Chateau Heartiste

“We looked!
Then we saw it
step in on the mat!
We looked!
And we saw it!
The Marriage Trap!”

“I know it is costly
And the sex is not sexy.
But we can have
A dog and one kid
that is trendy!”

“Buy the ring!
Buy the ring!
Buy the ring NOW!
It is work to get married
But you have
to know how.”

“’Have no fear, single man,’
Said the Marriage Trap.
‘Marital Things are
good Things.’
I can promise you that.”

“Then our lawyer came in
And he said to us two,
‘Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did
you do?”

And Wifey and I
did not say
the same things.
You see she was bored
and wanted away.”

“My fortune in limbo,
my stocks in a lock,
I sat silent and fearful
in a state of shock!
Well…what would YOU do
If your lawyer asked you?”

Chalk this up to the latest sign that marriage — versions 1.0, 2.0, and coming to a theater near you, 3.0 — is a raw deal for men and an institution on the precipice of falling cliffside into a shattered heap of anachronistic uselessness. Wives are now leaving perfectly good marriages and their sacrificial beta provider husbands because they are bored. Naturally, they will be leaving with their husbands’ hard-earned cash to fund their adventures in swarthy saguaro hunting. Welcome to the Eat, Pray, Self-Love era of the Fall of America. Next stop: hyperinflation.

A lot of midlife women in my acquaintance are leaving what appear to be perfectly good and loving husbands. Or thinking about it. Or cheating on them. Or wanting to. Or staying married and faithful but buying their own houses, which they either live in or keep as a bolt hole. […]

In a 2004 AARP survey of divorced people 40 and older, 66 percent of wives said they had requested the divorce, and 26 percent had surprised their husbands, often after planning for years. Women were especially likely to have no regrets, and 43 percent did not want to remarry. In another national study that year, ex-wives were three times more likely to say that they wanted the divorce, rather than their husbands wanting it. Fewer than 40 percent of marriages of more than 15 years were rated as successful by respondents.

A multitude of factors likely contributes to the urge to spousally purge of the modern American wife. The Chateau has discussed the Four Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse before as triggers or exacerbating conditions for the rising divorce, single momhood, and infidelity rates that will herald the denouement of the Grand American Epoch, and now we can throw in a couple more factors –

The death of shame and the glorification of status.

We now exalt that which we used to shame into invisibility. Pathetic single moms are paraded as exemplars of tough-as-nails fortitude and moral virtue. Infidelity is de rigueur, an exciting life transition that self-actualized women find empowering. And of course, taking your husband for all he’s worth in divorce, regardless of marital fault, is practically its own sacrament — the Sacrament of Separation Theft.

And then there is the compelling allure of status jockeying. When women are surrounded by lots of other women cheating on, divorcing, or leaving their dutiful husbands, they feel an odd predilection to ape the group dynamic. Women are herd animals, and will do what they see is trendy in the group. A bunch of well-heeled upper middle class ladies on the block had affairs, including Susie with the best landscaping in the neighborhood? Clearly the heretofore faithful wife thinks she is missing out on something. The stampede of the herd fills her with anxiety, morphing into unhappiness. She plots and connives; her heart bursts with excitement at the taboo! The outsized role of status seeking in shaping women’s choices may help explain why Western populations — excluding the peasant immigrant hordes rapidly displacing us — are demographically imploding: when half the properly educated and economically independent women you know have zero kids, you impart higher status on that childlessness, and then you will seek to mimic the behavior of your admired peers.

One Texas friend’s 40-something daughter is divorcing her husband. His son’s wife had an affair and they’re also divorcing. In another family, an uncle and nephew are both being divorced by their wives. These women had once been renowned for their utter, perhaps excessive devotion to family. The men are both handsome, kind, good fathers. Great catches. Both women have new boyfriends, while the men are still too broken-hearted to date again.

Great catch != gina tingle. It’s been said here many times, often to the guffaws of the haters and disbelievers:

You want to save marriage? Learn game. What are the odds that these “great catches” the wives are unceremoniously divorcing are betas to the bone? The answer is in the last sentence.

“while the men are still too broken-hearted to date again.”

Readers, these wives did not marry “great catches”. They married pushover herblings with steady jobs. Any man with a lick of game and an alpha attitude would not be broken-hearted for long after a divorce, even a surprise divorce that caught him off-guard. He would be lining up dates while the ink on the papers was still drying. Better yet, he would’ve skipped out on marriage entirely and enjoyed the fruits of the female sex free of charge.

Now being a provider herbling might’ve been adequate in 1950, but that was then, this is now. The deck is stacked against men, and marriage is the legal equivalent of cliff diving into a rocky shoreline. Game is one of the few resources men have left to protect themselves against women and a system that sees them as wholly expendable, ATM flesh pods from which to squeeze the last ounce of blood and coin tribute to feed the insatiable marriage machine that is the root of the modern consumption economy.

One divorced mother of two sons put her complaint succinctly: “I realized my husband was of no added value.”

To get the full chill of that statement, try imagining a husband who had divorced his wife saying it, or this next one.

It can’t be imagined, because any husband who initiated divorce on such grounds, overtly or tacitly, would be ass raped by a team of special ops lawyers. Not that husbands don’t feel the same way about their fat, aging wives; they just can’t act on the impulse with the same impunity that wives can. In fact, wives can divorce on these grounds and *still* walk away with a considerable share of his assets. There are many checks and balances built into society to keep the id monster chained in the cellar of the mind, but the prison warden of the female mind has left his post and the id monster has escaped to terrorize and feast freely.

None of this would be the crisis for individual men that it is if the playing field were level. (The impact on society is another matter.) If, in the case of divorce, women could not get a SINGLE RED CENT of the ex-husbands’ money, then the 7 year or 14 year or whatever itch that is seemingly built into the coding of every human being could proceed rather uneventfully, as bored wives would leave their marriages with EXACTLY, AND NO MORE, of what they brought into the marriage. That way, shocked and disillusioned ex-husbands would still have their material resources with which to help them attract new lovers.

If the marriage racket was reformed in this way we’d see a lot fewer bored housewives leaving for sabbaticals in Italy to get boned and robbed by Francisco the smooth talker. But this will never happen absent a revolution triggered by societal extinction level events. Women would wail and gnash their teeth and vote en masse with their lickspittle lackey hubbies in tow and the slow bleeding out of Western civilization would continue apace.

“My married friends seem to envy me. They think I have so much freedom,” she said. “I don’t think their husbands like them coming around me.”

This is an excellent Public Service Announcement. Husbands, you’d be wise to monitor your wives’ social circles and act to limit her time spent with cat collecting, unmarried harridans. They will whisper poison thoughts into your wives’ brains.

University of Virginia research shows that progressive wives are less happy than traditional wives.

“More traditional women may wear rose-colored glasses, but they also benefit from a sense of male and female roles,” said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, who conducted the research. “They don’t expect their husband to act like a woman.”

In contrast, the idea of marriage with a soul mate “who will meet their deepest needs for human connection” may ask too much of marriage, he said.

Another PSA: Marry conservative women if you want to avoid divorce theft and you believe in those lofty marital vows. Marry liberal women if you like getting taken to the cleaners and nuzzling your herb face into her fat lap.

Rutgers University biological anthropologist Helen Fisher sees the rise of working women as a cause of women asking more from marriage, but she’s not worried.

“Women have always commuted to work to gather fruits and vegetables, and for millions of years women were just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. … Data suggest that many ancestral men and women had two or three spouses across their lives,” she wrote on The New York Times’ Room for Debate blog.

“The same occurs today: I have examined divorce patterns in 58 societies and everywhere that spouses have some independent means, both sexes leave bad marriages to make better ones.”

Well, there is something to worry about, if worrying’s your thing. For one, those prehistoric working women still needed the muscle of men to protect them from all sorts of environmental insults. In contrast, today’s working women have air conditioning and On Star. They are now free to choose based on whim instead of necessity. (Game is very good at catering to female whim.) Two, not all prehistoric women were equal. Those of the cold, damp forests of Europe certainly evolved different traits than those of the hot, dry African savannah. But it’s futile arguing “evolution did not stop at the neck” with modern anthropologists; they are drowning in self-deceit too deep to rescue with simple logic.

As it is, our society is at a fork in the road. We can go one of two ways if an end to the divorce industrial complex is your goal:

1. Rescind feminism.

Basically, turn back the clock on the so-called “improvements” in divorce litigation. Put divorce lawyers out of business. Custody of children would be split evenly, half the time with mom and half the time with dad, unless solid evidence of extenuating fault could be found, such as pedophilia or physical abuse. End all affirmative action and favoritism, explicit or implicit, for women. This means no more maternal leave or sexual harassment workshops. Return shame to its rightful place as a molder of human behavior.

2. Follow feminism to its logical conclusion.

Completely gut the traditional notion of marriage by legally establishing polygamy and assorted polyamorous relationships as equally valid unions. (Should be easier now that there is legal justification for gay marriage.) Make divorce as easy as buying a gallon of milk. Reform marriage so that it better reflects the evolutionary disposition of people to fall out of love after seven years (or approximately the time the kids are old enough to function without constant parental supervision.) If we are biologically designed by evolution to weary of our partners after seven to ten years, then why is marriage not arranged in such a way that acknowledges this reality? After all, we don’t force gay men against their biological disposition to marry or screw women. Tenth wave feminists and principled libertarians could easily make the case that marriage is constricting of natural human urges, and thus inhumane, so should be offered to people on a contractual basis of varying length. You could get married for two years, seven years, twenty years, or till death do you part. At the end of the contract the spouses would go their separate ways, no muss no fuss, no exchange of assets or punitive payments of any kind. It would be as clean and hassle free as leaving your barber for another one. The option to renew the contract for a set number of additional years would of course be available for those remaining idealists and lucky few soulmates. Contracts also could be stipulated with allowances for cheating based on frequency and number of extramarital lovers. Children of divorce would be remanded to a state orphanage where, no doubt, they would be raised in stricter accordance with the dictates of governmental progressivism, because it takes a village.

The Chateau favors option 2, but that’s just because we’re a mischievous bunch of rascals. And it’s more doable. Fuck, we’re halfway there already.

[crypto-donation-box]