How to Get Married Young

In the past, women married young. The prime window was 16-25, with the peak around 18-20.

How did this happen? There were a number of elements to it, but among them, women lived at their father’s house until marriage. They kept busy, but they didn’t have to make a living. Getting married was their prime “activity,” if you could call it that.

Mothers and Fathers wanted their girls to marry decent men; and, no dilly-dally. To achieve this end, parents themselves arranged a variety of situations where their daughters could meet the right kind of suitor. Dances, in particular, were popular. The entire family went together. Clubs of various sorts, where boys and girls could meet each other, were established by parents; perhaps, as part of the Church. On top of this, mothers especially would help set up meetings with the promising sons of the women in their matronly circles.

Along with all this, mothers taught their daughters to be attractive to a man (dress, skills, manner), while fathers taught discipline. Parents did all this work because they wanted a good outcome. Girls mostly just had to go along with the program.

Today, parents largely practice a policy of neglect. They don’t tell their daughters much of anything at all, and don’t help in any way. What little they do tell them is mostly contrary to marriage: go to a good college, get a job, don’t be distracted by a man, don’t get pregnant. Girls don’t learn much in the way of skills, and are mostly told that they can enjoy freedom without responsibility.

In short, parents are hideously negligent. This includes upper-middle-class parents, who, in many cases, make all the same mistakes with special enthusiasm and effort.

Along with all this, women knew that, if they wanted to marry a Top 20% man, they had to out-compete 80% of the women; and, 80% of the women weren’t going to be successful. As Dalrock has observed, in the past, women were quite active in seeking a partner and gaining his attention. Today, they mostly put all their chips on random luck, while they are busy doing other things.

These patterns, perfectly sensible if a woman wanted to actually get married, are nearly the perfect opposite of the way women behave today. Women seem to think that marriage will just happen, if they make no effort at all. They also seem to think that they are entitled to a Top 20% man, but need make no effort to achieve this besides actually having a vagina, nor have any attractive qualities, even the most rudimentary virtues such as not being grossly fat. Thus, they reject any man perceived as not among that Top 20% (even though he might actually be in the Top 20% for marriage), perhaps threatening to have him arrested for “sexual harassment” along the way.

Thus, women today become experts at waiting. Waiting and waiting and waiting. If waiting worked, they wouldn’t be waiting so long.

This puts our young woman in a challenging position. She has no help from parents, or other social institutions, or the observable norms of society. Even work and school, which was recently the place where about 40% of people met their spouse, is now increasingly off-limits. Men won’t even get in the same elevator as you, for fear of losing their jobs as a result. It is common for men to avoid all eye contact with women at work. This is not because they are excessively timid, but because they simply have worked out the risk/reward ratio and have adjusted accordingly. Do not interact with these toxic bitches any more than you have to. (As if to prove their toxicity for all to see, women then complain that men are avoiding them! Guess what girls: men aren’t interested in women, or any people really, that do nothing but spew complaints and demands. Someday, let me explain what the phrase “a firehose of shit” means.)

Men today have, with great effort, trained themselves not to engage with women in day-to-day activities. Mostly, they won’t approach you. This kind of hard discipline worn into habit cannot be easily turned off and on. Theoretically, men would be more willing to interact with women, if there was some kind of situation where it was established beforehand that women want to be approached. Today, this mostly means bars and clubs. But, this is almost entirely hookup-related today, and many men, who are not interested in this — in other words, the kind of man who is interested in a more serious relationship — will simply not be there.

I conclude that women will have to make a special effort today to indicate to men that they will not be sent to court on sexual assault charges, if men break their policy of non-interaction. The first reaction, for a lot of men, if a woman interacts with them, is not “Oh, this is pleasant!” but: “Am I stepping into a pile of shit here?”

This is difficult for many women. They find it very difficult to be proactive. Here is one woman — a very nice woman! — who concluded that the Bumble app was unusable because it required women to “make the first move.” Women can’t even do this in the most indirect possible fashion, a text message.

If women want to go on a date, increasingly I think they will have to ask a man to go on a date. If she wants to, a woman can do 90% of the asking, basically telling a man that he is pre-approved:

She: “Let’s do something together sometime.”
He: “What, you mean like a date?”
She: “Well, that might work. What do you think?”
He: “Dating is kind of a shitshow these days.”
She: “Well, maybe it wouldn’t be a shitshow if we did it.”
He: “OK, well, my friends tell me that you shouldn’t waste any cash on a bitch unless you have screened her first. I’m not going to be a Foodie Call. So would you like to get some coffee?”
She: “OK, that would be a good start.”

This “date” should be, explicitly, part of a marriage strategy. Don’t ask a man on a date who you are not prepared to potentially marry — who has known, pre-existing disqualifiers. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time, and he is just wasting his time, unless there is some sex involved. Now you are having sex with a man who you have already pre-determined that you will definitely not marry — burning up time and accumulating damage.

Not the most romantic thing, I admit. But what are you going to do? Wait?