For a long time, marriage worked something like this, in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma:
Traditional, 19th century-style marriage: Trust/Trust = productive cooperation
Recently, we’ve had this:
(Women) Trust / (Men) Betray: Most women’s experience chasing a string of “bad boys” and “Top 10%” guys throughout her 20s.
(Men) Trust / (Women) Betray: Most men’s experience marrying these women sometime after Age 28.
We are now moving to this:
Betray / Betray. This is where nobody trusts anyone. You can’t establish any long-term cooperation. You don’t even try. Any investment would be lost. Things become very “transactional.” You can have a transaction even with people you don’t trust. You can trade $100 and a bag of cocaine with the lowest of lowlifes. (Although even here there is a little trust, that it is actually clean cocaine.)
This is just beginning to become mainstream. I think we will see a lot of change in the mainstream over the next five years or so, similar to the “second sexual revolution” that happened around 1965-1970.
Generation X: Did everything wrong, and then got it together and got married.
Millennials: Did everything wrong, and then got it together and most got married.
Gen Z: Did everything wrong, and now consider it a lost cause.
Nevertheless, whatever may be the “mainstream,” or the average centerline of a distribution, I think we can still focus on the Top 30% or so of the better sorts of girls.
Actually, a lot of these girls are having a lot less sex than their moms did.
It looks like there are more 20yo virgins today than there have been in several decades.
Cornerstone 