Why is everyone obsessed with convincing women to get married?

We want women to overlook the obvious facts about marriage so that men don't have to improve.

My social media news feeds are currently inundated with two themes:

• Women celebrating freedom from abusive men.

• Content exhorting women to get married (and often openly encouraging us to “settle”).

It’s not an accident that women are getting competing messages about marriage.

The backlash against feminist marriage progress

Women are finally breaking free of abusive men. They’re divorcing them en masse, or vowing to avoid them altogether. And like every social movement, the backlash has been swift and severe.

David Brooks recently advised people to focus on getting married, evidently confusing data showing a good marriage makes life happier with the idea that getting married, regardless of circumstance of person, is something everyone should aspire to.

Incels are constantly telling women they’re going to end up alone with their cats if they dare not to settle for foul-smelling, aggressive monsters.

I’m constantly getting long, whiny comments from men telling me I’m wrong about marriage, and that marriage is actually terrible for men and highly beneficial to women.

And everyone everywhere keeps touting the supposed benefits of marriage, even though those benefits mostly accrue to men. We’ve collectively decided that if it’s good for men, it is good for everyone, since only men are fully human.

I’ve written before about the growing body of evidence suggesting marriage is actively bad for women’s health.

The most interesting aspect of that article is how many angry men it attracts. They devote endless paragraphs—and in the case of at least one angry divorced bro, two days and hundreds of comments—to telling me how good marriage is for women, how terrible I am for asserting otherwise, and how I’m going to be single for life.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

So what’s going on here? Why are men so obsessed with convincing women that marriage is actually good for us?

Teaching women to ignore the realities of marriage

The answer is simple: Because doing so lowers the bar for men.

There are lots of things that are obviously good for us: access to quality medical care when we need it, for example, or having plenty of money, or having a loving family. We don’t need someone to tell us those things are good. We don’t need to be inundated with empty thinkpieces and fake studies asserting that money makes life better or life is happier when you’re not being abused.

Because the goodness of these things is obvious.

Just like the badness of marriage for most women is obvious.

All you need to do is look around at the women you know. Do any of them have a marriage you would want? If you’re a teenager, look at the marriages of the adult sin your life. Do those marriages seem good and happy?

How many women do you know who have given up dreams, careers, hobbies, and friendships for men who would never do the same?

How many women do you know who seem alone, or mostly alone, in parenting?

How many women do you know in abusive relationships?

How many women do you know who have to get help from their friends, mothers, and co-workers instead of their husbands?

How many men do you know who seem to earnestly venerate and respect their partners?

Can you name even 10 couples whose marriage you would want for yourself or your daughter? Five? One?

How do you feel when you think about your daughter in any of the relationships your friends have?

The evidence is everywhere—in what happens to women when they try to leave bad relationships and when they stay, in how marriage affects women’s life prospects, and in the low-value men that exceptional, stunning, brilliant women end up with.

We begin socializing girls to obsess over marriage from birth, because that is how much work it takes to get them to ignore the plain realities in front of them.

Marriage can be wonderful. So can men.

But there aren’t enough good men, and so for most women, marriage is little more than a prison that begins with a party. It is the highest risk gamble most women will ever undertake, with a lifetime of financial and other losses when you lose the bet.

Women know this. So we have to convince them that what they’re seeing isn’t actually there. That the women around them are in some way defective, and that’s why they have defective marriages.

One way we accomplish this is by encouraging competition and distrust between women. Another is through ageism. If younger women distrust and dislike mothers, viewing them as irrelevant and hopelessly uncool, then they’re a lot less likely to see their own futures in the lives and marriages of their mothers and other older women.

Aggressive gender socialization, lack of solidarity among women, and constant messaging about how terrible it is to be single work together to suspend women’s critical thinking. Still, though, it’s hard not to see the horrors unfolding in front of you which is why so many women are waking up and saying, “I don’t.”

That’s why we’re seeing such a strong push to get married, to “just give him a chance,” and to settle in the hopes of not ending up alone.

So really, why the obsession with convincing women marriage is good?

If women believe that they need to get married to be happy, healthy, and worthy, they’ll start overlooking red flags. They’ll worry their standards are too high, that their thoughtful judgments are emotional overreactions, and that they owe every man a chance and a date.

This makes it easier for low-quality men to find partners. And wives have immense value to men in a patriarchy, where a wife is a built-in servant and sexbot whom an entire culture will continuously gaslight into doing and being more, no matter how hard she’s already working.

The goal is to get women to lower their standards, so men don’t have to change, and so the next generation can be as trapped as their mothers.

One thing is clear: anytime a man prattles on about how marriage is bad for men, women should want to get married, or women need to lower their standards, the quiet part is “lower their standards for me, because I am a person of low value.”

They tell on themselves, if you listen closely enough. Because why would any man who has lots of great options (or who doesn’t actually care about marriage) give any thought at all to what women are doing as a group?

The messages you hear in the zeitgeist—at your church, from many of your friends and family, on social media, and from every braindead columnist who thinks he knows what’s best for you—aren’t really for you.

They are, like everything else in this culture, in service of men.

Don’t listen to them. Your standards can never be too high in a world where the bar for men is somewhere beneath Hell.