The failure of marriage in the West

Why is marriage failing in the western world?  I don’t know if there is really one answer, but there are definitely reasons that, in my opinion, we are doing worse not better.  I look around me now at forty years of age and I wonder what the hell happened to us all.  Society has changed in the time I’ve been married these past 14 years.  I met my soon to be ex-wife in the Navy but we re-connected on Myspace (yes…. I’m that old).  Social media has evolved, television and culture have evolved, but that wasn’t the start of it. 

Over time there has been a constant pressure on gender roles and what it means to be a woman or a man.  For many decades we were constantly told that the genders were equal.  Equality was the goal and everything needed to be leveled and “fair” for everyone to be better off.  In any system if you have high performers and low performers, but you have to make sure everyone is the same, what is easier?  Is it easier to get low performers to the level of a high performer?  Or, is it easier to force high performers to perform less?  If someone was capable of being a high performer, they’d probably already be one.  So, in the end we forced everyone down to be “fairer”. 

Feminism told women that after 1960 when Enovid hit the market that they were now “free”.  Women were able to control whether or not a pregnancy happened to a higher degree than ever before in HISTORY.  This drastic shift in how sex and relationships happened and the risks/consequences of promiscuous behavior was earth shattering to the dynamics between men and women.  You always hear arguments that men ruled over women until this point and that women were subservient to some degree, but you have to remember, historically for humans, and still for most other animals, sex typically was for procreation and resulted in pregnancy.  Now that it wasn’t the case women joined the workforce in numbers not seen before (20% in 1900, 28.6% in 1950, up to 40.45% in 1960, and up to 56.8% in 2016).  Women became more independent than ever and culturally we are telling women that they deserve the best results and best outcomes.  I still argue as I have in previous posts that EVERYONE only deserves that which they EARN. 

This competition is a paradigm shift in how humans have interacted with each other over millennia.  We, along with other animals, predominantly developed under static conditions.  Our biological desires are hard-wired into us based on millennia of evolution and genetic learning.  It’s no wonder that as we evolve faster than our biology can change, that we are having conflict between the sexes.  If we want to start getting back above replacement fertility rates, we have to either recognize that this new way of doing things isn’t working, or we will have to import our replacements.  Either way, this doesn’t seem like a great outcome for either side…. Does it?