Today’s item is for these men who are ambivalent about marrying their long-term girlfriends.

I was one of those men. I married my wife after being together for six years, most of that time living together. I was also ambivalent about it. We recently celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.

In those days (the 1990s), young men had a vague sense that marriage brought a lot of trouble but not a lot of advantages, while having a live-in girlfriend had a lot of advantages but not a lot of trouble. This is certainly even more true now, and rather than a vague sense, many young men have a much more precise understanding that marriage is a bad deal for most men. This has two basic aspects: 1) a legal structure that encourages divorce-raping good men; 2) women’s bad behavior, including (but not limited to) the fact that about 90% of divorces are effectively initiated by women’s bad behavior.

Things are, if anything, much worse today than twenty years ago. Also, my perspective is perhaps somewhat warped, because I actually have a very good wife. She is probably in the top 10% of wives in America today, which means that you would have a 90%+ chance of doing worse.

However …

As I’ve said, most of the good women are gone by Age 25. Although they may not be married, they are no longer single. They have already paired up with the man that (in the past) they eventually married. They have demonstrated the ability to pair bond and maintain a productive long-term relationship.

Guess what — you have one of those women.

Today, as I see it, about 50% of young women today basically do not meet the minimum requirements for marriage and family, when men meet them. Maybe they had the potential when they were 16 or 18, but not any more. They are unfit for marriage. They are not realistically fixable. If you marry one of these women, you will do worse than average, which, considering how bad the average woman is, should terrify you. These women are basically for the streets. Unfortunately, many men will marry women like this, even though they shouldn’t.

Of the remainder, about 20% — let’s say — are somewhat marginal. Barely adequate, Possibly fixable. They might work out, but it would probably be a struggle.

Then, there are the Top 30%. We men are going to have to take a stand somewhere, so let’s take a stand with the Top 30%. Someone should definitely marry these women, and make a go of it despite the perils. Don’t let them age out unmarried and childless.

Also, if you pass on this woman, you have to admit that the chances of finding another are somewhat slim, because, as I’ve said, the good women are gone quickly. The Top 30% of women are not the same as the Top 30% of the remaining single women that might be interested in you. It is more like the Top 5% of the leftovers.

Also, related to this, plan on having a family. Just plan on having 2-3 children, maybe 4-5. Plan on having 2-3 children within five years after your marriage. Don’t dilly dally. Even if it seems like “the timing isn’t right,” just do it anyway. Plan on homeschooling.

I would seriously consider getting a prenuptial agreement. This serves two functions. First, it might help ameliorate the very bad legal environment for men and marriage these days. Second, if your woman is strongly opposed, it suggests that she was always planning to divorce you anyway. or use her present legal advantages to manipulate and control you. It is a test of her character — among other things, a test of her willingness to follow your leadership. You might see a whole new side of your woman, and it might not be pretty. Maybe, you should just dump the bitch.

Remember, a prenup is irrelevant if you don’t get divorced. And, a good woman wasn’t planning on using the threat of divorce, or false domestic violence claims etc., to manipulate and control you. So, although a little hesitancy is to be expected, a good woman probably won’t have much opposition to a prenup agreement. The best women will understand that the present legal situation is a terrible cancer on the formation of successful families, and will understand that, in today’s environment, a prenup agreement is a good way for men and women both to attempt to construct a more productive legal framework.

I would also avoid getting a “marriage license.” You can get married without a “marriage license,” and people did for centuries. Heck, you can “get married” just living together! (Common law marriage.) So, do not sign any contracts with the government. No no no.

I suggest a small, quick wedding and a long honeymoon. Keep the cost under $5000. Get it done in a month or two if you can, with family and a few friends.

Here’s Coach Greg Adams on why the Two Income Trap leads to Child Sacrifice.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that all of feminism’s “advantages” (are they really?) come at the expense of children. These children grow up, and become a new generation of adults who are really not prepared to improve or even continue the beneficial institutions of the society. Children raised by single mothers, among their many problems, have a hard time forming families; or, if they do get married, they soon end up divorced. Basically, women are “sacrificing their children to Moloch,” not necessarily in a fatal way, but, by neglecting their care, they allow their children to be immersed in the environment of public schools, popular media and music, social media, etc. Corruption of the children is a basic Satanic strategy.

Today, a woman who Takes A Stand With the Family must accept that this means focusing a lot of time and effort on raising children well. This will mean homeschooling, or at least, finding a high quality alternative (private tutor, private school) that accomplishes an education comparable to homeschooling. I have a friend who is pulling his children out of a private, nominally Catholic school because it has gone woke-crazy. He is beginning to homeschool. But even setting aside these aberrations, in the best of situations, K-12 education (and college education continuing after that) these days tends to be very mediocre.

This is an interesting description of even the very tippy-top class of “well educated, well behaved” young people today. It is not very encouraging.

Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a couple genuinely brilliant. All, needless to say, were expensively educated and impressively credentialed. I assumed that they’d arrive with a fairly good idea of how to make an argument with an academic context and that I would be teaching them how to apply those skills to a very different set of rhetorical occasions.

What I soon discovered was that none of them had much idea how to make an argument in any context. Nor were they particularly skilled at analysing the arguments of others. They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know how to write; and they didn’t know how to think.

Is that what you want for your children?

To understand how this predicament came to pass, one needs to understand how students manage to get into places like Harvard or the Claremont colleges in the first place. It is not by learning how to read, write, or think. It is by jumping through the endless series of hoops that elite college admissions offices have developed over the decades to winnow down their skyscraper stacks of application folders.

To win a place at such a school, students most receive top grades in a broad range of AP courses, show evidence of participation in a dozen or more extracurricular activities—sports, arts, student government, et al.—demonstrate “leadership”, engage in “service”, and gather experiences, often through purpose-built programs, to write about on their personal essays, statements designed to convince the admissions officer of the existence of an actual human being beneath the credentials. To do all this, they will work without cease for years on end, sleeping little and foregoing the freedoms of adolescence.

This is not a system that’s designed to foster intellectual engagement. Students learn to skip and skim, not just their assigned readings, but everything. Everything is done at maximum speed and with the least possible effort. Curiosity and passion must be actively suppressed. Students become experts, not so much in subjects as in working the system. There is simply no time to do anything else.

Of course, colleges are no better, and often a lot worse. Here is this professor’s estimation of the tippy-top class of US universities today:

Is there any real learning still happening at American colleges and universities? Of course there is: in the interstices, the institutional cracks, where it can evade the surveillance of the diversity deanlets and the persecutions of the PC police. It survives behind the doors of the classrooms and in the quiet of the offices of the dwindling minority of true teachers who remember what it looks like and are committed, come what may, to keeping it alive. It persists inside the dorm rooms and the brains of the few recalcitrant students — the real campus subversives — who insist on being individuals, on thinking things through for themselves. May it live to see the end of this new dark age.

Whatever way you look at it, raising children even passably well these days means managing their environment and activities, and eliminating anything that is not Good, True and Beautiful — the food they eat, the music they are exposed to, the clothes they wear, the decoration and organization of the house they live in, and so on. This is basically a full-time project, implying a stay-at-home mother.

One way that Feminism leads to “child sacrifice” is: The children are never born. Careerist women have trouble getting married. Birth control and abortion prevent “unwanted” pregnancies. (Why are they unwanted?)

For the children that are born, many are born to single mothers who, even if they are somehow able to be full-time mothers, typically lack the masculine qualities (discipline, effort, focus) that build good character in both boys and girls.

Children with working mothers — including single mothers, married mothers and divorced mothers who are now basically single mothers — are abandoned to daycare, public schools (or private schools that are often not much better), and various afterschool engagements reflective of mainstream society. Too tired to pay much attention to the children even when she is home, in evenings or on the weekends, the working mother typically abandons them again to television, video games, social media and other easy ways to keep children quiet and out of the way. This is not the mom who works to plan a picnic in the park on Saturday, or who even has the patience to watch over a neighbor child who comes over to play. Typically, children are fed all kinds of bad food, beginning even from their first days with baby formula, resulting in the usual suite of health problems. A mother is too tired to watch over her children’s friends and acquaintances, seeking out good companions and quietly pushing away those that are bad influences.

Immersed in public schools/mainstream media/social media, any efforts by a working mother to somehow engage her children with things that are Good, True and Beautiful are commonly washed away in the deluge of mediocrity and filth that constitutes 90%+ of their children’s lives.

These children grow up, and become adults. Older adults, who were perhaps raised better, in the 1950s and 1960s, are today passing away, or their influence is waning. Parents hope that children will somehow “grow out of” the Woke nonsense, terrible music, video game and later porn addictions that they were immersed in during their whole childhoods. But, often this never happens.

The primary purpose of marriage is to create a context for raising children. There isn’t much need for it otherwise. Thus, divorce too comes at the expense of children. They are deprived of the infrastructure for their growth. The “freedom” enjoyed by the divorcing woman (women cause about 90% of divorces), comes at the cost of the children.

A woman today can become a Barren Whore, and maybe that is tolerable. If she stays unmarried and childless, she probably won’t cause too much damage. Maybe she will be a Good Employee and Good Citizen, and be of some benefit to herself and her society.

But, otherwise, I suggest that a woman should Take a Stand With the Family, with all that this entails.

Women talk a big talk, but in the end, 92% of White women in the recent past have gotten married. This does not even include those that wanted to get married, but didn’t (who we hear a lot about although their numbers are small).

Also, about 85% of women have had children. This does not include those women who wanted to have children, but didn’t (who we also hear a lot about). Between birth control, abortion, “morning after” pills, and adoption (which I assume counts as “not having children”), it is hard to imagine that there have been many women who really didn’t want to have children.

So, for younger women, who hear mostly the exact opposite of what women actually do, let me ask you this:

Are you one of the <8% of women who will never want to be married?

Are you one of the <15% of women who will never want to have children?

Maybe you are. But, I would say that, even with the present deluge of propaganda telling young women not to get married or have children (“strong and independent” = Barren Whores), 90%+ of women eventually wanted to get married and have children.

Are you one of the 95%+ of women under the age of 25 who wants to get laid regularly? But, you also don’t want to accumulate damage typical of Barren Whores?

Then, you might as well get married young, have babies, and not whore around before marriage.

After the children are out of the house, some time after Age 45, you can do all the career stuff you like.

Believe it or not, there was actually a time when there were “love songs.”

We can imagine that when a woman Takes a Stand with the Family, and focuses herself on being a Good Wife and Mother, it looks like this:

To keep costs down, I have suggested living in a small condo, perhaps one bedroom and about 600sf — even if you might have a family of five. But, it should be a nice place, in a decent neighborhood. Here is a real-life example of a condo in Miami, which I take as a place which is not very cheap (Detroit) and not very expensive (San Francisco). It is listed right now for $69,900.

This looks like a nice place for children, and also, you don’t have to take care of it.

The living room.

The bedroom.

Yes, it would be nice to have a big $700,000 detached house. But, it would also be nice not to have to pay for that. Take the financial load off.

Here today I will speak to young men, who might like to have a wife and family at a relatively young age.

A stay-at-home wife and family is not, inherently, all that expensive. Basically, you just have to feed them. It can get expensive in time — you might buy a big house, two cars, and all that. But, at least in the early stages, the first five years or so, you do not have to do much with a wife and infants except feed them. Basically, this is about $1000 a month. But, against this, you are not spending money on “dating” or otherwise entertaining women. Also, a wife can cook, which might mean a lot less spent on restaurant and takeout food. Even if you have a wife and three small children, you can get by for a while in the same one-bedroom apartment you had as a single guy. I know one woman who raised four children to adulthood in a 400 square foot cabin. You can get by with the same automobile that you had as a single guy. Your wife can go to the grocery store on the weekend when you aren’t using the car for work. Or maybe you could even go carfree and use a cargo bike.

Much of the expense of having a wife and family, especially a little later, has to do with “getting into the right neighborhoods.” Mostly, this is about public schools, although it is also about the neighbors and the neighbors’ children with whom your wife and children will interact. If you have a stay-at-home Wife anyway, then much of this problem can be resolved with homeschooling. You still want to live in a decent neighborhood, with decent neighbors from whom you can choose your friends and acquaintances. In general, I would make an effort to get into a decent, family-friendly neighborhood, and compromise on living space if you have to.

The “Don’t Need a Man” women are plentiful these days. When they strain their little pea brains, they might admit that it would be nice to have a man to shovel snow and fix the toilet.

So, for those women who are Taking A Stand with the Family, let me explain.

A woman doesn’t need a man, except to raise children. This is, for most women, their primary accomplishment in their lives. If you are going to raise children, then get married first, and stay married.

Your other options, as a single mom, are:

1. Hire a team of childcare professionals. These are the nannies, daycare, private tutors, private schools and so forth, to raise your children as they should be raised. Only a small percentage of women make enough money to pay for a team of professionals to raise their child properly.
2. Abandon your child to the government. The government will raise your children in their government schools, to be brainwashed little goons in their New World Order. In their remaining time, your child will be raised by the television, popular music, and the media. The results won’t be pretty.

A woman today who is Taking a Stand with the Family will probably be a homeschooler, or at least be very picky about finding private schools that reflect her values. In other words, she will be a stay-at-home Mom.

If you aren’t going to make an effort to raise your children well, these days, then it is probably best not have children at all. Just be a “free spirit” = barren whore. Women are usually not too happy with the outcome of this path, later in life, but it is not too bad for the rest of society. There are a lot of men who like barren whores, the more barren and the more whorish the better. But, you don’t marry them.

Among the non-viable, or problematic outcomes, we have:

1. Barren wives. If you aren’t going to have children, why get married? We can allow for women who wanted to have children, but it didn’t work out. But, you could just be “strong and independent.”
2. Single moms = whores who got pregnant. You will basically end up married to the corporation, or to the government anyway.

Especially these days, it’s coming down to two viable options for our young woman: Take A Stand With the Family, or be a Barren Whore. I recommend the first one. Get started early. You can just find a guy to pay for all your stuff. It’s OK! You can skip straight to the finish line, and get married around Age 18. A lot of women think they are going to somehow follow the Feminist Life Track, aiming to get married perhaps around Age 30, and somehow not accumulate damage along the way, usually (but not always) rendering women unfit for marriage. Can’t turn a Hoe into a Housewife. If you think you are going to Take a Stand with the Family at Age 30, why not skip the Feminist Merit Badge and get started earlier?

If a young woman is going to “take a stand with the family,” this doesn’t just mean getting married. Any idiot can get married. The most horrid slut can stand still in a dress for twenty minutes at a wedding ceremony. Mostly, it means what happens after you get married.

Today, I think that probably 90% of divorces are initiated, or caused, by women. For college-educated women, it might be 95%. “Initiated” doesn’t just mean filing the divorce papers. It means that the woman’s bad behavior led to the divorce. This might mean the “I’m not haaaaaappy” crap, or it might mean being such a horrid nagging bitch that a man felt the need to bail out just to keep his sanity. It might mean trying to manipulate a man by withholding sex, until, with regret, he naturally starts looking for it somewhere else. Among those marriages that do not end in divorce, but make men miserable to the point that they tell younger men to never get married, mostly this is caused by women.

In other words, today, the future of a marriage and family is largely up to a woman’s own behavior. So, a woman who “takes a stand with the family” needs to do whatever is necessary to make it work. Probably, if she does this, her husband is not going to cause any problems. Today, the divorce laws and family courts present a horrible conundrum for men, and incentivize bad behavior by women. But, this is only a problem if a couple divorces. My own parents live with the same divorce laws as everyone else, and it is irrelevant, for them.

There are a lot of aspects of being a Good Wife and a Good Mother. However, one of the most basic, and obvious ones is: a woman must not cheat on her husband. To make this a little easier, a wife should not have social media, and she should choose her friends carefully. No “girls’ night out.” A woman should be well aware that most women these days, including other mens’ wives, are degenerate wretches that no man should have married, and that no woman should associate with, if she takes a stand with the family. A woman who Takes a Stand With the Family should only associate with other women who do the same. This is not a very large group — especially for women who marry young. There are not a lot of 22 year old mothers who take a stand with the family. You might have to make friends with women much older.

Who decides whether a woman is a Good Wife? Her husband, of course. He might be a bad husband, but I don’t think it is possible for a woman to be a Good Wife, and her husband is not aware of it. If you have to say “I am a good wife but my husband doesn’t think so,” then you aren’t.