Tags
attraction, bad boys, commitment, dating, hookups, love, marriage, red pill, relationships
I recently met another SIW, this one in her mid-40s. Yesterday she shared her story with me, an all too typical one. She was engaged at 22, but her mother advised her to break it off, “not marry until you are at least 30.” So she did that, went to college, built a high flying career at a well known tech start up you likely use everyday, was paid very well and got some gravy train stock options to boot, bought her own place, travelled the world, and told herself, “I can do it myself! I don’t need a man!”
Except about a year ago she started to have major regrets. She started to have panic attacks just thinking about her job, and decided to quit that and spend a year “finding herself.” She’s luckily in the financial position to do so, and yet a year later she’s still aimless and wondering what direction her life will take now.
She’s slim, active, attractive. She’s got lots of cool interests and hobbies. I don’t know her well enough to know how much she’s dated, or how long her relationships have lasted but she doesn’t speak of anyone in the recent past.
I wonder if like I once did, she goes on dates and talks about her career and her travel and her education rather than what the guys in the manosphere clued me into what men really want to hear — about how she loves kids, is a great cook, and all the other feminine/wifely qualities she has to offer? Because of course, women are taught those things don’t matter to men, when clearly from men themselves, they do. And that when she talks about her career, travel, and accomplishments, what he hears is, “I am not ready/wanting to settle down.”
She’s got two canine “fur babies” but admits she’d much rather have a husband and real babies. But what her mom didn’t tell her at the time was she would miss the maximum MMV (marriage market value) window. By the time she was ready to marry, no prince charming was to be found. The commitment minded guys were long ago taken. And the men her age who were single either have long since given up on gals and gone MTGOW or have been through the divorce wringer already and aren’t willing to go down that path again.
At 46, the likelihood of a successful pregnancy is slim and despite ernestly looking (she says, although I wonder if she’s looking in the right places and at the great guys so often overlooked in favor of the flashier PUAs) she has yet to meet a long-term mate. She seems to suffer from the common fallacy that the guys she could date short term (her SMV or sexual market value) were the same she could expect to marry. So like many women who have followed her path, she finds the guys who likely would be interested in marriage too “boring.”
I wonder if someone had told her that she was choosing a fork in the road back then, if she would have taken the same path? I wonder if her mom realizes how the advice she gave her daughter long ago was going to lead to no grandchildren and a possible spinster daughter? I wonder if her mom would give her the same advice then, knowing where it has led now?
I am not saying she has not had a quality life or that she has not accomplished anything. Clearly she has. She’s smart, funny, and a really neat person. And like most women of my generation, she was following the supposed “best path” for a woman. But like many women find at about her age, you can’t grow old with a career. Your job probably won’t be as satisfying as a family who loves and cares for you. If family is truly the path a woman desires, she is best to seek it early in life, not wait until the window of opportunity is rapidly closing, like the fabled grasshopper. In ten years she’ll likely find the tech job market has moved on without her, and that what came easily in youth may not later in life. And that those who told her, “you can have it all, you go gurrrrrl, there will always be time for that later!” were actually selling her an experimental, unproven product.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, realizing that one can’t have it all on demand. And that there might not be any going back. But one may not want to go forward, either. I hope she finds her way, despite the odds. I really do.
Let those who have ears hear.
Some women succeed.Earlier, I mentioned the one who won’t share a bathroom with her husband. She had lots of other conditions too.This only encourages other women to believe they have men over a barrel.
Ugh. That mentality is atrocious.
It sounds like they have gone mad with the illusion of power. Instead they are only proving their lack of a kind, pleasant disposition.
“like” all comments 🙂
Indeed David, the herd defines the FI and expects conformity according to the times…
A saying I use in my own life “most of the people are wrong most of the time”. If all the ladies are doing it, I suggest you look for a different path.
Tarn,
I guess that she didn’t have me over a barrel. But she she did find someone.
Tarnished,
How should a man determine which type of career a woman has (re: meaningless VS worthwhile)?
Any career a woman pursues not involving the having and raising of a child is worthless. Women, oddly, recoil at “merely” being a baby makers, as if that’s not the most important thing a person could do. If women want a career, start one in your forties, after you’ve made all your babies. If you want it all, then get married early, have babies in your 20’s leaving you young enough to pursue whatever you want in your 40s. You and your husband will both be young enough to really enjoy watching your children be grow into adults, as well as enjoying being with a person you’ve endured real hardships and created a real life with. And you’ll have a career. Focusing on the career first, leaves the enjoying your children grow into adults very tenuous, often times becoming non-existent.
Today’s women are doing it backwards, using their prime baby making and sexual attraction years chasing a career that is, literally, meaningless compared to getting married and having children. By the time these women went to school and landed a career, they are now past their prime, in their 30s, possibly even 40s, hoping to find a man, for whom they have very little respect. After all, the very reason women choose this path is to be a strong, independent woman, who pursue a career just in case their relationship goes south. In other words, these women enter marriage with one foot out the door.
And on top of all that, most have ridden the carousel, which simply increases the odds of infidelity and divorce.
As for David’s response, it’s far better to have a society that pressures women who want a career, rather than family, to get married you and have a family, than it is to have a society that pressures women who want to get married and have a family, rather than a career, to get a career. As David, correctly, points out “the people (mostly women) who will denounce a girl for wanting to get married at 23 and stay at home are (for the most part) the same people who, had they been around in 1958, would have denounced a girl for *not* wanting to get married at 21”. Like it or not, conformity will happen, again, as David correctly points out “The enforcement of conformity, to this personality type, is more important than the substance of what is being enforced.” It’s better that good outcomes, that are based on the typical preferences inherent in human nature, be the substance to which people enforce that conformity.
Sure, at the margins some will be unhappy with the social conformity of young women to get married and have children. That’s a much better outcome that a large percent to a majority of women (and everyone else) being unhappy by enforcing conformity that on a few actually want.
Thanks for agreeing with 95% of what I wrote a few days ago, Ken.
https://notesfromaredpillgirl.com/2016/06/13/another-siw-tale/comment-page-1/#comment-10128
As for “babymaking being the most important”, I’ll agree that the successful continuation of our species is a good thing. And that’s why I also praised David’s comment, because it’s the truth. If the tables magically turned tomorrow, and the herd conformity went back to how it was in the 1940s, it’d be better for society overall. As for the very small minority of women like me who never want to be married or have children, we’d be alright too, because…just like in the past…nobody would physically force us to march down an aisle or become pregnant and we would just have to accept that we’re nonconformists swimming against the current herd mentality. Since I’m the only non-tradcon in my entire family already, I’d be perfectly fine with that.
Except Tarn, without birth control, tubal ligation, or abortion, in order to do so you would have had to been celibate. Not to get in the middle of you guy’s thing. It is only MODERN women that have had the option of sex w/o that = babies except in rare cases of natural infertility…
So your lifestyle is only possible really w/i the past 40 years.
I guess adoption and or abandonment has always been an out but… usually not socially condoned if the mother was able to care for the child especially when everyone else had a houseful.
Eh…I’d agree that modern technology and science has made it easier to obtain birth control with very high success rates. However, as long as people have been having sex there’s been forms of birth control and abortifacients, some of which were used so consistently that we still have documentation on them from the 7th century. And linen, silk, and animal intestine condoms have been in use since the 1500s, with the first rubber ones made in the 1850s.
So, I understand and appreciate your core point, but women and men have had numerous methods to prevent/stop pregnancy for a *lot* longer than just the last 40 years.
Plus, as we discussed above, there are many sexy things one can do that don’t include the danger of pregnancy, or STDs if both partners are clean to begin with. *wink*
Address please? lol