The (Largely) Lame Reason Men Are Running Even More From Commitment

Lots of societal hand-wringing of late about the decline of marriage. If you zoom out a bit, the divorce rate is actually decreasing in America, although it’s increasing for older people, the so-called “Silver Splitters,” which may indicate that people cannot hold a marriage together with semi-increasing life span (statistically, when you factor in COVID, I believe life span is actually decreasing for both genders over the last half-decade).

It is very hard to generalize or talk about marriage in the aggregate, because every marriage is very unique and they occur at the intersection of 900 different things, including:

• How old you were when you met
• Your attitudes about kids
• Your attitudes about sex
• Your professions and your goals therein
• Your religious background
• Where in America you live
• Your familial history with divorce
• Etc.

So again, it’s hard to discuss it in the aggregate, but we can semi-try a little bit here.

I watch this lady Pearl sometimes on YouTube. A lot of her stuff is insufferable, but periodically it’s interesting. Here’s a short:

In that one, she makes a binary argument about marriage:

1. Men want sex.
2. Women want stability.

Then she says 1 in 4 marriages are sexless. I’ve never seen that specific stat, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’d be the first person to tell you that people need to get laid more, especially within marriages.

So Pearl “destroys this feminist” (as the video title tells you) because she says, well, women ain’t offering sex, so how can they demand stability? There are a lot of things wrong with this whole ecosystem of an argument, including whether men want sex (some want fast mile times and to play video games in peace) and whether women want stability (some just want kids, or a thriving career). But if you assume “sex for stability” is the baseline of a lot of middle-class marriages (which again, is a wide-ranging assumption), then maybe that part has broken down, and maybe that’s tied to divorce rates and later marriages, etc.

It’s a much bigger picture than that, but I can offer you a couple of random pieces of intel here. First, in the last year or two, there’s been an uptick in “Trad-Wife” content on TikTok and Instagram. “Trad-Wife” ideology is essentially sex for stability; it’s sex and “keeping a good home” in exchange for economic protection. Honestly, with inflation and at-will employment, I see the value in some of that deal.

At the same time, I wrote a stupid little post a few weeks ago about some lady commenting at a social event “My husband turns 37 tonight. Guess I gotta go home and fuck.” I thought no one would ever notice this post on Medium, and it averages about 6–10K views/week with new claps and comments. Odd.

I think part of the reason that post interests people is because it’s a direct discussion of the implied marriage contract between many, and each sex/gender has a different view on how sustainable said contract is. One of the comments there says something like “Women view men as their employees,” which I could see as true in some relationships. Another comment is like, “The heteronormative basis of most relationships is the exchange of sex for stability,” which I can also see in many relationships.

The fact that these two articles, both of which aren’t really that great, have piqued interest — it seems like people are thinking about these topics.

When we had the whole “Quiet Quitting” phase around work, I thought that maybe the term applied better to marriage .

Here’s a long-ass pull quote from there:

And remember: A husband who packs the kids’ lunches isn’t “helping” his wife. He’s parenting his children. A husband who does the laundry every other week isn’t “doing a chore” for his wife. He’s being an adult.

My 50/50 co-parenting mom friends confirm that, for the first time ever, they feel their ex-husbands are doing their fair share. As divorced dads, they are forced — not by dint of wifely nagging , not by the couples therapist, but by law and necessity — to manage a household, to take care of their children and themselves.

Every divorced woman I know is happier post-marriage, even the ones who didn’t instigate or want the split. This isn’t unusual: A 2007 study found that women aren’t as “negatively affected” as men by a divorce. Despite women being likely to experience a more significant dip in income, the researchers found that in the first years post-divorce, “Life satisfaction is significantly more positive for women” than for men. Imagine that.

It has been both intuited by my group chats and proved by research that household inequities can lead to domestic despair . One study asserted that “couples’ divisions of household labor have serious consequences for relationship quality. Unequal housework allocations are associated with depression, marital dissatisfaction and divorce.” These unequal allocations tend to favor men, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. The researcher Brigid Schulte has pointed out that “just having a man in the house tends to increase the load for women — partnered mothers do more housework and child care than single mothers.”

This gets at the real issue. I think a lot of people assume, “Oh, women don’t like sex,” or “Once women get kids, they are less interested in sex.” That’s true for some women. I have friends that bemoan that to me, absolutely.

I think the bigger picture of the marriage breakdown is that a lot of men are complete duds as human beings. I think women have jobs (we’re at 17–19% single-income families in the U.S. now, I believe), and they have to show up and deal with all the standard workforce bullshit, then they have to conduct emotional and household labor at home, and all the while they see their corresponding male doing very little or nothing at all and expecting the old tenets of masculinity and marriage to hold up, and frankly, they don’t really have the time to grind on his dick after 14 hours of doing everything else.

So men get sad, because they’re not getting the physical/emotional release — and for a lot of men, sex is emotional, and maybe the closest they come to anything real — and women get frustrated, because Barry Boss Man thinks he’s “babysitting” the kids when she wants to go get drinks for two hours.

Sadness + frustration = wait until the kids are older and get divorced. And there, we just explained “Silver Splitters.”

Seems like that is what’s happening — dudes aren’t handling their end of the equation, and wanting to hold onto preconceived models of “providing” in exchange for getting to use their wife as a rag doll for 2 minutes and 11 seconds before bed, and women are like “WTF is this deal? Can you unload the dishwasher?”

Makes you wonder if the boys truly are all right.

I think that’s the true landscape in most heteronormative, middle-class-ish marriages of late. But I could be wrong. And again, each one is different.

I can tell you speaking for myself that my wife makes more money than me, and sometimes I feel guilty about my sperm being shitty and I associate sex with failure , so I’m not even that into having it all the time, bucking the traditional male trend.

As a result, I personally don’t buy into “sex for stability” because it’s not the relationship I exist within. But … I’m just looking at macro things I see around me and read in articles and watch on clips, and it seems like any decline in marriage is really tied to men not bucking up and being better partners.

Your take?

Related: “Marriage Is A Form Of Negligence.”