Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said that his secret was to “skate to where the puck is going.” If you want to get married, just plan on being a wife — specifically, a Good Wife and Good Mother. If you do that, getting married should be easy.
“I want to get married.”
“Yeah, you and all the other worn-out whores, who figure out around Age 28 that they don’t want to whore around forever. Not gonna happen, babe.”
“I am going to be a good wife and mother.”
“Well, I am not going to let you do that with some other guy.”
Plus, she looks like this:
Get it?
27 is not too old to have a child, but it would be nice if a woman already planning on motherhood at 17 should not have to wait a decade to get it going. Probably, she met the man she would eventually marry around Age 20, passed the 58 months it now takes, on average, for a couple to get to the marriage day, and then got to baby-making soon afterwards. In past days, she would have met her man at Age 20 (or earlier), and had a child at Age 21.
“Peachy Keenan” — presumably, not the name her mother gave her — was talking about how to become “marriage material” at americanmind.org.
Mostly, it is good advice.
Why can’t young men find suitable brides?
You know why. Fifty years of feminism has had its way with two generations of American women, with predictable results. Throw in the eager pharmaceutical market, social celebration of “sex work,” the pornification of entertainment, successful destruction of “devoted wife” and “loving mother” as attractive careers for girls, and finally, the dismantling of “human female” as a real and separate gender—and well, here we are. …
Fortunately, there are many eligible young men who have ducked and dodged the incoming cultural shrapnel that has stripped so many others of their agency and masculinity and their confidence and even their gonads. These brave souls made it to adulthood with their appendages attached and sanity intact.
Now they are in want of a wife. But that’s the problem: “wife.” What’s that? Most girls are no longer raised to be wives. Not since Target started selling Girls Rule t-shirts for toddlers, at least. “How to be a wife” is now an archaic skill set one must seek out on trad-minded blogs.
“How to be a wife” is not something anyone really ever even thinks about, until it’s too late.
OK, good, but her advice is not quite thinking about “how to be a good wife,” it is more along the lines of, “how to appear marriageable,” which is not quite the same thing.
Still, before a woman can learn, or study, how to be a Good Wife and a Good Mother, she has to begin by thinking that such a thing should be done.
Stop thinking of marriage as an end. It is a beginning. Life is extremely short so it’s best to get the good part started as early as you can. When you find the guy, remember that it’s not about what he owes you, or what he’s “done for you lately.” Forge something new as a team. Don’t waste another second on losers who don’t value you. Life can be difficult. Once in a while it can get so tough that you won’t know how to keep going. You’re going to need a loyal partner in that foxhole with you. Someone pulling for you. Someone ready to jump on the grenade.
There are a lot of ways to learn how to be a Good Wife. My favorite place to start is Fascinating Womanhood, by Helen Andelin. There are many other good resources, but read this first, and then you have something to compare to. An updated, contemporized version is now out, but I like the original, because of all the cultural quirks of that time which now seem antiquarian. It relates a time (the 1960s) when whoredom among women was still unusual; when most women became housewives even though feminism was spreading; and when young people dressed like this:
It was a high point of American history.
For a similar reason, you can learn a lot from the books of Jane Austen, precisely because they relate a certain time, place and social circle, with characteristics that seem almost untouchable now but perhaps we could aspire to.
Cornerstone 