NYT Opinion | Why Aren’t More People Marrying? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. (Gift Link)
NYT Opinion | Why Aren’t More People Marrying? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. (Gift Link)
Harping on people to get married from up in the ivory tower fails to engage with reality of life in the dating trenches.
This is a tough piece, one that I share without fully endorsing. It lays out the problems that women experience with some men, like that men are not getting college degrees at the same rate as women or the lack of emotional modelling provided to boys and young men:
For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.
Where I think it stops short is in thinking about the root causes of those things, and how supporting men can bring them into the feminist tent.
Locking as repost. Previous discussion here: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/623593
Please feel free to make a new discussion post about some of these ideas
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Commenters have recently tended to position themselves as iconoclasts speaking hard truths: Two-parent families often result in better outcomes for kids, writes Megan McArdle, in The Washington Post, but “for various reasons,” she goes on, this “is too often left unsaid” — even though policy wonks, and the pundits who trumpet their ideas, have been telling (straight) people to marry for the sake of their children for decades.
“It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.”
Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who is funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion.
The in-depth interviews, he said, “were even more dispiriting.” For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.
Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added.
The behaviors were ubiquitous enough that Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — Table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends.
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