-long relationship with a hot girlfriend is like, and he’ll tell you it’s a copulation carnival. His married buddies will turn green with envy.

As often surfaces on megafeminist sites like Reddit, hackneyed hackers and bromide belchers rush to fill the void of useful advice with Hivemind-approved diagnoses that abjure the wife of even the tiniest bit of responsibility for her role in her husband’s desperate sexual deprivation. Two common refrains — the husband isn’t doing enough to “support” his wife, and the wife has “low libido” — receive rounds of applause from the benighted.

These are handy rationalizations without a scintilla of realistic relevancy. In the real world, husbands who support the shit out of their wives are often less sexually rewarded than husbands who follow a program of benevolent sexism. And no scientist has yet, to my satisfaction, proven that there is an epidemic of pathologically low libido among married women. What is much more likely is that married men are, or become, less sexually stimulating to their wives, and the infamous “low libidio” of their wives is nothing more than selective female libido. Divorcee tell-alls revel in confessions of rejuventated sex lives once the beta provider hubby package was sent adrift.

A married man stuck in the thirstzone is not without options. Mistresses have traditionally been outlets for such men, and the culture used to give a wink and a nod to such arrangements, because the culture used to have a healthy and normal appreciation and acceptance of innate sex differences, before everything turned to poopytalk and hamster fuel.

There, too, is the advice offered by this very outpost of recivilization: A dab of dread will make legs spread. The poor sexless husband who attempted to shame his wife into fulfilling his most basic need in a marriage has, by accounts, ended all contact with her. Radio silence, while not the ideal solution to such crises of the cunt, is better than abject mewling and prone apologia. It has, at the least, made his wife think so hard about her lack of desire for her husband that she has taken to an internet forum full of spergs to find serenity now.

Dread game works, but only if the timing and execution occur before betatization has metastasized. A husband who repulses his wife is in a sorry position from which no remedy will work within a time frame not measured in years. The unspreadsheet man had undoubtedly been suffering months, perhaps years, of sexual isolation from his wife before he became so desperate that he felt it necessary to painstakingly chronicle his pain and accost her with it while she was at a hotel bar thinking about unleashing her inner bed fiend with a business associate.

At that late stage, any active effort to reverse his misfortune would be perceived as spite by his carnally estranged wife, stemming from a place of hurt and neediness. Perception is king in the mating arena, and butthurtness is kryptonite to women’s horny levels. The proper dose of dread needed to be delivered earlier, under circumstances less likely to be confused for vengeance.

The most effective punishment for a sexually withdrawing wife is punishment that can be construed as inadvertent. A woman is validated equally by intentional punishment as by intentional reward; both tell her “I’m so desired I rouse my husband to flattery and to retribution.” And a validated woman is an unpliable woman.

But punishment that appears almost “off-hand”, or apathetic and callous, is gold. This is the kind of punishment of female misbehavior (and, yes, denial of historically regarded marital duties counts as misbehavior) that strikes wee hamster nerves. It’s the punishment of indifference that follows when a husband’s mind has started wandering to thoughts of other women. The classic “late night phone call to wife with girls laughing in the background” ploy is an example of indifference punishment.

Wives can handle being punished when it validates their higher status. Cause-and-effect kneejerk punishment won’t rattle their self-possession or shake them into suddenly renewed desire. But no woman, wifed up or not, can handle being an afterthought to her man without compensating for her perceived demotion with reinvigorated lust.

This type of “punishment by gradually escalated indifference” of wayward wives/girlfriends — what a reader suggested can be called the “De-escalation Ladder” — will feature in a future post.

***

PS: Here’s an example from real life of “accidental” dread game in action.

What would a clickbait Chateau Heartiste be like? “Anonymous” comments,

If CH writes a post now with a title like “Robin Williams Forced to Commit Suicide by Divorce Court System” he can get a lot of traffic and extra fame. One thing I suspect happened is that the family courts of California ruled that Robin owed each ex-wife 5 figure alimony sums every month regardless of any drop in his earning power or desire to retire. But he was a liberal who supported that kind of system overall.

There is evidence that suicide risk has a genetic basis, however, like most genetically-influenced behaviors, strong environmental shocks can suppress or trigger the expression of the genes. In the case of Robin Williams, his two ex-wives were the environmental shocks that pushed him to a final solution.

Robin Williams will return to TV after nearly three decades – because two divorces have left him short of cash.

The comic’s breakups cost him £20million and he claims to need a ‘steady job’. He is also selling his £20million California ranch due to his sizeable alimony payments.[...]

The 62-year-old, said: ‘Divorce is expensive. I used to joke they were going to call it “all the money”, but they changed it to “alimony”.

It’s ripping your heart out through your wallet.’

There is no “rape culture” as deranged feminist cunts starved for male attention would want you to believe. Rape rates are at historical lows. There is a divorce rape culture, and it has amassed a pile of real victims far larger than criminally prosecuted rape has claimed. Men are literally killing themselves out of desperation once the divorce rape industrial complex has taken everything from them.

And I do mean “them”. Williams’ ex-wives had absolutely NOTHING to do with his talent, his drive, and his career success. Nothing. And yet with the sanction of the state they walk away with pieces of the man’s soul, leaving him pondering the escape of the rafter rope.

Marriage has never been a bigger sucker’s bet for men. Prenups are routinely shredded by lawyers and ignored by judges. The fix is in. The fundamental premise has been codified in law to the cheers of rabid feminists and solipsistic soccer moms and taken to its logical conclusion: Men are resource chattel, milked by a constabulary of strongmen to redistribute their earnings to an army of cackling divorcees.

If America is fated to be a post-Malthusian, r-selection reproductive free-for-all, then let it be in every way. That means, women are cut loose from the male alimony and child support teat to fend for themselves and accept the consequences of their decisions. Relying on men for support, pre- and post-marriage, is a luxury afforded K-selection societies, and that luxury comes with certain duties that modern women have largely chosen to abandon. If justice is fair and not wholly rigged against the interests of men, the divorce rape culture will be dismantled and an ex-husband’s life may be saved.

Having had the great honor and privilege to detox my buttox be a member in charmed standing of social circles past that included a fair number of gay men, I’ve heard enough lurid stories about their sex lives to fill an abattoir of ripped anuses. Some of them got gay married, many of them knew someone who got gay married. As an insider, I’ll let you in on a leetle secret…

Every gay marriage that was talked about was an open relationship.

Not a one of these gays who were married, or planned to get married, held any pretense of practicing monogamy. When the topic of promiscuous married gays came up, the only surprise was the blasé avowal of the fact. The gay men announced their intention to defile the tacit monogamous stricture of marriage with such nonchalance that it would astound them to learn anyone thought they might behave otherwise.

The Chateau has gay readers. I know you’re reading this. Tell me I’m wrong.

Gay marriage will be a continuation of the unmarried gay lifestyle and all that entails, except legitimized by the state. The bathhouse won’t stop at the boy wedding. The national embrace of gay marriage will have, as per usual when infantile tantrum-throwing leftoids get their way, unintended consequences down the line, and I predict bad ones at that. Marriage is already assaulted by numerous cultural forces; undermining it further by essentially permitting into its scope avowed nonmonogamists will drive deeper the wedge between straight beta men and the institution. And once the beta males leave the marriage game, it’s game over.

In big and small ways, social science studies have a habit of confirming many CH precepts. The latest finds that expensive diamond engagement rings and expensive wedding ceremonies are inversely associated with marriage duration.

This study was done by professors from Emory University. They found that U.S. adults who spent large amounts of money on engagement rings and/or their weddings were more likely to end up divorced!

According to the research, men who spent $2,000 to $4,000 were 1.3 times more likely to end up divorced than men who spent $500 to $2,000.

And when it comes to weddings, if you have a wedding that costs more than $20,000, you’re more likely to end up in “Splitsville!”

The average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is $30,000, according to “The Knot.”

Expensive rings and weddings are classic provider beta male game. And, as science is showing and the Chateau has warned, beta male game is ultimately self-defeating. Women don’t fall in love with a wallet; they fall in love with a man. They don’t desire a mate guarder who has to pay fidelity money; they desire a self-assured jerkboy who expects love free of charge.

And if you’re dating a princess who demands a big ring or ostentatious wedding, my advice is simple: Run. Don’t look back. The next day, you can admire the bulge of your full bank account and your spared dignity. I just saved you from hitching yourself to a woman who couldn’t really love you without a large gift bag included in the deal.

What studies like this one uncover is a bidirectional sexual market feedback loop: On one vector, you have a weak man who feels it necessary to pay for love and supplicate to his fiancee’s gaudy selfishness. On the other vector, you have an unenthusiastic woman who knows she is settling for a less desirable man in a trade-off between exciting sexiness and boring security, and who therefore feels empowered to make her sloppy second beta pay tribute to her in Damegeld. Where these two vectors meet, relationship exactness and complementarity trump love, and subcurrents of divorce are never far from cresting the polished dinner party surface.

Well-meaning tradcons with white knight complexes like Charles Murray and Ross Douthat wonder why more men aren’t MANNING UP and getting married. They say it’s because too many men are jobless.

Maybe. But there’s another, less Hivemind-hospitable explanation for the marriage dearth: Too many women are fat. Groom looks like he just found out he’s the designated prison bitch.

***

Commenter negro jesus writes,

True or not, I read that one of the original purposes of the best man was to privately ask the groom just before the wedding, “Do you REALLY want to do this??” If the groom said no, the best man would stand in front of the crowd and announce that the wedding was off. That’s what this poor bastard needed.

So, if true, the best man acted as sort of an alpha male wingman who would cockblock an ominous nuptial, but not before getting the green light from the gloomy groom. Outstanding. The West could learn some lessons from its disappearing traditions.

A new study finds that husbands’ happiness depends on their wives’ happiness.

The authors did not find a significant association between spouse’s marital appraisals and own well-being. However, the association between husband’s marital quality and life satisfaction is buoyed when his wife also reports a happy marriage, yet flattened when his wife reports low marital quality.

This isn’t the first study to discover a dependency on wife happiness for husband happiness, but not the reverse (i.e., wife happiness dependent on husband happiness).

Two internally derived psychological dynamics are at play here. First, what this study and others like it are picking up is the scarcity mentality that broadly afflicts the class of married men, who in their premarital lives would be known as provider beta males. Scarcity mentality refers to the instinctive and not altogether unjustified male perception that attractive women are hard to get and if you lose a woman you already have it’s a good bet you’ll spend lonely and aggravating years trying to replace her.

Men (non-NAM men at any rate) are wired to think this way because women are, in fact, the reproductively more valuable sex and thus the choosier sex. So when a man gets married, his happiness, as a consequence of his fear of losing his hard-won sexual outlet, ebbs and flows with his wife’s happiness. If wifey is unhappy or sexually distant, hubby’s visceral fear of incel goes into overdrive. His response, usually counterproductive, is to amp up his mate guarding.

Second, a wife’s happiness doesn’t depend on her husband’s happiness because wives, particularly younger wives with more sexual market options, don’t share the same fear of years of incel. Women have their own pressures and hurdles to overcome, (such as convincing a HSMV man to commit), but total sexual abandonment by the opposite sex is not usually one of them (unless she’s fat, ugly or old).

There is also the reality that unhappy husbands can still want and enjoy sex; unhappy wives… eh, not so much. Husbands who want to keep that twat train rolling have an incentive to maintain their wives’ happiness. Wives who want marital sex don’t necessarily need to keep their husbands happy.

What I’ve described is the influence of ancient biology. Today, we can add a third dynamic, one that is externally derived: Divorce theft. An unhappy husband won’t indirectly threaten a wife’s access to her resources or her children, but an unhappy wife can portend a near future of her husband’s bank account and assets slashed in half and time with his kids reduced more than that.

A case could be made that civilization is ascendent when wives try to increase the happiness of their husbands, and civilization is in decline when husbands fret over the happiness of their wives.

Commenter Otsuka Duojinshi highlights another great H. L. Mencken quote, this time on the topic of the romantic isolation of the wives wedded to boring beta male providers.

HLM identified a wife’s contempt for the beta/omega precisely:

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified.

To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.

HLM, if he were alive today, would wholly cosign Game as a legitimate pursuit for men, because he would understand that improving one’s sexual charisma does a marriage good. Here’s the Wiki on HLM. A lot of notable quotables by the great man!

This post is presented “as is”, with neither editorial condemnation nor endorsement. Read at your own risk.

There are scores of CH posts in the archives dealing with game for married men: How to (re)seduce your wife, and how to seduce applicants for mistresshood. But there aren’t many posts about picking up married women. An odd oversight, or a tribute to a latent moral code in the heart of CH?

Nevertheless, we feel it is important to give it all to the reader: The light, the dark, and the chaotic. To shy from forbidden topics would be a refutation of everything the Heartiste abides.

Will writes,

this is what I do if they are married or have BFs (you’d be surprised how many girls wear fake rings to weed out the weak.)

Anyway, the line is simple

Alpha-In-Training:” so, let’s grab a drink sometime.”

Cougar: “Oh! That’s so sweet, but I’m engaged, see my ring?”

AiT: “Hey, it’s just coffee”
::hands her the phone with the ‘New Contact’ screen already open::

C: “I shouldn’t…”

AiT: “How about this, I’ll shoot you a text and you can think it over.”

Works like a charm.
The above does two things. It demonstrates that you are persistent and get what you want. Secondly, she has plausible deniability. You’ve given her jiminy cricket a way to justify her giving out her number.
It sails right past any objections in a smooth manner.

The “it’s just coffee” and “I’ll shoot you a text and you can decide.” win 80% of the time.

I’m of the belief, perhaps optimistic, that a married woman truly, deeply in love with her husband cannot be seduced to betrayal. If I’m right, the problem remains: Just how many married women truly, deeply love their husbands? In this diversifying, slut parading, trust-cratering society we call a nation, vows of fidelity seem quaint. How many wives would you trust to uphold their end of a marital contract when every signal and every noise encourages female empowerment through perfidy?

Will is basically correct about the two premises that must be established when picking up married women. One, you’ve got to foresee and neutralize objections. This is obvious. Married women aren’t going to jump to pressure tactics. It’s too easy for them to lean on the crutch of their back-at-home hubbies when the heat comes between their legs. This means, in practice, giving her hamster a lotta room to spin. You’ll be courtly aloof, but with white hot sexual intent communicated all the same.

Two, all you need is her number. Unless she’s aggressively seeking an excuse to cheat, an insta-date isn’t likely an option. Secure her digits, then text her once later, maybe even a few days later, so that the temptation to sin simmers in her.

The happily married woman can’t be “taken with extreme prejudice” like the single woman. She will need to feel like she’s exercising some control over the proceedings, and she will need to feel like she can walk at any time.

On a related subject, a buddy I knew sometimes wore a fake wedding ring when he departed for the hunt. The first time he did this, I told him it was counterproductive. Surely, most girls will balk at getting hit on by a married man? He smiled, and said, “I have a line with this ring. ‘Oh, I’m not married. I just wear this ring to scare away stalker girls.’ Or I say, ‘It keeps away unwanted attention.’ It really messes with their heads. It’s like when hot girls sometimes wear fake wedding rings so they don’t get bothered by guys all the time. I’m telling them the same thing, except with the sexes reversed.”

magistro meo, mi amice…

In the “Picking up married women” post, I commented that an indeterminate number of happily married women will go out of their way to avoid the temptation to infidelity, and will extend this courtesy to their boyfriends and husbands.

Some happily married women (read: married women still sexually aroused by their husbands) avoid the company of sexually appetitive men or of high status men capable of stimulating the sexual appetites of women. Often, this avoidance is achieved simply by not going to places where a lot of single huntsmen congregate. And, married women will try to introduce the temptation-resisting wonders of avoidance to their husbands, by preventing them from being too frequently in the company of young single ladies. Moving to the suburbs helps a lot with this avoidance program.

Commenter Euro Death Knot astutely notes the corollary to the above observation, and illustrates it from personal anecdotes as the “other man” having an affair with a cheating wife:

The converse of this principle is that a married woman traveling alone is a strong indication of potential interest.

I first learned this long ago when I was a college kid who knew nothing and was traveling on my own in Europe. I spent a night in a youth hostel in the Netherlands and approached an attractive German woman (5+ years older than I was) who was taking a vacation bike trip on her own across Holland. While I had taken only one year of German and her English was just a bit better than my German, it was easily less than 2 hours from me saying hi until I was finger fucking her and she was giving me a hand job, all of this in an open-air loft above the hostel’s dining room with some people milling below us.

It was only the next day when we met up to take the same train to Köln (her to go home and me to crash for a few days with a girl I had approached, made out with and address-closed in a park in München who was studying and living in Köln) that I paid attention to the fact that the ring she was wearing was on her ring finger and I realized that she was married. She told me that her husband traveled a lot and she felt that he had been sleeping around.

I can still see in my mind’s eye how affectionately she embraced her husband who was waiting for her at the train station (never mind that she had pulled out my cock again on the train ride). A couple of years ago I Googled her and discovered that decades later she’s still married (with the same name and close to the same address so presumably to the same man) and has three grown children.

If a wife is traveling alone without her husband, there’s often a reason.

Three lessons:

1. A wife or girlfriend who does not make pained efforts to avoid circumstances rife with illicit sexual invitation is by default a woman seeking them out.

2. The average woman is very good at hiding her infidelity from suspicion. Much better, from what I’ve seen, than the concealment the average man is capable of summoning when guilt is ripping at the soul. I conclude that men feel guilt and loyalty more palpably than do women. The exception to this rule is the accomplished cad, whose years of deception and nurtured sociopathy have honed in him a jewel thief’s skill at evading detection.

3. Even with the best intentions, a taken woman is still human, and an abundance of charming men in her social or work environment will test her limits of self-abnegation, much like a convention of 19-year-old lingerie models with daddy issues will test a devoted husband’s and father’s vows. It’s no coincidence that female infidelity rose at the same time as female participation in the workforce, and hence female exposure to alpha male movers and shakers, increased.

My suggestion: If you want a guarantee that your beloved won’t stray, get her off the cock grid. Rural Montana perhaps. Facsimiles of cock grid escape used to be simpler undertakings, but that all changed with [X], [EX], and [XXX].

The next best option? Game.

Fred Reed, honorary poolside guest, on marriage and kids:

Nobody goes into marriage expecting divorce, but it comes very frequently, and she really does get the house and the children. In divorces, men lose. […]

The sensible conclusion is that you are better off single, building a career or whatever you want in life, and dating such flowers as drift by. […]

Add five or ten years, ten or twenty pounds, and the lack of any reason to continue being charming—and you are going to spend the rest of your life with it. Too many men marry the package, and only discover the content when it is too late. […]

Live with her if you must, but don’t marry her. A woman cohabiting has at least some incentive to be agreeable. A married woman does not. […]

It is said that marriage rests on compromises, but in fact it rests on concessions, and you will make all of them. […]

Children, which she will persuade you that you want, on thought you probably don’t want. They are an ungodly burden until they reach adolescence, at which point they become ungodly monsters, before leaving for university and becoming ungodly expenses.

Marriage: The triumph of hope over reason. Maybe the Swedes have this one thing right: Don’t marry, just cohabit, if you like the monotonousogamous lifestyle of one woman, together under one roof, for years and years, as sprog nip at your heels and resignation slowly substitutes for happiness.

Census Bureau data show that 70% of men aged 20-34 are unmarried. The trend is unmistakable, and predates the current recessionary unpleasantness: More men are dropping out of the marriage market, and this gradually escalating abandonment has been going on since the 1960s.

CH has discussed ad infinitum the various causes for the marriage strike (hint: it’s not just men avoiding the altar). Sometimes, theory isn’t enough to wake people up. You need to hear the pained words echoing from the charnel house known as the modern secular mating market. A commenter to that linked article, Tom Watson, writes,

This isn’t an article about maturity, its about conformity. Society is upset that men aren’t conforming to some crazy imaginary standard being set for them. This isn’t the the 1950’s, the economy has entered permanent contraction, so it’s pretty simple, we can’t afford to marry princess and give her the castle she wants. I don’t want want to be a cog in the machine, I want to see the machine grind to a stop.

What was it? 80% of women list shopping as their number one hobby? But you want to attack men for playing video games? Pretty selective. I want to live a life of minimalism, where I have enough money to cover the basics, I don’t need a 2000 square foot McMansion in burbs to get by, I don’t want to commute to a soul crushing job and end up like the age 50+ man drones I see drowning themselves in alcohol, fast food and TV just to numb their existential pain.

Modern culture to me is spiritually dead, I don’t feel like using my one shot at life running on the never ending treadmill of materialism just because cupcake wants me to, what kind of man would I be then? Definitely not my own. F#CK THAT!!

Courtesy of commenter mendozatorres, a quote from Mary Haweis, authoress, who sounds spookily prescient about our current state of marriage as she reminds her readers that marriage sans concessions is a boon for women and a raw deal for men.

Alas, when people complain of men not marrying (even they who are able), they forget how little women offer in exchange for all they get by marriage. Girls are so seldom taught to be of any use whatever to a man that I am only astonished at the numbers of men who do marry! [ed: we all are, mary.] Many girls do not even try to be agreeable to look at, much less to live with. They forget how numerous they are, and the small absolute need men have of wives; but, nevertheless, men do still marry, and would oftener marry could they find mates – women who are either helpful to them, or amusing, or pleasing to their eye.

–The Art of Beauty by Mary Eliza Haweis, published in 1878.

I wonder what the prime fertility years sex ratio was in 1878?

Mary Eliza Haweis is a friend of the Chateau. She understands — more nobly, she admits — that men must necessarily sacrifice to marry, while women enjoy lavish gains and the fulfillment of lifelong dreams when they marry. This inherent marital risk bias favoring women implies that the institution should be structured to supply men with some up front guarantees of return on investment or indulgences to fulfill, at least occasionally, their own male-specific romantic prerogatives.

Not surprisingly, Mary looks to be a fairly attractive woman by the standards of her time. It’s not quite an ironclad rule, but the way to bet is that attractive women are likelier than homely women to have familiarity with the basic truths governing the behavior of the sexes. After all, what kind of woman will be more in need of soothing platitudes to make it through the day without pondering the existential release of the razor blade poised lengthwise?

Nothing.

Or, more precisely, less than nothing. She became unhappier.

The husband bent over backwards to fulfill his wife’s every demand, and the result is tragicomically predictable: gina tingles extinguished.

For the past year or so, my husband has ceased to be able to turn me on, to the point where I am almost repulsed by our lovemaking. Recently, I broke down and told him everything. Since then, he has done everything in his power to get us back on track. The problem is now me! Even though this is all I’ve wanted, I can’t bear to be touched in certain areas.

Never mind the couples therapist answer. As per usual for the quality of output typical of this field of inquiry, it’s garbage. A commenter’s sarcastic jab gets it more right: “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”

Ok, just to torture the CH reading audience, here’s a sample of the couples therapist’s answer (a woman, natch):

This “hot potato” syndrome is not uncommon: one partner has an issue, but once he throws it off, the other catches something too hot to handle. In many ways, it is a good thing that your husband is responding so energetically to your plea for change, and you did an excellent job of moving beyond what had become a long-term impasse.

Yes, clearly what the husband needs to do is more of what didn’t work at all.

For example, you say you don’t like to be touched in certain places, so the exact details of this must be gently communicated to him, and he needs to be shown exactly what you would prefer.

As the feminist sages tell us, women are really turned on by having to read an instruction manual to their men on the proper use of their bodies during lovemaking.

You have done very well so far – be brave enough to address the next steps, which are largely about better communication.

“Better communication” to solve all your relationship problems! Empty platitude, the stock in trade of marriage counselors everywhere. The unhappy wife wrote to the worse-than-useless psychotherapist shell entity informing her STRAIGHT UP that she told her husband everything, and he did everything he could to meet her demands. What part of that suggests this relationship needs to be addressed with “better communication”? Sounds like they were communicating their marriage to an early bed death!

I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but the alacrity with which marriage and couples counselors and creeeeeeedentialed “psychotherapists” resort to droning bromides devoid of any explicit advice that might prove useful to saving relationships but carries the baggage of gently disturbing the gentle egos of gentle wives with gently feminist views about the moral supremacy of the female prerogative and the assumption of the male’s automatic fault in any scenario stuns even experienced observers of the junk therapist scene such as yours truly.

This couple deserve better advice than what a one Pamela Stephenson Connolly can offer them. CH to the rescue…

To the wife: First, make sure it isn’t some serious physiological issue, like CVD or something that could affect your sexual response. For that, see a medical doctor, i.e. a real doctor. But, odds are it isn’t a medical problem.

The way to bet is that your husband is a beta male — that is, dependable, reliable, generous, deferential… and utterly unsexy — and that his beta maleness got worse the longer your marriage went on. It’s not uncommon for men to get soft in body and attitude once they’ve settled into the marital comfort zone.

If this is the cause of your turtling sexuality, I’m afraid anything you do could only make matters worse. This is because there is a natural disconnect in your female brain between what actually turns you on and what you think SHOULD turn you on. You will, therefore, be unable to give your husband any advice that would work.

To the husband: STOP doing what you’re doing, and do the opposite. Instead of appeasing your wife, ask her to do things for you. No, DEMAND of her those things. Stop supplicating, and instead assume that you are God’s gift to womankind and can do no wrong. Apologize for nothing, make no excuses for her. Be unpredictable. Leave her for a spell, preferably unannounced. Tease her, poke fun at her, squeeze her hip fat with a disapproving glare, flirt with other women as she watches. In sum, initialize the first sequences of Dread Game.

After a few weeks of this wifely romantic reprogramming, grab her when the mood hits you, and start tearing off her clothes, oblivious to her mewls of protest. If your psychological preparations have been successful, she will relent and shake off an orgasm like a dog shitting a peach pit.

If not, consider cutting her loose and saving your newfound self-confidence for another woman who will submit to your love in the way every man secretly desires a woman to do. Even the effete hipster manlets.

There’s a new trend in wedding photos of brides holding their grooms aloft in their arms that exemplifies the cultural and even physical de-masculinization of Western White men and de-feminization of Western White women.

Brides and grooms are agreeing to this farcedy (farce + tragedy) under the pretense that such pics are “cute” and show their “fun-loving side”. Funny, all I see is a nauseating beta curled up like an infant in his aggrofemme’s arms.

This photo was submitted by a newlywed wife who offered, “This is his favourite”. Keep in mind as you view the wreckage that the “””man””” chose this photo as his favorite because it perfectly captured everything he was feeling on his wedding day.

“eek… a mouse!”

Maybe you think the gayfaced thing above is a closet case. A strong possibility. So try to explain this one:

American men are so fagged up I can’t even. Good luck trying to explain this to your future son when he asks why you let mommy carry you over the threshold like an overgrown toddler. News bulletin, dad: Sons have a strong need for an alpha male role model to look up to, and that usually means you. Way to let him down.

One wonders where the psychological castration and infantilization of White men and the phony propped-up machismo of White women will end. What is the end game? Millions of bicurious plushboys ruminating on the potential of everyday objects to double as rectum ticklers? Millions of screechy, thin-skinned feminist SJWs driving the economy to a halt with productivity- and innovation-killing HR complaints?

The best outcome that could happen now would be for this sociosexual inversion to reach an absolute nadir until the system snaps and the degenerate poz mafia scatter like cockroaches as the pendulum swings violently backward, scything away the filth and disease of infected ids.

Executive Summary: There’s a tight link between female fertility and divorce.

Do women initiate the majority of divorces because men are innately “badder” than wives? Or, is it more likely something else which motivates wives — something intrinsic to the demands of their female desires — to push for marital dissolution at greater rates than husbands push for it?

CH has tackled the subject of female-initiated frivorce. It’s good to revisit the topic for clarification, because there are a lot of people who still labor under delusions about the malign effects on society of the divorce industrial complex, and what exactly incentivizes wives to file for the majority of divorces.

Feminists like to point to statistics that supposedly show that divorced women experience a fall in their standard of living as proof that wives are reluctantly initiating divorces to get out of marriages to ill-behaving husbands. There are two problems with this highly misleading statistic (assuming the stat is true in the sense it is being used):

1. The presumption that women are thinking through the long-term and less tangible financial consequences of divorce when the short-term and more tangible incentives are all in the woman’s favor.

A woman who knows she will get half, the house, and custody with child support thinks she will hit the jackpot in the event of divorce, because those rewards are immediate and tangible. She won’t be as likely to think through the prospect of diminished career potential or sexual market value. Incentives matter in human behavior, and front-loaded incentives matter more than downstream disincentives.

2. The drop in a divorced woman’s standard of living, if true, is likely based on a faulty comparison with her standard of living while she was married. The better and more relevant comparison is between the standard of living of a divorced woman and her life as a single woman before she got married. Do divorced women live better than they did as single women BEFORE they got married? That is the useful metric which will shed light on whether divorce really is a bad economic decision for women.

Regarding the supposed post-divorce drop in women’s standard of living, WPrice added:

I tend to reject the statistic, because it usually refers to a feminist study from the 1980s (when academic feminism had carte blanche to make things up). However, it’s true that a woman’s income often looks low on paper following divorce. This is because child support, child tax credits, EIC, property transferred to woman from ex-husband and other benefits are not counted as income. In the meanwhile, it looks like a man’s expenses have gone down, because he no longer gets to claim these expenses on his tax returns. The truth, however, is that she gets all of the supposed increase in his living standard and then some directly in her pocket. The statistic is so deliberately dishonest that it ought to be called what it is: a lie.

Divorce is deliberately set up to ensure that women lose as little as possible when leaving their marriage for whatever reason. Men, of course, are punished no matter what the reason.

The reason our laws, and in particular divorce laws, are biased in favor of women, has to do with the human psychological underpinnings that emerge from the Fundamental Premise.

The divorce rate skyrocketed right after no-fault divorce was passed in CA in 1969, followed by most other states. It has since declined from its mid-1970s high and leveled off (but still nowhere its historical lows in the US pre-1969), so whatever shock to the marital system no-fault divorce instigated seemed to have worked itself out by the 1980s.

CH is fond of the Diversity + Proximity = War equation, but there’s another one we love just as much for its pithy descriptive power:

Options = Instability.

A young woman in her nubile prime has more romantic options than a same-age young man. This makes commitment at that age inherently unstable (especially for naive beta males). The formula reverses for men, who experience a rise in romantic options as they get older and gain social and financial status, (and given that men of all ages are attracted to female youth and beauty, there would be incentives for an older husband to trade his status for a younger second wife).

Theoretically, then, we should find that female-initiated divorce is mostly by YOUNG wives, and male-initiated divorce by OLDER husbands. And that is pretty much the case… but for the former only.

From Dalrock:

As I’ve shared previously the data shows divorce rates are highest when the wife is young and has the incentive to commit divorce theft, and lowest when the wife is older and the husband has the incentive to commit divorce theft.  Divorce is actually least likely when conventional wisdom suggests it occurs most, when the wife is older and the husband has the opportunity to dump her for  a younger woman.

On the surface, this result is strange. But thinking about it, I can tell you why the divorce rate doesn’t follow a symmetrical “U-curve” that reflects older husbands “trading up” for younger second wives: men, unlike women, are simply more comfortable keeping two lovers simultaneously. Husbands don’t have a problem screwing a mistress and coming home to a doting wife. Wives DO have a problem screwing around and maintaining a happy facade with their cucked beta hubbies.

In short, men have a harem mentality. Women don’t.

One glaring correlation that emerges when examining divorce trends is that the divorce rate mirrors women’s likelihood of getting pregnant (aka how fertile she is, aka how hot she is).

The divorce rate and the female fertility rate, if superimposed, are practically IDENTICAL. Divorce is, to a great degree, a function of a woman’s sexual desirability and her options in the sexual market. The more romantic attention from desirable men a young wife can command, the more unstable her marriage.

If stable marriages are a noble societal goal, then encouraging later marriages would work to lower the divorce rate. But, this strategy also works to lower the marital fertility rate, as older mothers have fewer children than younger mothers. Plus, beta males with rising SMV (sexual market value) don’t much like marrying road worn and put away hard women in their 30s, and they won’t if they don’t have to.

A better social strategy would be to instruct young men in the ways of seducing women — both premaritally and maritally — so that they can better tame and redirect their young wives’ hypergamous compulsions to themselves and away from alpha male interlopers. Still another possibility is pairing off younger wives with older husbands, for a balanced SMV match. Or, removing the disincentives to stay married that have become part of divorce and family laws.

(FYI, women will always receive the bulk of child support, and child custody, because women are naturally disposed to the task of child-rearing in a way that men aren’t. Most men don’t much like the drudgery of child-raising, but for that minority of ex-husbands and fathers who crave the joys of being a full-time dad, the family court system should be reformed to better sympathize with their needs.)

Bottom line: If divorce laws are grossly unfair to either sex, they need to be changed. Lamely indulging in “life is unfair” white knightism posturing is no excuse for accepting the continuance of bad laws. (Perspective: “racial quotas are wrong.” “life is unfair.” See how that doesn’t work?)

Padawan125 needs the assistance of the CH readership on no less a problem than salvation of his brother’s soul.

CH and readers, need your help here. I always find the BOTM [beta of the month] stories hilarious. However, it’s not hilarious when your own brother deserves his own BOTM story. I don’t know how to shake him out of his beta-ness and I need help.

My brother has been married for 5 years with kids. I have always questioned his decisions and wanting to marry her but have been “supportive”…as in keeping my opinions to myself. Although recently, his wife pushed me over the edge. It was recently revealed that she has been cheating on him for 2+ years. The texts that she sent her lover was revealed to my entire family. She has no respect for my brother and openly despises him. Even admitting in text that she couldn’t divorce him yet because she wanted to wait to get more money out the deal. Her cheating even brings into question the true paternity of his youngest child.

When this was all revealed my brother approached me for help in getting a divorce. Somehow, less than three months later, he changed his mind and is now back with his wife. Nothing that I do or say has swayed his decision. I have tried the following approaches:
–Shamed him for not being a man, lacking balls, and allowing his wife to have all power and how his wife has openly insulted him in front of everyone.
–Tried to bribe him by telling him to come live with me, quit work, and I would support him until his mind was back on track.
–Told him how accepting her back was him saying to her and everyone that it is ok for people to treat him with disrespect.
–It sets a bad example for his kids showing them that they have a weak father.
–etc, etc, etc

I cannot even look at my brother anymore and want nothing to do with him or his wife. My parents are urging me to “support him and his decisions” because “life is too short.” I am sick to my stomach and want to repeatedly punch him in the face to wake him up.

What do I do here? I want to believe that he is not a lost cause and there is something that I can do to help him grow a pair. Do I continue to ignore him and focus on my own life? I don’t want to lose my brother, but at the same time I cannot bring myself to interact with him.

“Life is too short”, like its cousin aphorism “live and let live”, are the ritardando notes of the powerless feeb. Yes, life is too short…. to live under the heel of a bitchy cheating whore wife.

Unfortunately, Padawan125, there is no easy solution to your brother’s crisis of the id. He is in that sad masochistic zone that all men who feel like they have no options in the mate market occupy, nursing the dying embers of his self-worth. Impenetrable layers of misery rationalization bunkers protect his bruised ego, and there isn’t much psychology of persuasion magic that’ll bust through.

Except for one thing…

The love of another woman.

Or at least her welcoming vagina.

Spend some time on the town with your brother (minus the wife of course). Insinuate the teachings of Game into your conversation. Get him flirting with any woman at least as attractive as his wife. If you feel the urgency of your brother’s situation demands rule-bending, then invite (or pay off) a cute pivot to accompany both of you on a night out. Be sure to allay your brother’s beta-reflex concerns and inform him that your girl guest is your “friend”. What he doesn’t know is that you instructed your friend to shamelessly flirt with him.

The strategy is to get your brother believing in his sexual market worth again. If he senses that other women are a real possibility, then those ego bunkers will start to crumble, and he’ll slowly pull away from his shrike wife. If he can get a kiss close with a cutie on one of those “bros’ nights out”, his nuptial breakaway is practically assured.

Godspeed, because you are doing the Lord’s work. “which lord?” Come now, let’s not spoil the moment with nagging technicalities.

Charles Darwin – yes, that guy – once drew up a pro and con list for getting married. His list is reprinted here, in readable format.

The standard Chateau view of marriage is that it is a raw deal for individual American men, as currently constituted, (it wasn’t always thus). However, there are good reasons for monogamous, heterosexual marriage to continue as a cultural norm and societal buttress. Ol’ Charlie hit on a number of the pros. It’s really not a good idea to have children outside of marriage, particularly over the long term (single mommyhood erodes civilizational capital). Over the short term, it’s still a bad idea unless you belong to one of the few human races in the world (think: Swedes) who can handle having children within an unmarried, cohabitational context. (The verdict is out on how sustainable the Swedish method is, considering how quickly their evolved suite of mental characteristics compels them to hand their country over to the kebab crush.)

fr tho, Darwin’s other marriage pros could nearly as easily be gotten with a live-in long-term girlfriend, but to give him credit that was most certainly not the case back in his day. Also, :lol: at “Better than a dog, anyhow”.

A lot of Darwin’s marriage cons are inarguable; men must betray their masculine urge to wander and explore once they are hitched to home and wife. Most men aren’t keen about keeping themselves in good graces with relatives; women have much more affinity for nurturing family ties. It is absolutely true that wives, and to a lesser extent husbands, get fat and lazy after marriage. A wife and family are a responsibility that will cut into a man’s free time, (many men are ok with trading in their free time for the comforts of domestication). Less money? Sure. (Don’t be fooled by the lure of a double income. Wives – and long-time cohabitating girlfriends – will just spend twice as fast and twice as much what they spent when they were single.)

Darwin was very concerned about an increase in his “anxiety” from marriage, as he wrote it twice. Potential marital money problems vexed him, too. The provider beta was a real catch in Darwin’s day that isn’t as true today. Women didn’t HATE HATE HATE betas back then with the same bubbling spite. But the ability of a provider beta in the Darwin era to leverage his provisioning skill for prime poon meant that he couldn’t slack off and give his date a bag of Skittles for her birthday, and recline smugly knowing a blowjob was coming his way regardless. Jerkboy Game in Darwin’s time probably had more limited appeal to women than it does today.