This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by Myles Poland. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me
On January 23rd 2023, Pearl published an article to Amerikaner titled “The Bad Trad.”
The thrust of the brief article was to make the case that everyone within the broader Dissident Right is a person, that all of us have a past, and that when it comes to dating men and women ought to give each other ample grace rather than turn up our noses at potential marriage partners because they fall short of lofty perfection.
I agree with the case the article makes, though I’m not entirely sure to whom it’s directed. On the face of it, this article is directed towards men in this thing of ours, exhorting them to look past the fact that women too often make the terrible decision to get tattoos, along with a cacophony of other mistakes. Vanishingly few of the men I’ve met within the Dissident Right are unaware of the fact that we all have a past, and for the sake of starting a family, many common female flaws need to be overlooked. Put another way, most men are willing to settle, provided a woman actually has something to offer.
It’s clear that Pearl wrote her article in good faith and that she means well. However, her ability to understand the issues at play is hampered – if not outright quashed – by the fact that she is a woman. Women always have romantic options. They may not always be very good ones, but romance is always on the table if you were born as a woman and haven’t let the gender industrial complex take advantage of you. To put a point on this categorical statement, porn stars don’t seem to have any trouble getting married. Women who perform bizarre sex acts with strangers on camera in return for money are readily able to find someone willing to marry and support them and their children. Women who have Down’s Syndrome reliably have boyfriends. Hideously disfigured women can almost always find someone willing to date them. As a woman, the sex that is pursued rather than pursues, Pearl is simply incapable of grasping the totality of the issue with any true understanding.
I haven’t had a date in more than a decade, though not for lack of trying. As such, I think I’m in an excellent position to explain to the few female readers, and many male readers on whom fortune has more graciously smiled, the psychology of unmarried men and the challenges with which the modern dating market confronts us.
Divorce hangs over the culture of the Western world like the sword of Damocles, threatening to eviscerate anyone unfortunate enough to get caught beneath the blade when it falls. You may have heard that around half of all marriages end in divorce. This statistic is technically true, but doesn’t paint an accurate picture, as it combines first, second, and third marriages, across all generations. Unsurprisingly, Boomers lead the pack with the highest rates of divorce. Even today, Boomers are an enormous driver of the aggregate divorce rate, forking over huge stacks of cash to divorce lawyers to litigate their “gray divorces,” or divorces in old age. While it may be a relief to hear that the odds for Gen X and Millennials remaining married are a lot better, the odds of divorce are still perilously high at 10-20%. Further, the marriage data that’s emerging on Millennials in particular indicates that the decline in the divorce rate is being driven by fewer people getting married in the first place. A stable marriage is becoming a luxury for a privileged few.
Before moving on, let me return to that 10-20% divorce rate mentioned just a moment ago. Pick a number between one and five before reading further. Have you got a number in your head? The correct number is four. If you were thinking “four” as well, congratulations, the woman you swore a vow before God and man to spend the rest of your life with has just decided to take your children, your house, and half your worldly possessions from you. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, and the actual cost will likely be much more than just your kids, your home, and half your stuff. Is that a risk that seems worth taking? For the scoffers reading this article, to the people who don’t quite understand where I’m coming from, I want you to think very hard on that question. You have a one in five chance of having your life destroyed for decades, for and I quote the law regarding no-fault divorce here, “any reason or no reason at all.” If you’re on the younger side, you can drop those dismal odds to one in ten. Not much of an improvement to see your life’s work to that point evaporate.
It’s safe to say that entirely too many men within the Dissident Right grew up with divorced parents. In fact, I think it’s pretty decent odds that children of divorce make up a majority of our ranks. The victims of easy divorce know first hand what a lingering disaster divorce can be for every party involved, especially men and children. Custody is almost uniformly granted to women, and if split custody is granted, then a man’s access to his children is severely stunted, with this restriction enforced at the point of a gun. Depriving a child of their father ought to be a capital crime, but instead it’s the birth right of every woman born in a Western country. By far, the leading perpetrators of abuse against children are the romantic partners of single mothers, a data point that was completely overlooked until very recently.
Divorce and its consequences loom in the back of the mind of every man dating today, and there is no respite. Unlike Damocles and the sword Dionysius hung over his head, men don’t have the option to admit the situation is not all sunshine and lollipops, and remove ourselves from risk if they choose to date with an eye to marriage. There are vanishingly few and increasingly irrelevant institutions and cultural messages encouraging married couples to work out their differences and remain married. Everything within our culture points to divorce as an easy end to an unfavorable situation. Divorce attorneys advertise on billboards on the commute to and from work, on the radio, on social media, and by word of mouth through your friends and acquaintances who have already been put through the ringer. Meanwhile, marriage counseling is mentioned only in hushed tones behind closed doors, in much the same way as recommending drug rehab.
The one strategy men have been able to adopt, and even then only somewhat successfully, is to mitigate risk. Men have, I think, evolved an innate sense for grasping when some course of action simply isn’t worth the effort. If we were programmed to follow every trail of mammoth tracks until we either found something to eat or died, there wouldn’t be very many of us left. Sadly, there are innumerable factors that contribute to a higher likelihood of divorce or separation. Unfortunately for Pearl, tattoos are one of them. A woman having tattoos shows that she has a habit of making bad decisions despite obvious and permanent consequences.
The likelihood of divorce scales linearly with the number of previous sexual partners a woman has had. The general theory is that successive sexual partners damage a woman’s ability to meaningfully pair-bond, though I wouldn’t expect mainstream science to even bother looking into the consequences of being a whore any time soon. What this means is that even if a man is willing to be gracious to a woman who, to put it politely, “has a past,” there’s simply no fighting the fact that this woman’s brain is likely irreparably damaged. I’m not aware of any such increase in risk based on the number of previous sexual partners a man has had. I say that not to excuse men sleeping around, but to explain that the risk is asymmetrical: a whore is a liability.
Speaking of potentially irreparable damage, very nearly every woman a man could hope to meet these days is on hormonal birth control. What hormonal birth control does is trick a woman’s body into thinking it’s constantly miscarrying. It’s no surprise, then, that something like half of all women in Western countries are on some form of chemical anti-depressant. Chronic alcohol and illicit drug use are also on the rise among women, compounding risk factors for a romantic relationship to end up on the rocks. Dear reader, do you see where I’m going with this? Barring a functionally perfect woman presenting herself on a silver platter, for entirely too many men, the only winning move is not to play.
I can hear the romantically successful men reading this warming up their keyboards and typing up a response, ready to dispense what they see as helpful advice. While I and others in my position appreciate your thinking of us, save your comment. You have nothing to offer us that we haven’t heard before, and none of it is useful. I don’t mean to come across as rude or dismissive, but it’s the truth.
Advice given to people in positions like mine usually amounts to little more than canards. Comments like “find a decent girl at church,” or “I met my wife at a bar,” or “I met my girlfriend at a concert,” et cetera. This advice, while well-meaning, is predicated on the idea that anyone who looks out upon the hellscape that is the dating world and has an issue with it is doing nothing but sitting at home waiting for their future wife to ring the doorbell. This simply isn’t the case, at least not with anyone to whom I’ve spoken in this thing of ours.
Furthermore, this kind of advice is simply not actionable. What do I mean by “actionable?” Actionable advice is advice that’s actually usable. It’s tailor made to the situation at hand and takes into account the relevant context and circumstances. Allow me to draw an analogy: Suppose one of our guys was struggling to find a job. Would anyone think it’s appropriate to say “Just walk up to the boss and give him a firm handshake!” Or “You just gotta put yourself out there!” Or “I met my job at a bar!” I kid with that last example, but you get my point. These are canards. Maybe in some very unusual circumstances giving a potential employer a firm handshake and little else might work, but the chances are so low that trying it is a waste of time, and another strategy is obviously preferable.
Actionable advice in this circumstance would be to point out geographic areas or even potential employers where our intrepid hero might find a job, offers to set up interviews, or help arrange training to make our guy stand out from the crowd on a job bulletin. I’ve found that guys within our thing sometimes get angry and confrontational when their well-meaning but ultimately useless advice is called what it is. I understand that you gentlemen mean well, but simply put, unless you know a single girl and are willing to introduce her to a single guy in this thing, then please, save your comment.
I’m not necessarily a fan of explaining human interactions in economic terms, but much like my comparison between dating and job-seeking, it paints too clear a picture to leave aside. In order to get something that you want, you generally must have something to offer in return. In the case of men, just about every one of them to whom I’ve spoken in this thing of ours has a decent-paying job, a vehicle, and a place of their own. Most follow at least some sort of fitness routine and are otherwise trying to better themselves. By contrast, what do women have to offer? Pearl’s original article is symptomatic of the issue: rather than exhorting women to not be whores, she instead urges men to accept the fact that women are whores who make awful decisions. As mentioned previously, a long series of sexual partners, birth-control, anti-depressants, drugs, alcohol, and the entire western cultural edifice have rendered single women into infertile, pharmaceutical zombies. If that’s all we can reasonably expect, why even bother?
Even more appalling, the culture at large insists that even a woman who is the biological equivalent of a threadbare dishrag is entitled to high-earning corporate executive who can bench press 350lbs. NAXALT, naturally, but the trend is undeniable. Women are simply biologically and culturally wired to be catered to, and have no grasp of what their actual value on the dating market really is. And don’t get me started on single mothers.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. Put plainly, men have held up their end of the bargain. Most of us did everything “the right way,” and our reward is to not only be left single, but to be lectured by people living in a completely separate reality from the rest of us. I strongly suspect that this article will be met with nothing but hostility, the exact kind of hostility you’d get from a boomer when you try to explain that college tuition, homes, and cars can no longer be bought on minimum wage. I sincerely hope that there are at least a few of you reading this who have come to a better understanding of the challenges most of us face, and will react with less hostility the next time one of our guys points out the state of things.
After all, we’re supposed to be a movement of edifying and uplifting one another, not boot-strap Reaganites complaining about “kids these days.”
I agree.
I am divorced. My ex left the Christian Faith and when she realized I would not leave Christ and The Church she left me behind too, but not before she abused me in multiple ways
This fact has caused me to be ghosted and abandoned by countless women. I can explain in great detail how my ex was the one who served me, and how it was because I was steadfast inches faith and would not leave the Church is why she left me.
For some reason that kind of dedicated faith does not matter to any women with “I was a man who has a strong faith in Jesus”
Seems like they just was someone who goes to church every Sunday and says they are faithful versus the man who literally lived out the “Love the Lord, and hate your family” part of having a strong faith, women want the IDEA of a strong faithful man, and not the DIRTY REALITY of what that kind of faith looks like.
Women say they want honesty, but when you are honest with you goal, intentions, and what happened in the past they leave.
Not sound like “I hate women, women are deceitful”, many of the women that called it off when I revealed my past divorce are great women who’d make a man happy.
I am getting at is that women are not good at knowing what they want or what the reality of what they want actually looks like.
INB4 “just don’t talk about your past’
I refuse to hide my past to a woman I want to pursue. It will come out sooner or later, and I might as well separate the chaff from the wheat early on, a woman that is truly dedicated and faithful will look at the hardships I’ve gone through and see how it has shaped me.
If the Hoes ain’t mad, hoes mad now.
The bad advice from men in this thing is almost worse than a woman rambling without understanding the issue.
Nothing was more upsetting than telling me “not everyone is meant to get married” (from married people specifically) got that twice from the happiest of couples. It’s harmful to say in any terms “you’re a spergy retard and don’t deserve a tattoo free virgin.” Yes it’s been said, and applied to people around 30 with a house and a car and a gym membership.
That being said, my encouragement to single men in this thing is just don’t talk about this stuff with people who can’t understand it.
I had some dude I was a friend (notice the past tense usage). He actually tried to blame me for my ex leaving the faith and me, tried to blame her physical and emotional abusing me on me. He even scoffed at me when I brought up my concern that she was cheating on me. His advice was “just suck it up, You are to be the example of Christ, so what if she cheats on you, so what if she physically abused you, so what if she tries to prevent you from going to church and practicing your faith. Just love her more and be the Christ figure.”
He was not part of our movement but many times men give shitty advice to other men in hardship, when a simple “I don’t know what you are going through is like, but I am here for you all the same” would suffice.
Also the advice of some of our guys of “just lower your standards” when they have no idea what our standards are or why we have them.
I really do think our movement would greatly benefit from an actual matchmaking set up, I know FullHaus does it kinda, seems like a side off thing of theirs, been meaning to send them a message. Casting a wide net right now and letting the Lord bring the woman to me.
But yeah, a lot of the married or older gents in our movement don’t seem to understand the dating scene today. Like bruh we have 2/10, A cup 350 lb ham planets who can’t cook, thinking they deserve a 6’8″ tall tan muscle man with a six figure job.
While dudes like me who have a steady job that has skills applicable to life, a house (a damn lake house in my case), a good network of friends both online and irl, and pretty fit, have that farmboy build; only thing keeping me down is that I am a manlet.
But none of that matters to the modern woman in the dating scene or where the ol’ guard used to pick up chicks, but they can’t understand that.
Glad to see you writing Myles! Just as a fun question, what’s the best and the worst dating advice you’ve received?
One tip I’ve received as far as risk mitigation is concerned is to date for 2 years. Obviously the 2 year period is flexible, but you need to date long enough to see how your partner reacts to stress and pressure. It’s easy to keep up a façade for a year or so, but it becomes very difficult to do that in a stressful situation, like on a road trip or a camping trip. Also, if you’re using dating sites, make sure you use good pictures. Might be worth having that done professionally.
This advice may not be the worst I’ve received, but it’s definitely quaint; it is to “detail your car before a date”. I get the idea behind it, and I’m a pretty tidy person, but after high school just about everyone can drive. If a woman cannot drive, there’s likely a major red flag there (such as severe health issues or a criminal record). Perhaps 19/20 women I’ve gone on a date with can drive themselves around, and even fewer have entered my vehicle. It really doesn’t come up that often, and if you’re detailing your car before every date, you’re wasting a lot of time.
A risk with divorce I rarely see talked about comes up when you have kids, and your wife divorces you. It’s a given that she’ll get the kids. This particular problem arises when she marries a man who has children of his own; forced bedroom fun times are more likely to occur among step-siblings than regular siblings.
Also, if they major in a degree that is near-worthless, or worse-than-worthless, you’re going to be the one paying for that bill. That tacks on a potential extra $20,000 (median student loan debt) – $40,000 (average student loan debt) on top of the cost of a wedding if you get married. That’s not an easy thing to overlook, and it’s not in men’s best interests to tell them to “just look past that”. A bad degree isn’t a dealbreaker per se, but it is a sign to pump the breaks.
It’s not entirely bad though. A lot of men are checking out of the dating hellscape, and plenty that remain quite frankly are wasting their time. If you’re the type of man to put in the work (be employed, have your own place, don’t be overweight, be masculine, have decent social skills, etc.), you’ll stand out in no time. Your competition is the overweight soy-faced pornography-addicted Disney addicted man-child.
I can definitely feel the rightly placed frustration in this article. It was one that I shared for many years (I’m currently in a relationship, and I fully admit that I just plain won the lottery here). I’ve seen my fair share of articles, from Christian publications, regarding loneliness. While I’m sure they all mean well, no one wants to hear from a happily married 20 something, or an elderly pastor who married his high school sweetheart, about how being single is a blessing and we ought to be just living joyfully in the Lord.
Subsequently, I fully recognize that the advice of ” just work on yourself”, while good advice intrinsically, starts to taste bitter after a while with the realization of the disparity between a man’s standard of success versus the quality of woman he can reasonably expect
The problem with “just work on yourself” isn’t that it’s not something you should do, it’s that it includes the unspoken “and the women will come” part. You should be working on yourself purely for its own sake, because it will make you feel better, work harder, and do better. Whatever else comes from that is all secondary and unpredictable, and can’t be held up as the primary motivatior.
I’m a married man who advises extreme caution in all interactions with women. The truth is that even marriage “counseling” is rife with. A blogger called Dalrock covered how most marriage counselors, even the Christian ones, operate off the “Duluth” model. In plain terms: “the woman’s always right, so let’s figure out what you’re doing to piss her off so much.” Also, her family will always take her side. If you do get married, gear up for at least half the people who sat on the bride’s side to approach you during the night, threaten you with bodily harm if you don’t “treat her right,” and think they were brave and original for doing so. So much for two families coming together.
A lot of the “independence” women have been nursing has actively shaped their attitudes. Society also refuses to let women fail, to this often comes with a crippling unawareness of the fact that women are some of the most dependent creatures that exist. They play the game of life on “very easy” mode. Even in very traditional households where children are taught Christian morals, loyalty, and hard work, women in the family are often treated like “princesses” by the father and told they should never settle for anything less than what their fathers think they deserve. I’ve seen the same dads who admit their not-too-bright son is probably not going to amount to much think that their entitled, plain, and overweight daughters deserve a real-life Bruce Wayne. Don’t even get me started on women’s p*rnography (romance novels/movies, etc.) where unremarkable and brash women always seem to get the 6’5″ multimillionaire who has an important job but looks like he works out for 12 hours a day.
Most women also have irregular hormones. Without even talking about the pill, they’ve experienced the same endocrine disruption men have from microplastics. Except instead of suppressing testosterone and all of the restorative effects it has on men, it’s made women boorish, stubborn, aggressive, and risk-oriented. Combine that with birth control in the water and a lot of women being on birth control, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
We also know women’s capacity for pair-bonding diminishes with each sexual partner. Combine that with the dopamine roller-coaster that many younger people are already on from drug abuse and social media, and you’ve got the recipe for somebody who is never satisfied with anything. 4/10s regularly get ego-boosting requests on dating sites and apps that convince them they’re not slovenly and pathetic.
Is it possible to marry a woman and have a happy, healthy, and good life with her? Yeah. It’s also possible to jump off a 200 foot cliff face with a parachute and land safely. It’s stupid to attempt either without proper training and perspective, and preparation. And even if you did everything right, it’s still possible for things to go wrong. Until we have mechanisms to hold women accountable for their actions and decisions, it’s usually a bad move to get involved with one.
I can completely sympathize with this commentary. It genuinely does seem like the women out there are dismal and the rise of social media has degraded the available pool of women much more severely than the men. I actually share articles and videos about the negative effects on women of promiscuity, social media, and dating apps to fathers with daughters and even women that I meet, and they do not take it negatively, believe it or not. A good friend of mine got married to what seemed like a good girl, she was insane, they were divorced within a year, and when I say insane, it was stuff like threatening to kill his dog. At any rate, I may as well leave some advice here, which hopefully might somehow be helpful, but I am also happy to receive critiques. I really tried to help my friend but in the end it was an unsalvageable situation. So how about 1. feel free to spend time around older guys who you respect and believe come from good families and just ask them if there are any single women in their families. A man would probably be honest in telling you a woman is crazy, even if it is his own daughter. A very good friend of mine met his wife because her dad told him “you should marry my daughter”. 2. Some women love playing match maker. Feel free to tell older women you are in the market, but be aware that they will often try to force matches that are no good. 3. Have a good idea for where you stand in terms of desirability in relation to the competition (ideally in terms of percentile), so factoring in appearance, height, salary, personality, etc. and then get an idea for what women in the same percentile would look like. 4. Absolutely never ignore red flags. My friend did, and went on faith, and it really set him back.
Poland,
You choose to expend so much mental energy generating these faggy incel copes. If you applied the same level of mental energy to finding a wife you wouldn’t be so lonely and miserable. You put more thought and effort into being an incel than i put into my marriage. The above steaming pile of incel copes can’t keep you warm at night, won’t cook you any home-cooked meals, and can’t bear you any children. The “risk” is a cope: if you were really so terrified of financial devastation you wouldn’t be a WN content creater. You need to forgive God for not moving as fast as you’d like and keep your eyes open for the woman He created to be your wife. Or else, one of these days, you’ll run out of second chances. I’m so looking forward to rejoicing on the day when you post “hey guys I’m getting married forget all that incel bullcrap.”
Thank you for writing a comment that demonstrates exactly what I’m talking about. If anyone ever asks for an example of useless advice for modern dating, I can point them here.