By Lyn87
Almost everything in life involves trade-offs of some sort. If you want something you usually have to give something to get it. I want a new Ferrari. The dealer wants some money – quite a lot of it as it turns out. I don’t make that kind of dough, so I look for something I can afford. Ah… that used Porsche looks about right. I give the dealer what he wants and he gives me what I want. I drive away laughing and he laughs his way to the bank. Win-win.
So why am I driving the used Porsche rather than the new Ferrari? Because I don’t have something the dealer values as much as what he’d be giving up if he gives me the keys. In this case what he wants is defined as, “More money than I have.” I’ll refer to the currency of commerce as ”Transactional Monetary Value” for reasons that will be obvious in a moment. If I want what he has and do not have the means of coercing him, I have to conduct a monetary transaction with sufficient value to make it worth his while. It works both ways of course: I’m not going to pay for the Porsche in exchange for a rusted-out old Gremlin. He has to offer me something I value at least as much as the money I’m giving him.
But what about relationships: does the same principle hold true? I think it generally does. The term I want to introduce is “Transactional Relationship Value,” which I will abbreviate as TRV starting now.
We instinctively understand that some things are more desirable than others – including women. All things being equal, a beautiful woman has higher TRV than an ugly one. The funny one will have more men vying for her attention and affection than the grouchy one. Nothing groundbreaking yet.
Let’s apply the principle further. I’m going to stick to things men look for in long-term relationships. TRV in short-term relationships focuses on the superficial, such as “Considering my states of inebriation and arousal, is she good-looking enough and easy enough for my purposes?” Not exactly the stuff good LTRs are made of.
It occurs to me that most guys look for potential wives and girlfriends to possess a whole suite of attributes, unlike the example I used earlier with only two variables: car and money. How much each of those attributes matters varies widely among individual men, but we mostly like the same things. There are ways to rack-and-stack our choices, and I’ll get to that a little later. First let’s look at some of the attributes. Keep in mind that none of these are exactly quantifiable, so for our purposes let’s peg their values at how the average guy would rate an individual woman on each trait. Remember though, it works both ways as women want to get the maximum TRV they can get as well.
Physical beauty. I don’t care if you’re a leg-man, a butt-man, a bust-man, a face-man, or whatever. Unless you have a serious fetish we men generally agree on who’s hot and who’s not. We may disagree about points, and I may think someone is a 9 while you think she’s a 7, but most guys will put most women within a few points of each other. Anything more is quibbling for purposes of my argument. Plot a bell curve and determine the mean if you want to put some semi-rigor into it.
Age: The old adage is for a man to take his age, divide it in half and add seven years to get an approximation of what he should be looking for at the start of a long-term relationship. Obviously it works the other way for women: they have to subtract seven years from their age and double the result. That fits what actually happens reasonably well. Women in their early twenties go for guys a few years older. Guys in their fifties find those women “pretty but vapid” and prefer women in their thirties instead for LTRs. The closer to the half-plus-seven age a woman is, the higher her TRV is to men at the corresponding age.
Baggage: This is tricky. If she has a high notch count, a couple of kids from the local thugs, daddy issues, control issues, whatever, those psychological rocks in her rucksack lower her TRV depending on what a man’s hot buttons are. Again, hard quantification is impossible, but if she has more baggage than a Samsonite factory, she loses TRV.
Money: Not usually as important to men as to women, but a woman who has her finances in order is preferable to a woman who is deeply in debt, all things being equal. This category also includes her ability to make money if you’re going that route, and her family connections that may help you in your own career ambitions.
I’m just scratching the surface here, and we could all name other attributes that might matter: sense of humor, intelligence, desire for children (or not), religion, political views, etc. We can debate about what matters most and by how much, and ultimately each of us decides for himself, but let’s not pretend that we can’t differentiate between treasure and trash. To return to my analogy, even if we all like sports cars, you may prefer your BMW to my Porsche, and I may prefer my Porsche to your uncle’s Corvette, but none of us will think the other’s choice is terrible. Granted, vehicles are not a perfect example, but stick with me for the sake of the analogy.
Just as the new Ferrari has more Transactional Monetary Value than the used Porsche I ended up with, every man and woman has a certain amount of TRV to bargain with. Under the Marriage 1.0 rules a man brought his TRV to the table, which included looks, money, humor, ambition, etc, and was probably going to marry a woman with similar TRV. What you can offer affects what you will receive.
I promised you a method to rack-and-stack your choices, which I turn to now. You can use something called a Decision Matrix, or DecMat for short. You develop your screening criteria first. Those are the “must haves” or “deal breakers.” It can be anything that really matters to you: if “natural blonde” is one of your “must haves” you screen out every redhead and brunette no matter how high she rates on her other attributes. If “already has kids” is one of your deal-breakers you’ll screen out single moms. Once you screen out the “no-go” women you rank the remainder using your evaluation criteria. Here’s where the DecMat comes in. It’s a graph or computer program that asks you to rank each attribute that matters to you against every other attribute. It then assigns weights to each one based on your answers, so when you plug in the values of the attributes it rank-orders your possibilities for you and gives each one a single score. That’s your estimation of her TRV. It’s not necessarily THE answer, but it’s AN answer based on what you say you want. TRV is the aggregate of a person’s ratings on all the attributes, weighted in accordance with the decision-making person’s preferences.
Here’s where it get tricky – and competitive. Sure, your evaluation of a woman’s TRV is your own opinion, but chances are if you rate a woman as having a high TRV, other men will too.
Since you want all the TRV you can get, and so does everyone else who’s in the LTR market, you need to have a realistic expectation of what your TRV can buy. If we plot every woman’s average TRV we’ll get some sort of bell curve. Same thing with men. Superimpose the two charts with the means lined up. Even with different preferences and the vagaries of attraction, the odds of you ending up with someone more than one standard deviation above you is probably negligible, although you can easily get someone more than a standard deviation below you – but why would you want to?
Now I’m going to outline the problem, and why this article belongs on an MRA site.
Here’s the problem. Feminism lowers a woman’s TRV.
A LOT.
I’m going to do a little napkin math here, so don’t go nuts with your calculators. I’m just making a point with numbers I think are about right – this is an opinion piece, not a statistical treatise. In the past under Marriage 1.0 a person was a pretty good bet as long they were weren’t much more than one and a half standard deviations below the mean of the TRV bell curve.
Feminism in general has lowered the female mean at least one and a half standard deviations. That is a HUGE shift. A guy at the 50th percentile – the middle of the curve – who would have had a decent shot at a decent life with a decent woman under Marriage 1.0 rules is now screwed. The women at the 50th percentile today – under Marriage 2.0 rules – are no longer good marriage risks for average guys (more on risk assessment later). The result is that the group “all men in their prime marriage years” is VASTLY larger than the group “acceptable women in their prime marriage years.” What happens is that a relatively small number of guys hit the jackpot, a lot of guys have “okay” marriages, a lot of guys get screwed over when they marry unsuitable women or turn out to be unsuitable themselves, and the rest wait it out while Kay Hymowitz nags at them to “man up.”
To compound the problem, half a century of misandrist family law has caused millions of boys to grow up without fathers in their lives to guide them into manhood. Feminized schools did the rest, and so the male mean has fallen under the assault as well. How much? I’d guess more than half a standard deviation versus previous generations. The average woman of your grandparent’s generation would not be very interested in what two generations of single mothers and feminist education has turned today’s average man into either.
We’re now two generations into female-headed households, feminized education, and feminist jurisprudence and they’ve taken a toll on both sexes. If you could take an average man and an average woman today and send them back a few generations the average guy would be in the bottom third of his peers (barely marriageable) and no decent guy from back then would consider the modern woman to be marriageable at all. (Feminism damaged both sexes but lowered women’s TRV more.)
To add insult to injury, the lines move to the right as we age and TRV decreases faster for women than for men. Stating in the late-20’s to late-30’s a man’s TRV goes into decline while a woman’s goes off a cliff. This helps older single men, who now may increasingly choose among women who are much younger than they are.
By the time the party-girls hit their 30’s and are awakened by the sound of their biological alarm clocks going off their TRVs are in the dumpster out back under an empty box of truffles. By age 35 their looks are on the way down, and they probably have a fair amount of baggage. (To be fair, I don’t look like I did when I was 20 either.) But the sexual dynamic has changed for them. Where they once could have all the guys they wanted in their beds, their male age-peers are now looking for women in their mid-twenties (half plus seven years). The men who are looking at those women are in their fifties, or maybe forties if the woman looks good for her age.
The good news is that half of all marriages do not end in divorce court, so there are a lot of men and women who are making marriage work. It is certain that a significant percentage of those marriages are not ideal, but either party has the ability to file a no-fault divorce petition. So in half of all marriages both parties perceive that the advantages outweigh the burdens. The bad news is that every year feminism pushes the lines a little farther to the right in favor of women hitting the kill switch.
So now people, mostly men, are haggling over evaluation criteria that would have been screening criteria a couple of generations ago. Feminism has turned LTRs into minefields for a lot of people, with the added caveat that it’s usually men who lose everything when it doesn’t work out. Their kids get the pink shaft too and the cycle continues with the next generation.
That brings me to the topic of risk assessment. Two factors come into play: the likelihood of something bad happening and the severity of the consequences if it does. The potential downside of a bad marriage is catastrophic, so it’s very important to set the odds in your favor as much as possible if you want to marry. The things you do to lower your chance of disaster are called risk mitigation. Once you understand the risks – the likelihood of things going wrong and the severity if they do, you have to mitigate the risks by either lowering the probability of failure and/or limiting the damage if they do. Integrity is the number 1 risk mitigation factor in my estimation. Integrity is not the “given” it used to be, so for many or perhaps most Western women today the odds are too high to warrant the risk. Risk assessment and mitigation is a large enough topic to warrant its own article though. Ultimately we all have to balance the risks against the potential rewards and make the call.
The beauty of the bell curve is that no matter how far you skew it there will still be people at the top who make the grade. They just go from being common, to uncommon, to rare, to very rare the farther you push the mean. A quarter century ago when I was dating, acceptable women were common, good women were uncommon, very good women were rare, and exceptional women were very rare. Today you have to slide everything over at least one notch. That means that while there are still a very small number of exceptional women, the average young woman is no longer an acceptable risk once you factor in the results of your risk assessment.
Having said all that, I’ll reiterate that integrity must be one of the screening criteria. With the legal power a woman has to wreck your life, a guy contemplating an LTR must know the woman he’s marrying will refrain from using her power to screw him to the wall.
Short of just packing it in – which is an option – I posit that learning short Game is a lot less important than having a high TRV, as it allows a man access to women at the high end of the curve. These women are mainly ones that would have been in the upper-middle of the curve 50 years ago, but at least a guy has a fighting chance if they pair off. Of course women more than a standard deviation above the mean are rare, and a man will have a lot of competition before the dynamic flips in favor of men at around age 26, but by that time most good ones are taken and anything else is a crap-shoot with loaded dice. Demographic data suggest that divorce is not spread evenly throughout the population. If two people both bring high TRV and integrity to the match, the odds are pretty good that they’ll be okay “’til death do us part.”
So if a man wants to marry he must do two things: pick the right woman and be the right man. Some guys here will jump all over that as if I’m blaming men. I’m just acknowledging the fact that men are actors in their own fates. Terrible things do happen to good guys who do everything right, but you can improve your odds a lot by refusing to settle for low TRV and low integrity in yourself and the women you spend time with. Good luck, and be smart.
