 My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and I will show all of you Corona-free and Narcissist-free evening. That's probably my cue to vanish from the frame, but I have no intention of doing that. Warning! This is going to be an extremely long video. Possibly two hours. And very crammed with lots of information and research and so on and so forth. So my advice is to pause and resume, pause and resume, not necessarily in the same day. People ask me where are my COVID videos? Ask YouTube. They have deleted them. So I have uploaded all of them to my alternative channel. Vaknin Musings. V-A-K-N-I-N, happens to be my name, Musings-M-U-S-I-N-G-S. Vaknin Musings, one word. That's my alternative channel. You can find a link to the alternative channel on my main channel as well. Now people have been disputing very hotly my claim that women prefer beta-loser-mails and I've provided a series of links both to academic studies and to articles in the popular press, which support this claim and I must warn you that there's a tsunami of studies which tend to support this claim. Nice. I hate to pierce your bubble and I hate to drag you from virtual reality where you are. Women no longer are looking for alpha-winner males. Why? Because they don't need you guys. They have their own money. They have their own jobs. They have their own little home in the prairie. They have their own television set and microwave meals or dinners. They don't need you. They don't need you for anything. They want sex. They go to the local dive. They pick up a guy. They do what they do with his brains and that's the end of that. They don't even need you for children. Many of them don't have children. They're childless. They prefer their careers. You don't have much to offer to women anymore. They are on the ascendance. They are empowered and they are becoming more and more like men or more precisely more and more like narcissistic and psychopathic men. Women prefer better males because they can control the better male. They feel superior to the better male. They can force the better or ask the better or coerce the better male to do whatever they want him to do. They can bang him and dump him. Better males are malleable. They are malleable. They are all over the woman. They are easier to, you know, to digest and easier to manipulate. And also the risk of rejection is much lower. Women, don't forget, are much more narcissistic nowadays. So rejection is equivalent of narcissistic injury. And women don't want to experience narcissistic injury. No narcissists does. So if they approach an alpha male, they may, they may get rejected, which is intolerable, unbearable. Instead, they approach safe males. The more better, the safer. And these males are unlikely to say no. They are likely to be delighted that they have been picked and chosen and they are likely to act subserviently and cater to the woman's needs. It's a woman's world. It's a woman's market. Women make the choices. Men are there to obey. Tough. Tough. Get over it. Adopt. Another issue that was raised a lot by women this time is that men refuse to commit. They're complaining that there are no real men left. Men don't want to have families. Men don't want to provide. Men don't want to stick around, etc, etc. Well, it's women's fault. Sexual inflation. When women offer unconditional sex with no strings attached, it's called sexual inflation. And such behavioral choice leads to a precipitous decline in committed relationships and a commensurate rise in casual sex. And so you see, through the history of our species, women and men traded. Women traded access to their bodies as vessels of sexual gratification and childbearing, known as pregnancy. Men provided, in return to this access to women's bodies, men provided proteins. Proteins as nutritional supplements, game meat that men had hunted for, so hunting. Protein packaged as sperm in order to make children, still necessary. And protein packaged in muscles, musculature. Men were protein providers. Women gave them sex and children in return. Men also guarded their women and children. Actually, women and children were enslaved chateaux. They were property, enslaved property. So men guarded this property from incursions by other men. And so typically men described euphemistically relabeled this possessiveness protection. And the Holland savory arrangement is known to this very day as marriage. But nowadays, as sex is freely and instantly available, men have little incentive to commit. Why would I commit if I can obtain sex freely? Women are no longer dependent on men for any of the traditional functions, and therefore men don't commit. They just get the goodies. They get the yummies without the whammies. The foundation of the intergender compact have crumbled. Gender roles became fluid and fused. So we are living in a unigender world. And this frustration led to aggression. Radical feminism on the part of the women. The manosphere on the part of the men. QV, see my previous video. Gender vertigo in suit. Men and women are exceedingly wary of each other. And repeated hurt and abuse perpetrated by both parties is driving most people to opt for an atomized, solitary, self-sufficient existence as a lifestyle choice. The families of the not too distant past were orientated along four axes. These axes were not mutually exclusive. They could coexist. Some of them overlapped, and all of them enhanced each other. So people got married for various reasons. Number one, because of social pressure and social norms. The social diet. They created the social diet. Think of your mother-in-law, or your own mother. When am I going to have grandchildren? Number two, people got married to form a more efficient or synergetic economic unit. Economic diet. Number three, people hitched, got together in pursuit of psychosexual fulfillment. The psychosexual diet. And finally, in order to secure long-term companionship, the companionship died. And so we can talk about the following four axes. Social economic, emotional, utilitarian, rational, and private familial. To illustrate how these axes were intertwined, let us consider, or let's start by considering, the emotional axes. Until very recently, people used to get married because they felt very strongly about living alone, partly due to social condemnation of reclusiveness. In some countries, people still subscribe to ideologies which promote their family as a pillar of society, the basic cell of the national organism, a hot house in which to breed children for the army, and so on. And these collective ideologies call for personal contributions and sacrifices. They have a strong emotional damage and provide impetus to a host of behaviour patterns. But the emotional investment in today's individualistic capitalist ideologies is no smaller than it was in yesterday's nationalistic ones. That we have transitioned from one societal model to the other simply dislocated or moved the locus of the emotions, not the intensity or their very existence. It is true that technological developments rendered past thinking obsolete and dysfunctional, but they did not quench men's thirst for guidance and for a worldview. And still, as technology evolved, it became more and more disruptive to the family, increased mobility, a decentralization of information sources, the transfers of the traditional functions of the family to societal and private sector establishments and providers, the increased incidents of interpersonal interactions, safer sex with lesser or no consequences. All these fostered the disintegration of the traditional extended and nuclear family. Let's consider a few of the trends that directly affected women. One, the emergence of community marital property and of laws for its equal distribution in case of divorce. These constituted a shift in legal philosophy in most societies until as recently as the 1930s or 1940s in many countries. This did not exist. The result was a major and an ongoing redistribution of wealth from men to women. It's by far the biggest transfer of wealth in human history from men to women. Add to this the disparities in life expectancy between the two genders and the magnitude of the transfer of economic resources between men and women becomes evident. Over the decades, over the generations, women are becoming richer because they live longer than men and thus they inherit men. And because they get a share of the marital property when they divorce men. 73% of all divorces are filed by women. 50% of all marriages disintegrate. That means that the property of 50%, half the property of 50% of men is transferred to women. These endowments are usually more than they are usually more than they had contributed to the couple in money terms. Women still earn less than men, for instance. The second trend is an increase in economic opportunities. Social and ethical codes changed. Technology allows for increased mobility. Wars and economic upheavals lead to the forced introduction of women into the labor markets. Remember what happened in the two world wars? Women had to step in and work in factories because the men were away fighting. Number three, the result of women's enhanced economic clout is a more egalitarian social and legal system. Women's rights are being legally, as well as informally secured in an evolutionary process punctuated by minor legal revolutions. Trend number four, women had largely achieved equality in educational and economic opportunities. Fact, most college graduates are women. And women are fighting a winning battle in other domains of life, the military, political representation, legal repercussions, me too, movement. Actually, in some legal respects, the bias is against men. It is rare for a man to complain of sexual harassment or, I don't know, to receive alimony or custody of his children. In many countries, men rarely are the beneficiary of social welfare payments that go directly to the woman. Number five, there's an emergence of socially accepted, normative, single parent and non-nuclear families. This helped women to shape their lives as they see fit. Most single parent families are headed by women. Women single parents are disadvantaged economically. Their median income is very low, even when we adjusted to reflect transfer payments. But many are taking the plunge all the same. I call it the freedom premium. Women want to get away from men, so they become single parents. And their lifestyle and everything goes down, but they're willing to pay this price. And so gradually, the shaping of future generation becomes the exclusive domain of women. Even today, one third of all children in developed countries grow in single parent families with no male figure around to serve as a role model. And this exclusivity has tremendous social and economic implications. Don't forget also that the vast majority, overwhelming majority of teachers are women. Gradually and subtly, the balance of power shifts as society becomes, again, matriarchal. I'm saying again because originally, societies were matriarchal, not patriarchal. The invention of the peel in other contraceptives liberated women sexually. The resulting sexual revolution affected, I'm sorry, not COVID, I swear. The resulting sexual revolution affected both sexes, but the main beneficiaries were women, whose sexuality was suddenly legitimized. No longer under the cloud of unwanted pregnancy, women felt free to engage in sex with multiple partners. And trust you, me, they took advantage of this freedom. In the face of this newfound freedom, liberty, and the realities of changing sexual conduct, the double moral standard crumbled. The existence of a legitimately expressed feminine sexual drive is now widely accepted. Men success as much as women. And women have the same sex drive as men, same power, not identical physiologically, but same power. The family, therefore, becomes also a sexual joint venture. Organization, communication, and transportation multiply the number of encounters between men and women and the opportunities for economic, sexual, and emotional interactions between them. For the first time in centuries, women are able to judge and compare their male partners to other males in every conceivable way, including sexually. Increasingly, women choose to opt out of relationships, which they deem to be dysfunctional or inadequate. We'll talk about it a bit later. More than three quarters of all divorces I've mentioned in the West are initiated by women. And women became aware of their needs, their priorities, preferences, wishes, in general, their proper emotions. They cast off emotions and thought patterns inculcated in them by patriarchal chauvinistic societies and cultures. There was a lot of peer pressure on women throughout the ages, and now it's no longer effective. The roles and traditional functions of the family were gradually eroded and transferred to other social agents. Even functions such as emotional support, psychosexual interactions, and child rearing, they often relegated to outside subcontractors as a process of outsourcing the family. Emptied of these functions and emptied of intergenerational interactions, the nuclear family has been reduced to a dysfunctional shell, a hub of rudimentary communication between its remaining members, a dilapidated version of its former self. Honestly, families are no longer needed. They are an inefficient organizational unit in current-day society and with existing technologies. Men are not needed. Families are not needed. You see where all this is going, and procreation is no longer wanted. The traditional roles of women, their alleged character, propensities, and inclinations were no longer useful in this new environment, and this led women to search for a new definition, to find a new niche, so to speak. Women were literally driven out of their homes by the functional disappearance of the home. In parallel, modern medicine increased women's life expectancy, prolonged their child-bearing years, improved their health dramatically, and preserved their beauty through myriad new-founding techniques, cosmetic surgery, for instance. And these gave women a new lease on life, a renewed lease. In this new world, women are far less likely to die a childbirth, like until a hundred years ago. They are far less likely to look decrepit when they are thirty. They are able to time their decision to bring a child to the world. They are able to refrain from bringing a child to the world, passively or actively, by having an abortion. They have ownership and control of their bodies, possibly for the first time in human history. Women's growing control over their bodies, which have been objectified, reviled and admired for millennia by men. This new control is arguably one of the most striking features of the feminine revolution. It allows women to rid themselves of deeply embedded masculine value, masculine views, male prejudices concerning women's physique and women's sexuality. The whole narrative was male. The language used is a male language. Penetration is the male's point of view of the sex act. From the female point of view, it's not penetration, it's engulfment. So women are regaining control of their bodies and via this new control, they are changing the way they see the world. And finally, the legal system and other social and economic structures adopted themselves to reflect many of the above mentioned sea changes. Being inertial and compassing, of course, the institutions reacted slowly, partially and gradually. But still, they did react. Any comparison between the situation just 20 years ago and today is likely to reveal substantial differences. But this revolution is only a segment of a much larger one. You see, in the past, the axes with which we opened our discussion were closely and seemingly inextricably intertwined. The economic, the social, the emotional, you know, they all formed one amalgam. The axes invested in the preservation of societal mores and ideologies, the private, the familial, the utilitarian, the rational, they all kind of morphed into each other. They were all one unity. Society encouraged people to get married in the past because it was emotionally committed to a societal economic ideology which infused the family with sanctity and historical mission and even grandeur. But notwithstanding social views of the family, the majority of men and women got married out of cold pecuniary calculation that regarded the family as a functioning economic unit within which the individual effectively transacts. Remember Jane Austen's novels? Forming families was the most efficient way known to generate wealth, accumulate it and transfer it across the generations, across time and space to future generations. These traditional confluences of axes were diametrically reversed in the last few decades. The social and economic axes together with the utilitarian rational axes and the emotional axes are now aligned with the private and familiar axes. So put simply, nowadays society encourages people to get married because it wishes to maximize their economic input. But most people do not see it this way. They regard the family as a safe emotional haven. And heaven depends on your partner. So axes that were mutually exclusive in the past came together and axes that were together in the past were ripped asunder. The distinction between past and present may be subtle, but it is by no means trivial. In the past people used to express emotions in formulaic, socially dictated ways wearing their beliefs and ideologies on their sleeves as it were. The family was one of these modes of expression. But really the family served as a mere economic unit devoid of any emotional involvement in content. People got together, they got married, they made children to distribute wealth, end of story. There was no romantic love, no attachment, no support, no support. None of these modern, I don't want to say nonsense, none of these modern aspects of the family. Today people are looking to the family for emotional sustenance, romantic love, companionship, and not as an instrument to enhance their social and economic standing. Creating a family is no longer the way to maximize utility. But these new expectations have destabilized the family. Both men and women seek emotional comfort and true companionship within the family, but very often they fail. And when they fail to find this emotional comfort, the sakhour, the companionship, when they fail to find this, the passion, they use their new funds of sufficiency and freedoms and they divorce. Let me summarize this, a bit of a complex argument. Men and women used to look to the family for economic and social functions. Whenever the family failed as an economic and social launching pad, men and women lost interest in the family and began looking for extra marital alternatives. This trend of disintegration was further enhanced by technological innovation which encouraged self-sufficiency and unprecedented social segmentation. It was society at large which regarded families emotionally as part of the prevailing ideology. So while the partners within the couple, the partners within the family, father and mother, husband and wife, transacted society as a whole, glorified the family, sanctified the family, romanticized the family. And today the roles have reversed. Society now tends to view the family in a utilitarian, rational light as an efficient mode of organization, of economic and social activity. And while in the past its members regarded the family mainly in this way as a wealth producing unit, now its members expect differently and more. They expect emotional support and companionship. In the eyes of the individual, families were transformed from an economic production unit to emotional powerhouses. In the eyes of society, families were transformed from elements of emotional, spiritual ideology to utilitarian, rational production units. I repeat this, listen carefully. In the eyes of individuals, families were transformed over the past hundred years from economic production units, which they used to be until a hundred years ago, to emotional powerhouses. We look to the family nowadays, to a relationship, to a committed relationship, doesn't have to be marriage. We look to our relationship for emotions. We want to find emotions there. But in the eyes of society, exactly the opposite happened. In society used to think of families as elements of emotional and spiritual ideology. And now society came to see families as merely utilitarian, rational production units. This shift of axes and emphasis is bridging the traditional gap between men and women. Women had always accentuated the emotional side of being in a couple and of the family. Men always emphasized the convenience and the utility of the family. And this gap between men and women used to be unbridgeable. Men acted as conservative social agents, and women acted as subversive revolutionaries. What is happening to the institution of a family today is that the revolution, the feminine revolution, the way women saw the family, is becoming mainstream. And the way men saw the family is becoming obsolete. The ancient institutions of monogamous marriage are ill-suited for all this. Monogamy is ill-suited to the exigencies of modern Western civilization. People of both genders live and work longer, which renders sexual exclusivity impracticable. It's not practical to expect two people to be sexually attracted to each other for 50 years. I'm sorry, not even Marilyn Monroe. People travel far. They travel frequently. They're exposed to tempting romantic alternatives via social media, social network, and in various workplaces, social settings. As leisure time increases and physical survival is all but effortlessly guaranteed, recreation takes precedence over procreation. We don't need to multiply as much as we did in the past. Medicine keeps us alive. We live longer. Now it's time to have fun. Until the 1920s, only women were expected to abide by a strict code of sexual exclusivity. Men openly, albeit some of them discreetly, kept mistresses. They patronized brothels, prostitutes to sate their exuberance. In many cultures, polygamous men maintained herons. As women's lib and gender equality gradually took over, feminism became vonton. Sexually emancipated women assumed many hitherto male behaviors. I mentioned it before. Alarmed by this turn of events, men suddenly became paragons of virtue akin to women in erstwhile days. Men now vow to adhere to a single sexual partner, thus attempting to force women to revert to type. This abrupt, about-face wrought mayhem on the monogamous bond, because it forcibly equated sexual exclusivity with love and bonding, and regarded cheating as a proof of absence of love and bonding, which was never the case with men. Men cheated with prostitutes, you name it, mistresses. It wasn't proof. It didn't constitute proof that they don't love their wives, or that there's no bonding there. It was just the thing, boys be boys, you know, the thing men did. But now that women are doing this, men are aghast. How can they? What do you mean, how can they? You've been doing it for thousands of years? It's their turn. Contradictory expectations from one's intimate partner are unrealistic. No single person can be a passionate, exciting lover, an empathic patient friend, a stalwart companion, a good father, a good mother, a cook, a handy person, an intellectually-equal, an adventurer, stable breadwinner, and myriad other functions beside. No one, no one can fulfill or meet this job description. No one can provide all the functions that one needs in another. So there's a need to outsource, and there's a recurrence of emotional and sexual affairs precisely because many of these needs are not met by a single individual. These are the disruptive outcomes of an overwhelming or pervasive and we, an attrition because we keep, we have this idealized romantic image that our partners should provide everything. Passion in bed, great food in the kitchen, you know, this famous French saying, the ideal woman is a whore in bed and a cook in the kitchen, a chef in the kitchen. Of course, most of us end up with exactly the reverse, a chef in bed and a whore in the kitchen. Thus, even as social monogamy and pair commitment and bonding are still largely intact, and more condoned than ever, by the way, and even as infidelity is fervently condemned by everyone, especially those who exercise it, sexual exclusivity, mislabeled sexual monogamy, is declining. It's a fact, it's gone almost, especially among the young and among the old, these two groups. Monogamy is becoming one alternative of many lifestyles and marriage only one type of relationship among a few, sometimes not even a privileged or unique relationship, as marriage, your spouse competes for time and resources with work, with same-sex friends, with friends with benefits, with opposite-sex friends, with ex-lovers, with classmates, I call it the intimacy cloud. Intimacy cloud, we carry with us cloud of people we're intimate with emotionally, and we find ourselves very often ending up being sexually intimate with them as well. We may be heading towards a future of serial monogamy devoid of sexual exclusivity, emotional attachment and bonding within sexually open marriages or partnerships, whether it's open nature is proclaimed and promulgated or tacitly accepted and overlooked. Don't ask, don't tell. The contractual aspects of marriage are more pronounced than ever, with everything on the table, from extramarital sex, the partners negotiate, you know, today marriage, committed relationships, they are transactions, they're negotiated, negotiated deals, and everything is for grabs, everything is discussed, extramarital sex, yes or no, agreed or not, allowed or not, prenuptial agreements, the commodification and preponderance of sex, premarital and extramarital, robbed it of its function as a conduit of specialness, as an expression of intimacy, and since childbearing or childrearing is largely avoided, mortality rates are precipitously plummeting everywhere, or childrearing is outsourced, the family has lost both its raison d'etre, its reason to exist, and its nature, is the venue for exclusive sexual and emotional interactions between adults and adults and their children. Profest values and prevailing social mores and institutions have yet to catch up with this emerging multifarious reality. The consequences of these discrepancies are disastrous. About 40 or 50 percent of all first-time marriages end in divorce, and you don't want to know the numbers for second and third marriages. The percentage is much higher. Percentage is much higher for second and third attempts at cannubial bliss. Open communication about one's sexual needs is tantamount to self-reination. One's partner is likely to reflexively initiate a divorce if you dare to ask them, I don't know what, to join a threesome. This honesty and cheating are definitely the rational choices in such an unforgiving and punitive environment where you cannot freely interact with your partner. Indeed, most surviving marriages have to do with perpetuating the partner's convenience, their access to commonly owned assets, and future streams of income, and the welfare of third parties must not oblige their kids. Rest while sexual exclusivity often degenerates into either celibacy, abstinence on the one hand, or parallel lives with multiple sexual and emotional partners on the other hand. That's much more common. About 21 percent of all couples are sexless, but about half of all men and women cheat, and serial cheating is becoming more and more the norm with multiple partners over time. One-eyed stands for both genders are usually opportunistic, and extra pair affairs are self-limiting as emotional involvement and sexual attraction weigh in over time. In fidelity is therefore much less of a threat to the longevity of a dedicated couple than it is made out to be. Most of the damage is caused by culturally conditioned, albeit deeply and dramatically felt reactions, to conduct that is almost universally decried as deceitful, dishonest, and in breach of vows and promises. But I'm saying again, even though we all kind of frown on cheating and so on and so forth, most cheating is self-limiting, and both emotional involvement and sexual attraction weigh in over time. Indeed, the life expectancy of a typical love affair is six months. So where are we right now? The roots of the crumbling alliance between men and women go deeper and further in time, long before divorce became a social norm, men and women grew into two disparate, incompatible, and warring subspecies. Traditionalist, conservative, and religious societies put in place behavioral safeguards against the inevitable wrenchy torsion that Monogamy entailed. So there were idics like no premarital sex, virginity, no multiple intimate partners, no cohabitation prior to tying the knot, no mobility or equal rights for women, no mixing of the genders, etc. All these were protection, defenses, firewalls against the evident disintegration of the monogamous arrangements. We now know that each of these habits does indeed increase the chances of an ultimate divorce actually, as Jonathan Frenzen elucidates in his literary masterpieces. It boils down to a choice between personal freedoms and the stability of the family, the former decisively precrued the letter. During the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, discrete affairs were an institution of marriage. Sexual gratification and emotional intimacy were outsourced, while all other domestic functions were shared in a partnership. What happened is the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was followed by the Victorian age, the backlash of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, alligerant feminism, and the advent of socially atomizing and gender equalizing transportation, information processing, and telecommunication technologies. And all this mess, all this soup led inexorably to the hollowing out of family and heart. In a civilization centered on brain power, men have lost the relative edge that brown muscles used to provide. Who needs muscles nowadays? You have Japanese robots. Monogamy is increasingly considered as past its expiry date, a historical aberration that reflects the economic and political realities of bygone eras. Moreover, the incidence of lifelong singlehood has skyrocketed, as people hope for their potential or actual relationship partners to provide for all the sexual, emotional, social, and economic needs, and then they get solely disappointed when they fail to meet these highly unrealistic expectations. We have created an unrealistic fantasy, and when we fail to meet it, we say okay, the hell with everyone and with everything, I'm going to stay alone in my apartment and watch Netflix. Not such a bad thing, come into the good. In an age of economic self-sufficiency, electronic entertainment, and self-critification, the art of compromise in relationships is gone. Single motherhood, sometimes via IVF, with no identifiable partner involved. Single motherhood had become the norm in many countries. Even within marriages or committed relationships, solitary pursuits, such as separate vacations or girls night out or boys night out, they've become the norm. Many men and women married or in committed relationships spent most of the time separately. The 20th century was a monument to male fatuity, male idiocy. Wars and ideologies almost decimated the human species. Forced to acquire masculine skills and to fulfill men's shoes in factories and in fields, women discovered militant self-autonomy. The superfluousness of men and the untenability of the male claims to superiority over them. They found out that most men were wizards of all, behind a very, very fraying curtain. In an age of malignant individualism, bordering on narcissism, men and women alike put themselves, their fantasies and their needs, first. Everything else, family included, be damned. And with five decades of uninterrupted prosperity, birth control, feminism or woman's lib, most of the female denizens of the West have acquired the financial world with them to realize their dreams at the expense and to the detriment of collectives that they had ostensibly belonged, such as the nuclear family. Feminism is a movement focused on negatives, obliterating women's age or bondage, but it offers very few constructive ideas regarding women's new roles. By casting men as the enemy, feminism also failed to educate women and to convert them, to educate men, I'm sorry, and to convert men into useful allies, which they could have been. Owing to the dramatic doubling of life expectancy over the past hundred years, modern marriages seem to go through three phases. Infatuation, the honeymoon phase, procreation, accumulation of assets, children, shared experiences, memories, and then exhaustion, outsourcing, bonding with new emotional and sexual partners for rejuvenation, all the fulfillment of long repressed fantasies, needs, and wishes. And so divorces and breakups occur mostly at the seams, the periods of transition between these three phases, especially between the stages of accumulation, procreation, and exhaustion, outsourcing. This is where family units break down. With marriage on the decline and infidelity of the rise, the reasonable solution would have been, should have been, swinging, swapping sexual partners, or polyamory households with multiple partners of both genders, all of whom are committed to one another for the long haul, romantically involved, sexually shared, and economically united. Alas, while a perfectly rational development of the traditional marriage, and one that is best suited to modernity, these solutions are emotionally unstable arrangements because of romantic jealousy. Romantic jealousy ineluctably rears its ugly head. Very few people are emotionally capable of sharing their life partner with other people. Human psychology dictates that in any modern adaptable variant of marriage, monogamy must be preserved while allowing for emotional, sexual, and romantic diversity. How to square this circle? How do we remain monogamous and alive? What virtual trusty balance can we conjure up to replace the spiked medieval origin? One break. I have a suggestion. My suggestion is called TLM, Time Limited Marriages. These are marriages, marriage contracts with expiration dates, expiry dates, one to three years for childless couples, and a minimum of seven years for those blessed with children. Why seven years? To allow the parents to provide a stable environment during the child's formative years, zero to six. So these time limited contracts can be allowed to expire, and then the parties are free to look elsewhere for the fulfillment of their sexual and romantic dreams and wishes, or these contracts can be renewed and renegotiated. The question is not why there are so many divorces, but why so few? Surely serial monogamy, in effect a tawdry variant of time limited marriage, is far better, fairer, more fair and more humane than adultery. Couples stay together and tolerate strain, tolerate cheating, owing to inertia, financial or emotional dependence, insecurity, lack of self-confidence and esteem, fear of the unknown and the tedium of dating. Some couples persevere owing to religious convictions or for the sake of appearances, yet others make a smooth transition to an alternative lifestyle, polyamory, swinging, and central adultery. Indeed, what is changed is not the incidence of adultery even among women, in my view. There are good grounds to assume that adultery and fidelity, they have remained the same throughout human history. The phenomenal, qualitatively and quantitatively, has always been the same, nearly underreported. What has changed or what have changed are the social acceptability of extramarital sex, both before and during marriage, and the ease of obtaining divorce. People discuss adultery openly where before it was a taboo topic. Another new development may be the rise of selfish affairs among women younger than 35 years old. These women are used to multiple sexual problems, they grow up in the hookup culture. Selfish affairs are acts of recreational adultery, whose sole purpose is to satisfy sexual curiosity and the need for romantic diversity. The emotional component of these usually short-term affairs, one-night stands and the like. The emotional component is very muted, or non-existent. Among women older than 60, adultery has become the accepted way of seeking emotional connection and intimacy outside the marital bond. And these are the outsourcing affairs, so we have selfish affairs among the young, and outsourcing which are for recreation, and outsourcing affairs among the old which are for intimacy. Within the time-limited marriages I'm proposing, partners would have little incentive to cheat. They could simply wait for the contract to lapse, to expire. The looming expiry would also keep the intimate partners on their toes, and on their best behavior, by generating a sempitonal environment of courtship and positive sexual tension. The periodically renegotiated marriage contracts would reflect changing economic realities, shifts in romantic sentiment, and other pertinent new data. Of course, time-limited marriages would eliminate the need for divorces, except in extreme emergency cases. They would expire. Until recently couples formed around promises of emotional exclusivity and sexual fidelity, uniqueness in each other's mind and life, and more common until the 1940s, virginity. These were the grounds, the grounds for marriage. You were a virgin, you were promised to be sexually exclusive, and you were emotionally exclusive. You loved only your partner. Marriage was also a partnership, economic or related to child rearing or companionship. It was based on the partner's past and background, and geared towards a shared future. Nowadays, couples coalesce around the twin undertakings of continuity, I will always be there for you, and of availability, I will always be there for you. Issues of exclusivity, uniqueness, virginity, these have been relegated to the back burner. It is no longer practical to demand of one's spouse to have nothing to do with the opposite sex. It is not practical to ask her to not spend the bulk of his or her time outside the marriage. It is not practical to demand that she or he doesn't take separate vacations, more generally be joined at the hip. Affairs, for instance, both emotional and sexual, as said certainties in the life of every couple get used to it. It's like death, it's inevitable. Mappers of the couple are supposed to make themselves continuously available to each other and to provide emotional sustenance and support in an atmosphere of sharing, companionship and friendship. All the traditional functions of the family can now be and often are outsourced as I mentioned, including even sex, including even emotional intimacy. But contrary to marriage, outsourcing is frequently uphazard, unpredictable, dependent as it is on outsiders, sometimes strangers, who are committed elsewhere as well. And so this would explain the relative durability of committed relationships in the form of marriage. It would explain the conservative and less conventional forms of marriage. It is, marriage is convenient. It's convenient and it's a highly predictable arrangement. Divorce or other forms of marital breakup are not new phenomena, of course, yes, but their participants have undergone a revolutionary shift, the precipitance of divorce are now different. In the past, families fell apart owing to a breach of exclusivity, mainly in the forms of emotional or sexual infidelity. They fell apart because of the deficiency of uniqueness and primacy. Divorce women, for instance, were considered damaged goods because they used to belong to another man and therefore would often neither primacy nor uniqueness. Or couples fell apart because of some egregious violation of the terms of the partnership, for example, sloth or dysfunctional child rearing or infertility. Nowadays intimate partners bail out when the continuous availability of the significant others is disrupted sexually, emotionally, as well as as friends and companions. Marriages are about the present, about the present and they are being put to the test on a daily basis. Partners who are dissatisfied opt out, team up with other, more promising providers. Children are serially reared by multiple parents and in multiple households. Not necessarily such a bad thing, by the way. Still, despite all the fashionable theories of marriage, the narratives and the feminist, the reasons to get married, I mean, despite all these upheaval, I think the reasons to get married largely remain have remained the same. True, there have been wrong reverses and there are new stereotypes cropping up, but biological, physiological and biochemical facts are less amenable to modern criticisms of culture. Men are still men and women are still women and there's very little they can do about it, although they're doing their best. Men and women marry to form, as I said, sexual diet to gratify their partner's sexual attraction and secure a stable and consistent and available source of sexual gratification. The economic diet, the couple is a functioning economic unit within which the economic activities of the members of the diet and of additional entrants are carried out and regulated. The economic unit generates more wealth than it consumes and the synergy between its members is likely to lead to gains in production and in productivity relative to individual efforts and investments, so it's good to team up. Then there's a social diet, the members of the couple born as a result of explicit or explicit direct or indirect social pressures, peer pressures, family pressures, such pressures can manifest in numerous forms. In Judaism, a person cannot hold some religious posts unless he's married. It's a form of economic pressure. In most human societies, avowed bachelors are considered to be socially deviant, abnormal or defective. Something's wrong with them. They're content by society, ridiculed, shunned, isolated, effectively excommunicated. Partly to avoid dissensions, partly to enjoy the emotional glow that comes with conformity and acceptance, some couples get married. Today, myriad lifestyles are offered. Myriad, you have a menu of lifestyles, the old-fashioned nuclear family. It's just one of many variants. Children are reared by single parents. Homosexual couples bind and abound. But the pattern is the same. Almost 95% of the other population get married at some stage. It's still a shocking number. People settle into a two-member arrangement, whether formalized and sanctioned religiously or legally or not. So when I say marriage, I'm extending the term. Any regular cohabitation with distribution, divisional functions. And then there's a companionship diet. It is formed by adults in search of sources of long-term and stable support, emotional warmth, empathy, care, succor, good advice and intimacy. The members of these couples tend to define themselves as each other's best friends. Folk wisdom tells us that the first three diets are actually unstable. The sexual diet, the economic diet, the social diet, they're actually unstable. They are unstable because they are formed owing to constraints or outside pressures. They are formed to cater either to biological needs, which fluctuate over time and very often wane, or in response to other people's expectations. They're not real. They're not indigenous. They don't come from inside. Companionship diet is as stability, stable. Sexual attraction wanes and is replaced by sexual attrition in most cases. This is the Coolidge effect. This could lead to the adoption of non-conventional sexual behavior patterns, sexual abstinence, group sex, couple swapping, or it could lead to recurring marital infidelity and the disintegration of the couple once the infidelity is found out, which inevitably and invariably does, by the way. Pecuniary concerns are insufficient grounds for a lasting relationship. In today's world, both partners are potentially financially independent. They don't need each other. This newfound autonomy knows at the roots of traditional patriarchal, domineering, disciplinary relationships. Marriage is becoming a more balanced, business-like arrangement with children and the couple's welfare and life standard as the products of the family. And so marriage's motivated sowning by economic considerations are as likely to unravel as any other joint venture in business. Admittedly, social pressures do help to maintain family cohesiveness and stability, but being thus enforced from the outside, such marriages resemble detention centers rather than a voluntary, joyful collaboration. Moreover, social norms, peer pressure and social conformity cannot be relied upon to fill the roles of stabilizers and shock absorbers indefinitely. Why? Because society changes. Norms change. Look at the past 50 years. Peer pressure can backfire. For example, if all my friends are divorced and apparently happy, why shouldn't I try too? So it goes both ways. Only the companionship diet seems to be durable, durable. Friendships deepen with time, while sex loses its initial biochemically induced lustre. Economic motives are reversed, avoided. Social norms are fickle. Companionship, like wine, improves with time. Even when planted on the most desolate land, under the most difficult and insidious circumstances, the objury seed of companionship sprouts and blossoms. Matchmaking is made in heaven, goes the old Jewish adage. But Jewish matchmakers in centuries past were not averse to lending the divine a hand. After closely scrutinizing the backgrounds of both candidates, male and female, a marriage was pronounced, arranged and pronounced. In other cultures, marriages are still being arranged by prospective or actual fathers, without asking for the embryos or toddlers consent. The surprising fact is that arranged marriages last much longer than marriages which are the heavy outcomes of romantic love. Fact. Moreover, the longer a couple cohabitates prior to their marriage, they hire the likelihood of divorce. Counter-intuitively, romantic love and cohabitation, getting to know each other better, are negative precursors. They have a negative correlation, negative predictors of marital longevity. Companionship grows out of friction and interaction within an irreversible formal arrangement. There are no escape closers, no exit strategies. In many marriages where divorce is not an option, legally or due to prohibitive economic or social costs, when divorce is not an option, companionship grudgingly develops and with it contentment, if not happiness. Companionship is the offspring of pity and empathy. It is based on ensured events and fears and common suffering. It reflects the wish to protect and to shield each other from the hardships of life. Companionship is habit for me. If lustful sex is fire, companionship is like old slippers, comfortable, static, useful, warm and secure. The best thing to have in a harsh winter. Experiments and experience show that people in constant touch get attached to one another very quickly and very thoroughly. This is a reflex that has to do with survival. As infants, we get attached to our mothers and our mothers get attached to us. In the absence of social interactions, we die younger. We need to bond and to make others depend on us in order to survive. The mating and later marital cycle is full of euphoria and dysphoria, and these mood swings generate the dynamics of seeking mates, copulating, coupling, getting married and reproducing. The source of these changing dispositions can be found in the meaning that we attach to marriage, which is perceived as a real, irrevocable, irreversible and serious entry into adult society. It's a rite of passage. In previous rites of passage, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, the Christian Communion and more exotic rites elsewhere, these rites of passage prepare us only partially to the shocking realization that we are about to emulate our parents. During the first years of our lives, we tend to view our parents as omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent demigods. Our perception of our parents, of ourselves, of the world is magical. All entities, we and our caregivers included, are entangled, constantly interacting and identity interchanging and shape-shifting. And so this is how we see our parents to start with. At first, therefore, our parents are idealized. Then as we get disillusioned, they are internalized to become the first and most important among the inner voices that guide our lives, our introjects. As we grow up, remember adolescents? We rebel against our parents in the final phases of separation, individuation, identity formation. And then we learn to accept our parents and to resort to them in times of need. But the primordial gods of our infants never die, nor do they lie dormant. They lurk in our super ego, engage in incessant dialogue with the other structures of our personality. Our internalized parents constantly criticize and analyze, make suggestions and reproach. The white noise of these voices is the background radiation of our personal big bank. And thus, to decide to get married, to imitate our parents, is to challenge and tempt the gods, to commit sacrilege, to negate the very existence of our progenitors, to defile the inner sanctum of our formative years, to become our parents, to supplant them. It's getting married is kind of human sacrifice. We're sacrificing our parents by becoming parents. This is a rebellion, some momentous, solid encompassing that it touches upon the very foundation of our personality. Inevitably, we unconsciously shudder in anticipation of the imminent and no doubt horrible punishment that awaits us for this iconoclastic presumptuousness. And this is the first dysphoria which accompanies our mental preparations prior to getting wet. Getting ready to get hitched carries a price tag, the activation of a host of primitive and hitherto dormant defense mechanisms, denial, regression, repression, projection and others. This is a self-induced panic. It is a result of an inner conflict. On the one hand, we know that it is unhealthy to live as recluses, more biologically and psychologically. We shouldn't live alone. It's better to be alone. We are taught. Solitary is fame. With the passage of time, we are urgently propelled to file a debate. On the other hand, there is the above-described feeling of impending doom. And so, we have to go through this phase and having overcome the initial anxiety, having triumphed over our inner tyrants or inner guides, depending on the character of the primary objects of the parents, and to overcome our parents. We go through a short euphoric phase, celebrating their rediscovered individuation and separation. We are separate now. We have really become adults. By getting married, we affirm that we are no longer our parents, that we have separated, become individuals and others. Re-invigorated, we feel ready to court and woo prospective mates. But our conflicts are never really put to rest. They merely lie dormant. Married life is a terrifying right to passage in itself. Many react to it by limiting themselves to familiar, knee-jerk behavior patterns and reactions. Many ignore or dim their true emotions and gradually these marriages are hollowed out and they wither. Some seek solace in resorting to other frames of reference, the terra cognita of one's neighborhood, country, language, race, culture, language, background, profession, social stratum or education, anything familiar. Belonging to these groups imbues people with feelings of security and firmness. And many combine both solutions. More than 80% of marriages take place among members of the same social class, same profession, same race, same creed, same breed. This is not a chance statistic. It reflects choices, conscious and more often unconscious. We seek the same. We seek the familiar. We seek to remain in our family of origin by creating a family that reflects the family of origin, that imitates it, that is a facsimile of it. The next anti-climatic dysphoric phase transpires when our attempts to secure the consent of a mate are met with success, with success, multi-failure. Daydreaming is easier and more gratifying than the dreariness of realized goals. Maintained routine is the enemy of love and of optimism, where dreams end harsh reality intrudes with its uncompromising demands. And so securing the consent of one's future spouse forces one to tread an irreversible and increasingly challenging path. One's imminent marriage requires not only emotional investment, but also economic and social ones. Many people fear commitments and feel trapped, shackled or even threatened. Marriage suddenly seems like a dead end. Even those eager to get married entertain occasional and nagging doubts and numerous cold feet. The strength of these negative emotions depends, to a very large extent, on the parental role models and on the kind of family life experience in the family of origin. The more dysfunctional the family of origin, the earlier and usually only available example, the more overpowering the sense of entrapment and the resulting paranoia and backlash. People sometimes decompensate and act out minutes before the wedding. But most people overcome this stage fright and proceed to formalize the relationship by getting married or committing. This decision, this leap of faith, is the corridor which leads to the palatial home of post-snapchial euphoria. This time the euphoria is mostly a social reaction, not an individual one. The newly conferred statutes of just married bears a cornucopia of social rewards and incentives. Some of them enshrined in legislation, economic benefits, social approval, familial support, the envious reactions of others, expectations and joys of marriage, freely available sex, having children, lack of parental and societal control, newly experienced freedoms, all these foster another magic about or feeling omnipotent. It feels good, it feels empowering to control one's newfound labors home. One's living space, one's powers, one's life, it fosters self-confidence, self-esteem grows, it helps to regulate one's sense of self-worth. It is a manic phase, everything seems possible now that one is left to one's own devices and is supported by one's mate. It seems that you've made it. With luck and the right partner, this frame of mind can be prolonged. However, as life's disappointments accumulate, obstacles mount, a possible sorted out from the improbable, and time passes inexorably, this euphoria usually abates. The reserves of energy and determination dwindle. Gradually one slides into an all-pervasive dysphoric, even unhedonic or depressed mood. The routines of life, its mundane attributes, the contrast between fantasy and reality, all these erode the first burst of exuberance. Life looks more like a life sentence. This anxiety sours the relationship. One tends to blame one's powers for one's atrophy. People with alloplastic defenses and external locus of control, they blame others for their defeats and failures. Narcissists do, psychopaths do. Thoughts of breaking free, thoughts of going back to the parental nest, of revoking the marriage. These thoughts become more frequent in this phase. It is, at the same time, frightening and exhilarating. It's a prospect that people entertain. And again, panic sets in. Conflict raises its ugly head. Cognitive dissonance abounds in a turmoil leads to irresponsible, self-defeating, self-destructive behaviors. A lot of marriages end here in what is known as the seven-year itch. And next awaits parenthood, if the couple survives. Many marriages survive only because of the presence of common offspring. These are parental marriages. One cannot become a parent unless and until one eradicates the internal traces of one's own parents. One must make room for one's children by removing one's parents, removing them. This necessary patricy, matricy, and they're unavoidable, they're painful, and they cause great trepidation. But the completion of this crucial phase is rewarding all the same. And it leads to feelings of renewed vigor, newfound optimism, a sensation of omnipotence, a reawakening of other traces of magical thinking. It's like once you get rid of your parents, you can finally make new life. In the quest for an outlet, a way to relieve anxiety at boredom, both members of the couple, providing they still possess the wish to save the marriage, hit upon the same idea, but from different directions. The woman, partly because of social and cultural conditioning, during the socialization process, she finds bringing children to the world an attractive and efficient way of securing the bond, cementing the relationship, transforming it into a long-term commitment. Pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are perceived as the ultimate manifestations of the woman's femininity. The main reaction to childbirth is more compounded. At first, he perceives the child, at least unconsciously, as another restraint, likely to only drag him deeper into the courtmar. The man's dysphoria deepens and matures into full-fledged panic. Even someone who is happy with his forthcoming child has this panic. It then subsides. It gives way to a sense of awe and wonder, a psychedelic feeling of being part parent to the child and part child to his own parents. The birth of the child in the first stages of development only serve to entrench this time warp impression like time trouble. Raising children is a difficult task. It is time and energy consuming. It is emotionally taxing. It denies the parent, his, or her privacy, intimacy, and needs. The newborn represents a full-blown traumatic crisis with potentially devastating consequences. It's no wonder that a big percentage of mothers go into postpartum depression. The strain of the relationship is enormous. It either completely crumbles, breaks down, or is revived by the novel challenges and hardships. A euphoric period of collaboration and reciprocity of mutual support and increasing love follows the childbirth. Everything else pays besides a little miracle. The child becomes a center of narcissistic projections, hopes and fears. So much is vested and invested in the infant that initially the child gives so much in return that it blots away the daily problems, tedious routines, failures, disappointments, and aggravations of every normal relationship. It's like the glow of the child obscures the darkness in the relationship. But the child's role is temporary. The more autonomous the child becomes, the more knowledgeable, the less innocent, the less rewarding and the more frustrating the child is. As toddlers become adolescents, many couples fall apart, the members having grown up, developed separately, and are estranged. The stage is set for the next major dysphoria, the midlife crisis. Midlife crisis is a colloquial term. It's a clinical entity. It's essentially a crisis of reckoning, of inventory taking, disillusionments, saying goodbye to dying parents, the realization of one's own mortality. We look back to find how little we have accomplished, how short the time we have left, how unrealistic our expectations have been, how alienated we have become, how ill-equipped we are to cope, and how irrelevant and unhelpful our marriages are. To the disenchanted midlife, his life is a fake, a Potemkin village, a facade behind which rot and corruption have consumed his vitality. And this seems to be the last chance to recover lost ground, last chance to strike one more time, invigorated by other people's youth, a young lover, one students or colleagues, one's own children, invigorated by this youth, one tries to recreate one's life in a vain attempt to make amends and to avoid the same mistakes. This crisis is exacerbated by the emptiness syndrome. Children grew up, they leave the parents home. A major topic of consensus and a catalyst of interactions disappears. Children are gone. What are we going to talk about? What are we going to plan for? What are the common goals? The vacuity of the relationship engendered by the termites of a thousand marital discourse is revealed. And so this wholeness, this emptiness can be filled with empathy and mutual support, but it rarely is. Most couples discover that they had lost faith in their powers of rejuvenation and that their togetherness is buried and the remountain of grudges regrets sorrows and disappointments. They both want out and out they go. The majority of those who do remain married revert to cohabitation, their roommates rather than love, to coexistence rather than to experimentation, to arrangements of convenience rather than to an emotional revival. And it is a said and sorry site. A biological decay sets in, the couple heads into the ultimate dysphoria, aging and death. Even so and even until then, many couples, the dysfunctions in many couples, set in very early. Sexless relationships have acquired pandemic proportions. Legions of sex-starved people roam the streets foraging for the ever dwindling numbers of the sexually active. These few remnants of virility and femininity end up with ravenous harems or ravenous legions of lovers who's morally conflicted inmates reluctantly seek extramarital intimacy and romance. Most men now prefer pornography and it's solitary aftermath. They regard modern female company a very dubious pleasure. The price is not worth the price. The price is not worth the price. How have we come to this? Modern men is a narcissistic, porn addicted misfit. Women have banished men from their lives. They raise their children alone. They educate their offspring on their own. 90% of teachers are female. They are way more accomplished academically and they are breaching all the remaining glass ceilings forcefully. Men are on the retreat, hiding in cyber caves, self-medicating perilously, assiduously avoiding the dual threats of intimacy and sex with women. Their new find found nemesis. It is war and all the sides in it are losing it. Women in sexless, loveless marriages often behave like single women. They go out alone, they travel alone, they drink alone in bars, they associate with single women. I call this kind of women virtual singles. These women, even married, send out signals, broadcasts which are identical to the signals of single women. Men pick up on these signals and they respond to them powerfully by aggressively quoting the virtual signal, a single, by sexualizing her behavior and by reducing her to a sex object, normal. Additionally, other women react to virtual singles with resentment and fear because they consider them to be predatory. Every woman in the company of a virtual single is afraid that the virtual single will seduce her husband and abscond or elope with him, steal him away from her. All the men around the virtual single assume that she is available for sex. She is a whore, a slut. The majority of women in the world still live in male dominated patriarchal societies, replete with sex aversion, male chauvinism, misogyny and fear of feminine sexuality. Such a societal mindset is the effluence of backward religiosity, oppressive economic and legal circumstances, and in some parts of the globe, a numerical surplus of women over men, for example in Russia. Women in such environments encounter the same problems as women everywhere. Loveless and sexless marriages, pay gaps, glass ceilings, sexual harassment, economic hardship. Women react in largely the same ways. They resort to lovers, for example, or they enter the workforce or they focus on their offspring. But there are major differences too. Women in patriarchal societies are fierce supporters and defenders of the social order and its attendant values of male superiority. Men are expected to be the primary breadwinners and providers, the sole decision makers, the leaders. Women are eminence glace, the power behind the throne and behind the scenes. Western mores and solutions to intergender problems are frowned upon as both decadent and unworkable, destructive and dangerous. And honestly, when you look at the record in the West, it's pretty understandable. I would have rejected it as well. In traditionalist cultures, women channel their rebellion and are passive, aggressive and manipulative, rather than being openly defined. In such societies, men initiate divorces, not women. By comparison in the West, as I said, most divorces are the initiative of disgrunking and disheartened women. Even women who maintain long-term extramarital affairs bear children only to their strange, alienated, hateful and hated husbands. Most businesses are family or in patriarchal societies. The family however dysfunction is sacred and organising principle and renders life itself meaningful. All this in patriarchal, traditionalist, conservative societies. So most women in these so-called backward communities lead double lives. They are hidden or cult inner world to which they retreat. They are unhealthily and insetiously obsessed with their children. Hormor-eroticism between women in these societies is rife and rampant. Some of these women find love with other men, but never as viable options or substitutes to husband or family. They lead compartmentalized, sad, tragic lives. We tend to think of the more recent conventions of our times as eternal. Nothing is further from the truth. Even extreme practices such as incest were once condoned and codified, for example in ancient Egypt. Hormosexuality was an integral part of the education of young men in the Greek world. And similarly adultery was the bone tone in the High Middle Ages, especially in southern France and Sicily. It was called amour-côtois, courtly love. Knights, errands, troubadours would court married noble women and dedicate to them acts of chivalry and reams of romantic and explicitly erotic poetry. The affairs did not remain platonic, but were always public. Between the 17th and the 90th centuries, in places like France and Russia, having a lover was as natural as having husband or wife, plus the change. And so we ask ourselves, why do some people end up with drop-dead gorgeous, considerably younger women? The two major lies in modern education. One, if you only put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. Not true. Most people can't. Number two, there are no leagues and therefore no one is out of your league. Well, here's the newsflash. There are leagues and you're likely to end up being married to someone who is in your league, as shares your attributes. Your children will wind up even worse off. Social class and status are uncompromisingly harsh and rigid, cross-generational realities. This is known as the matching hypothesis. People end up in committed relationships with partners who are equally socially desirable or undesirable. This politically incorrect tenet of social psychology has been around since 1966. Look it up, matching hypotheses. The whole phenomenon is natural, in other words genetic. It's called assortative mating. Like mate with like, the rich, the powerful, and well-educated tend to intermarry. Look up homogamy. So if she is a traffic-stopping beauty, has money, and her shoes cost more than your annual income, don't bother with her. You may end up banging her as her entertainment du jour, but it will never amount to anything more serious and she will dump you the second you ask for more or begin to bore her. Toys and pets should never aspire to usurp their owners. Know your place, boy? Marriages are never damaged by love affairs. Love affairs are frequently damaged by marriages, actually. For a love affair to have occurred, the marriage must have already been in serious trouble. The affair, the act of cheating, only brings the rot in the marriage to light. So a love affair rarely harms a marriage more than it is already hurting. But marriages do put an end to love affairs. Surprisingly, few cheaters actually divorce to marry their lovers. The exact figures is three percent, three percent. When forced to choose between their lover and their spouse, the overwhelming majority choose the spouse, regardless of how dysfunctional, abusive, dead, and acrimonious the marriage is. Moreover, even on the rare occasions that an affair leads to a divorce, it is even rarer for the illicit liaison to survive the divorce. The erstwhile paramours drift apart and find new powers, untainted by memories of deceit and heartbreak. So, extramarital dalliances are nothing but symptoms of an already dying marriage. But even a dying marriage has the power to decimate most exciting and happy dalliance. Contrary to appearances, women mostly prefer, as I said before, and I'm again referring you to all the links in the pinned comment. Pinned comment on my video which deals with what's called the Manosphere. One thing I neglected to mention in that video is that there's a tiny, tiny minority of women who self-style sapio-sexuals. Sapio-sexuals are people who are sexually turned on and attracted to intelligents. And so there's this self-identification as a sapio-sexual. In the 1950s, Albert Einstein was a rock star and a sex symbol. Marilyn Monroe wanted to bedding. Nowadays, these roles are reserved to brawny footballers, not brainiac nerds. The very word sapio-sexual reflects the malaise of our age. It is a pretentious molestation of a Latin verb. It is about poséo-nescient appearance. It's ignorance. It's not true substance of erudition. Why is sapio-sexuality going extinct? Three reasons. Malignant egalitarianism and truthiness imply that everyone is at least as intelligent, at least as capable, at least as knowledgeable and as an expert, as everyone else about every subject under the sun. Why? Because they have a smartphone and can access Wikipedia. A soundbite, 144 characters, only scheming and browsing mentality resulted in the amputated truncation of our attention span. We have no time for true learning because it requires more than 10 seconds and the suspension of both dichotomous thinking and grandiose fantasies of omniscience. And finally, in a hook-up and celebrity culture, emphasis shifted to looks. The only information instantly accessible as a foundation for sexual decision-making is how the person looks. Narcissistic and histrionic preoccupation with image and appearances precludes the deep dives, which are a prerequisite to appreciating the mind in all its splendid complexity and attractiveness. Another topic I would like to, another question that was raised by you and I would like to tackle is why do second and third marriages end in a divorce much more often than first marriages? I think it's because beyond a certain age, that if I'm to 45 would be my guess, women and men are irreparably, irreparably damaged goods. I think people beyond the age of 45 are damaged, broken. They carry with them baggage from previous relationships that renders them incapable of maintaining functional new ones. There's hurts, there's abuse, there's grievances, lack of closure, fears, unresolved conflicts, and the narcissistic defenses that always elicit. And these are the scarred residues infestering detritus, debris of previous botched marriages and painful liaisons. Happened by such emotional mayhem, men and women crave long-term intimacy, companionship, and love, but disabled as they are by their past, they settle for horrid sex and fleeting flings, strewn across the arid Sahara that their lives had become. Before capitalism in the pre-industrial world, one survival depended on the extended family, the clan, friends, community, social skills, social skills, teamwork, communication, empathy, reciprocity, altruism, and integrative networking. They determined one's outcomes in life and one's happiness, they determined one's life, one's very survival. By shifting the emphasis to one's job and money, we made survival contingent of the technologically empowered individual in an atomized lonely world. Relative positioning became the goal of life and its meaning. Social media reified this shift in emphasis. This breakdown in collaborative coexistence within fanatic, dead societies bodes ill as far as our species goes, everything from procreation to recreation, from production to reproduction. Everything depends on reverting to communal modes of interaction that we seem incapable of reversing the deleterious trends that are tearing us apart and pitting us against each other. We have reached an age where objects are far preferable to human beings. It's our civilization is fanatic, we live in a death cult, a gigantic death cult, and the religion is consumption, and we react to our own commodification with narcissistic defenses. Hey, see me, I'm alive, notice me, I'm a human being, I'm special, I have something to say to you. The more we shout, the more we out shout. The more we shout, the less we are heard. Everyone is trying to shout louder about them. All our institutions are falling apart because of this. Marriage, the interaction between men and women is critically dependent on honest, proper communication that gets true, that is understood. What's the chance of that in today's world? What's the chance of that in our renebrated singles bars where everyone is so drunk that they don't remember the other's name, where sex is emotionless, anonymous, impersonal, mutual masturbation? What's the chance of that? Yes, you get it right. Zero.