Back and forth articles on IFStudies.

I found these articles silly in terms of trying to understand why marriage rates have dropped because of ‘cheap sex’ or not. In them, basically they’re arguing the back and forth whether cheap sex has an influence on marriage rates given the decreasing amount of marriage formation the more sexual partners that one has.

While there is some validity in that notion — some men don’t want to marry women with very promiscuous pasts — the bigger issue is always going to be the nature of the expanding expectations that women have and the obesity(1) epidemic(2) for real(3).

Even in the “free love” 1960s-1970s most of the men and women there still got married. Dalrock’s coverage of the never married data shows that even with people racking up higher partner counts from 1960s-1970s (the 45-49 year old age groups in the 2000s and 2010s) they still got married past 90% rates like most successful civilizations.

The big meaningful differences between 1960s and 1970s is the rates of obesity have skyrocketed in addition to social media literally destroying the dating markets. Social media has become so curated that people only put out the best, and everyone needs to be in some neat little package. So when you meet other people that are not all that like most people are then there’s going to be mega-differences in expectations versus reality. I don’t even have to mention feminism in making womens’ expectations skyhigh either. Porn, being raised by divorced parents or single parents, and other factors likely play an influence as well.

Cheap sex may well explain a bit, but the bigger issues still loom.