Whenever the State gets involved in anything, it damages that thing. Sometimes, if the interference goes on long enough, it destroys. And that includes the relationships between men and women. If the State stayed out of their relationships, men and women would fall into their natural roles. Since the State does intervene massively, current roles are anything but natural.
For an example: wages stopped going up in 1973. It is 100% the State's doing. It's been estimated that if wages had continued to go up, as they would have if we still had a free market, the average salary would be about $90,000 a year.
With that kind of money a man could easily support a family. If his wife didn't want to work, no problem. They could have a middle-class house, a yearly vacation, and everything else that used to be part of the American Dream.
Those days are gone.
There are other problems. Over the past few decades the law has benefited educated, intelligent women (but not lowly-paid, not-so-bright women) at the expense of men. This has caused some pretty big problems. Really big problems.
As a woman's socioeconomic status has gone up, many if not most of them expect a potential husband's not only to keep pace with hers, but to be higher. He is supposed to be taller (always), just as good-looking if not better-looking, have just as high-paying of a job if not higher...and also support her career, etc., etc.
You know exactly what I'm talking about; I don't have to go on and on and explain it in detail.
However, the law is now against men. For example, Affirmative Action means "white men need not apply." I have seen the truth of this several times. I have seen men with Master's degrees who could find nothing but part-time jobs, for several years, while less qualified (and sometimes unqualified) women (and minorities) were promoted.
I've had more than one man tell me the men at the job had to carry the women, many of whom thought working was holding meetings and talking. I've seen it myself. More than once.
What's ironic about men carrying some women at work is that these women, who believe they got their positions completely on their own, generally do not consider the men who work for them to be marriageable. That is a tragicomedy if there ever was one.
And of course the marginally-qualified, indeed the unqualified and therefore inept, never know they are. I've seen it several times, and so have you.
What this means is that while the socioeconomic status of educated women is going up, the exact opposite is true of many men. So many of these women look up and up and up for a husband...while most of them are down below.
This is one of the reasons why 49% of all people in the United States are not married.
These problems were taken care of in the past when men were highly-paid and women were kept out of most jobs. Since women's socioeconomic status wasn't that high, the available pool of potential husbands was much larger.
Nowadays, if she is a lawyer (shudder) or a doctor or an MBA or has a PH.D., she is going to look around by a man who's even higher up...and then finds they are not there. And if they are there, what man in his right mind would marry a female lawyer?
These women, unable to find a man they consider marriageable, then get hostile and blame their problem on men. And I'm seen that, too, more than once. And so have you.
These women in fact are turning themselves into spinsters. Self-deluded, ambitious spinsters, who justify their being alone with fantasies about how men don't like "strong women" (read unpleasant and hostile) or "successful women" (read unpleasant and hostile).
If these women wish to get married, then they will have to lower their standards. However, they cannot do it. They cannot love such a man; they cannot respect, and they are in a rage. A self-induced, self-deluded rage which they blame on everyone and everything but themselves. Of course we can go back to the past when the free market gave men high-paying jobs (good idea) and women were kept out of most jobs (not so good of an idea).
Personally, I'd settle for the State getting the hell out of people's lives and then watching what happened when liberty and freedom again became American values, not just the empty words they are so often today.
It'd be a lot better world than the one we have now.
In the meantime, the women looking for Mr. Perfect ("rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart...having his way with a protesting but willing but stuggling but yielding temptestuous female"*) can find him in women's pornography...also known as romance novels.
(* from Neil Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon")
Poster Comment:
I posted this on my blog (which generally gets 50-100 hits a day) and a bunch of sites linked to it and I've gotten several hundred hits in less than two days.