tl;dr: Marriage is a bad deal for man, and it has always been so.
We recently had a post deleted by the mods. It advocated that marriage is the end-game for men. The problem with that post was that it was getting upvoted like hell! There are, unfortunately, great misunderstandings and false hopes in the RP-community about marriage. Let me see if I can clear some out.
First misunderstanding is that Marriage 2.0 sucks, while Marriage 1.0 was a good, "patriarchical" thing, where men were the embodiment of "alpha", dominant, and women were submissive. The reason for the existence of this belief is, in my opinion, twofold: First, most RP-ers in here are young, under 35 years old, and they don't have a personal memory of marriage before the 70's or 80's. Second reason, there is an over-representation of conservatives and right-wingers in TRP, so over-simplified ideals often find fertile ground ("Wouldn't it be wonderful if man and wife could live in a loving, harmonious family?")
Now, gentlemen, the truth is that Marriage 1.0 sucked. It was, in many aspects, worse than Marriage 2.0. Women, not men, had the power in the "traditional" family. I could go on to explain why and how, but I want to talk about other things, and you can grab The Manipulated Man from the sidebar, and read all about it. It was written in 1971, and actually by a woman(!), and is one of the two books every man should absolutely read. (The second such book is The Empress Is Naked, my own :)
What I want to talk about is why men, TRP-ers not excluding, are drawn to the idea of marriage. Two reasons: paternity and exclusivity.
Paternity
Many men want to have children. TRP-ers will routinely talk about spreading your genes, and such evopsych mumbo-jumbo. Let's examine paternity from the evolutionary perspective, then.
Family, i.e. an exclusive pair bond as a means to produce and raise children, is a very recent social arrangement. It has been around for only a few thousand years. For the hundreds of thousands of years that preceded its existence, there was "free" sex (in various social arrangements, which included the exchange of sex for food). Contemporary evolutionary psychologists consider paternal behavior to be a courting behavior, and not care for your own children. Since the biological cost of a human birth, and the subsequent cost of raising a child to reproductive age is so huge, man has evolved to derive pleasure from ejaculating in a fertile (young) and beautiful (healthy) woman. That's all he needs in order to have descendants. That is, it is much more beneficial (evolutionary) to impregnate a woman, than to invest on raising a child. Therefore, it is much more pleasurable to have sex with a variety of pretty women, than to be a family-maker.
In the pre-historic era (and in several hunter-gatherer tribes of today), the notion of paternity was unknown. That is, paternity as we know it in the West, is a social construct, not a built-in instinct - in contrast to maternity, which is much more biologically-based. More specifically, paternity is a social construct of the agricultural era when each child meant more working hands for the family, and more soldiers for the state. In the Roman era, for example, there was extra taxation on the Roman citizens that did not produce children. It became a social expectation to have children, surrounded by honor, while is was dishonorable not to have children. I'm afraid some of these expectations survive to this day, although the practical reasons have eclipsed and children are a financial burden rather than a benefit to the family.
Another disturbing trend, as I see it, is for men to seek status and recognition directly from their children, in the same manner that women seek emotional (and material) support from their children. Men crave status - and that is because status leads to more sex. Due to the average man lacking any substantial status in the modern society, he feels an urge to have "his own" people (i.e. children), that will look up to him as a god. ""If noone will give me deference, my children will." It's all subconscious. And it's sick.
As for "spreading your genes", it's quite a wacky argument. No prehistoric man though "Hey I'm gonna spread my genes, I like that". We are not programmed to seek spreading our genes per se. We do not derive orgasmic pleasure from becoming sperm donors, for example. Again, ejaculating in beautiful women is what we are programmed to crave.
Exclusivity
Another huge misunderstanding is that men are programmed to seek exclusivity over a woman. This is probably a very difficult subject to clean up, because it's entangled with a pile of other misunderstandings.
First, if men were so focused on exclusivity on a woman, prostitutes would be out of business. Men don't need exclusivity. They need regularity. They need regular access to a vagina. And preferably to a harem of vaginas, not a single one. Ever since what I call the Female Coup d' Etat, when women abolished free sex, the only way to have a regular (as in, e.g., every three days) access to a vagina, was marriage, i.e. a socially enforced obligation to care for a woman for all her life. Plate-spinners, for as long as they can effortlessly spin plates, have no need for exclusivity. A man having sex with another man's wife feels grateful towards him, for paying for the woman's expenses while he gets it for free.
For the average lower-middle class to working-class man, or for even lower social strata, the most efficient way to get the sex he needs is not marriage, it is prostitution.
I should probably note here another need of men, that is related to the discussion of exclusivity. Men need companionship. Men need to not be lonely. We yet again need to go back to prehistoric times to see how this problem was solved. Hunter-gatherer men were never lonely. They had their friends, their fellow-tribesmen, fellow-hunters, fellow-warriors. Their buddies, often called "brothers". Men satisfied men's need for companionship. (Well, probably women also, because sex was free and the War of the Sexes was not in full outbreak, as it is in the last 8,000 years or so, but the fall-back, minimum level of companionship was always based on male buddyship). Men today view marriage as their only way to avoid loneliness - erroneously, because the answer to loneliness is friends, not wife.
So, to recap.
Marriage was never an institution where man could find happiness in, it was tailored to benefit women.
Marriage 1.0 was even worse than Marriage 2.0. It made man a slave of a woman for a lifetime.
Procreation is for women. Men don't need children in order to feel happy.
The top-two requirements for a man's happy life is companionship and regular access to sex.
Friends for intimacy, prostitutes for sex: that's the formula with the greatest value-for-money for non-rich men.
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