Tuesday, January 26, 2016

"What is the best system for finding and choosing a wife or husband?"

When my sister told me she was getting married I threw a fit. The fool she was marrying, who I went to high school with, was an alcoholic and crackhead. He told her he would quit. She believed it. I didn't. He didn't quit until they were divorced and he joined AA.

Women should not be allowed to choose their own mates without parental approval - or of the brothers (my parents said nothing about the piece of shit she married).

Of course, they got divorced after three kids - and only one turned out right. Sort of, considering one son's wife is an alcoholic.

A lot of what we are is genetic. So choose your partner carefully, considering your kids are going to inherit your idiot genes.

A lot of people are lousy at choosing mates.

The Mansophere, as always, is completely wrong about this Alpha/Beta/Gamma bullshit. Only liars and fools such as Roissy (who is a Jew) and Roosh (who isn't white) and Vox Day (who left the U.S. and lives in Italy) believe it. Such beliefs only destroy marriage and societies.

This article is from Bruce Charlton's Notions.


I have become convinced that a system of primarily parental choice (with a veto from participants) is overall the best human basis of a loving, strong, effective marriage:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-science-of-sex-most-important.html

Individual men and women are not equipped (neither by instinct, nor - in modern societies - by training: quite the opposite) to make wise choice of a husband or wife, unaided.

In practice, this means that the primary (although not final) choice should often be out of the hands of the potential married couple - as was original and natural to Men.

This is the consensus of human history.

Individuals are seldom validly able to choose their own spouses in isolation from a community which provides reputational background knowledge on the other person and is or her family, over a period of time - and which takes into account long term aspects.

Now - this is not the society we live in, in The West - and it would take a couple of generations to re-establish even if we wanted to (which, clearly, the mass of people currently do not).

This is not about to change for the better - all indicators are that overall marriage trends are for the worse.

But it is worth thinking-about in order to understand:

1. That the system we have at present for finding a spouse not only does not work (overall, on average), but cannot work.

2. What kind of system ought to replace it.

3. That we need to be on guard against the vast tide of hard-line and soft-sell propaganda to the contrary (the thousand daily mass media inputs and conversations from un-loving and mis-guided friends and lifestyle advisers, from love stories and pseudo-science, from fools and fiends - all of which takes for granted that individual husbands and wives ought-to select each other autonomously, in defiance of family - and 'nobody else has any right to interfere').

4. The question is not one mainly of vetoing unsuitable spouses - but more importantly of the first step - which is choosing another particular person as a possibility for marriage.

5. In a sense, the parent's role (ideally) would be to a choose a field of potential candidates, and within that field enable individual choice to operate.

7 comments:

August said...

Charlton's right, but it doesn't mean the rest of the manosphere is wrong. Charlton's key contribution here is pointing out the evolutionary pressure was on the parents of young women- not the young women themselves.

PUA, and all this other crap exists in a milieu were the young women pick, and everybody is attempting to thwart biology- i.e. have lots of sex without very much reproduction. This is why they keep doing crap that seems stupid- they didn't face the evolutionary pressure, so gene selection for young women who could think straight and marry the right guy hasn't happened.

Anonymous said...

Another way to achieve the same result without directly arranging marriages is with chaperoned events that employ pre-screening for "the right kind of lads" from "good families". This was the upper-class Victorian approach, for example; they let young men and women flirt rather freely at balls and social luncheons and the like, but made sure that no riff-raff were present to join in the flirting (and that nobody was allowed to sneak off to the hayloft unsupervised). In Western Europe, this approach was probably more common than arranged marriages per se- "Here is the list of acceptable men, dearie. You can pick your favorite, but only from among these".

I suspect this is the main reason that middle-class parents today still insist on junior getting into "the best college" possible, even though they're money pits, and the students learn nothing of value while getting indoctrinated with leftist agitprop. If you can get your son or daughter into Harvard, odds are good that he or she will date only other people who were smart and motivated enough to get into Harvard. Sure, having junior stay home a few years while bussing tables and taking night classes makes more financial sense, but do you really want junior to start dating some high-school dropout waitress or line cook who sells grass on the side for extra cash?

Much of the seemingly-irrational financial excesses of middle-class American life are really driven by parents' need to remove their children from the presence of the dysfunctional human wreckage caused by the managerial welfare state.

Anonymous said...

MGTOW'd Out Says...

The best system is the one currently in place--individual choice without undue influence by outsiders.

"Much of the seemingly-irrational financial excesses of middle-class American life are really driven by parents' need to remove their children from the presence of the dysfunctional human wreckage caused by the managerial welfare state."

Any evidence to back up your claim?

Unknown said...

"Any evidence to back up your claim?"

How about I've been it many times, including in my own family? Know what Henry Rollins said? "Knowledge without experience is bullshit." I've got both.

Anonymous said...

Well, the last words I said to my father for fifteen years after beating him bloody was an ultimatum in which I informed him that if he ever dared wield authority over me he would pay with his life. Of course, the context was he was about to chastise me with his rod that his Bible exhorted him to do, and since he thought his authority over me cam from his god, there was nothing I could do about it. He learned painfully what utter lies his god, his Bible and his church really were. I think you can guess this is not something I would favor and I'm hardly the only one.

However, looking back on it now that I'm married myself, I seem to have become my father. I am married with a mundane career and a mortgage and two stepchildren in their 20's one of whom can't seem to distinguish her arse from her elbow. (Name a dysfunctional way to behave and she's done it.)

Nevertheless, assuming that he had some other incentive than to punish me for my insubordination, my Dad probably would have done about as well as I did choosing a spouse. She's not perfect and neither am I. In an imperfect world, that's about the best you can expect.

Unknown said...

"with his rod that his Bible exhorted him to do"

So few know that "rod" was the one to guide sheep, not hit them.

Anonymous said...

"Any evidence to back up your claim?"

Ever heard of White Flight? Former urban-dwellers from 1965-1995 weren't over-extending themselves on suburban mortgages and slogging through hour-long commutes in heavy traffic solely because they liked having bigger yards.

It's almost certainly not a coincidence that urban crime started climbing when the "Great Society" kicked off, nor that it dropped rapidly right after mid-90s welfare reform and longer prison sentences.