Down below, Derek takes issue with my advice to young brothers.
I tell marriage minded young men to wait on the wedding, until they are psychologically ready, sexually disciplined, and financially stable. Derek disagrees. He encourages young men to marry as early as they can, regardless of their immaturity, and despite a lack of money. Derek writes:
You know that a man of 25 has worse odds of achieving marriage than a man of 20. That’s just basic probability. It’s false to claim otherwise.
Derek clearly doesn’t believe in hypergamy. It makes no difference. Hypergamy is a social reality. Hypergamy is the reason that guys like Derek show off their “trophy” wives at parties. The unspoken assumption is that he must be somebody important, given that he bagged a girl who looked like all that.
Let’s return to our scenario, and compare the two men postulated above. Let’s assume that our brothers are both broadminded, and each will accept a woman a full year older than he is. In that scenario, the young man of 25 has a pool of all the unmarried women, aged 18-26, available to choose from. A young man at 20 has a pool of all the unmarried women, aged 18-21, to choose from. The 25-year old has a much larger pool of eligible females to work with. Thus the “basic probability” of finding a suitable mate is easy to estimate for each, with the 25-year old having a much greater likelihood of successful coupling.
Let’s put this aside for a moment, and talk about another important reason that a man should wait to marry, until he is at least 25. That reason is hypergamy.
Hypergamy is an overused word in the sphere, but it is well-defined as the practice of women seeking to “marry up.” The hypergamous nature of human females is incredibly consistent. In every human society, from the beginning of recorded history, there has always been a general, instinctive drive by women to mate with someone in an equal or greater dominance-caste.
I figured out a way to host pdf files on this shithole, and here’s my first attempt. This is a very accessible primer on hypergamy:
Elizabeth Cashdan, Women’s Mating Strategies
If you are a male who is seen as successful, then the probability that you will have mating opportunities is exceptionally high. Accelerated social status (i.e. a good wage and a degree) is an incredibly good predictor of one’s ability to find a suitable mate.
Now, when I was 18-19, I saw hypergamy up close, and I won’t forget it. While I occasionally got with chicks who were my age, it became clear that these girls were using me as a sexual stop-gap. I was useful, until the hot 26-year old guy with the law degree got serious.
I was a dumb little fucker, and I made a habit of getting attached to these girls, who dumped my ass the minute they got commitment from the older guy who was a good earner.
It’s quite possible that the 26-year old guy had an even smaller penis than I did. It was certainly true that most of them were shorter than I was. Many of them had visible physical flaws. It didn’t matter. They all had something I didn’t: resources.
While 19-year old me occasionally got the substandard outliers of the 19-year old female population, that kid never, ever got a hot 24-year old to pay him any attention. Those were the women that he lusted after. They didn’t even talk to him.
Protip: I still lust after the hot 24-year olds, and today I fuck them with regularity.
Now, if I could go back in time, I probably wouldn’t. Those years of dejection made me a much sharper player. Even so, if I did go back in time, and talked to my younger self, I’d have sat down with little me, and forced him (at knifepoint, probably) to read Dr. Cashdan’s paper. I’d have then told him to do exactly what he ended up doing anyway, which was to be cool, get as much education as he could, and quit crying tears over the endless string of skanks who were fucking and chucking him. At some point, that guy became 27 himself, and many of the same skanks who spat on him at 19 suddenly reappeared, once he bought his first house and had some disposable income.
I realized, at about that time, how lucky I was that I had been dumped by all these hoez. A large minority of them had already been married and divorced, and a few of them had bastard kids that their ex-husbands were paying for. That could have been me. If it were, I’d never have achieved my educational and career goals, and would surely be living in poverty today.
Not only did I have the opportunity to fuck many of the same sluts who didn’t look at me, when I was a few years younger. I also had their fresher, hotter 24-year old sisters on offer. Those girls were stupid, flatchested little kids when I was 19. When I turned 27, they were ripe and ready to go.
If you are a dejected 19-year old today, you need to quit worrying about the sluts who ghost out on you. Many of them will ride your dick for a while, and a large number of these will try to fill your head up with lies about how much they love you. Take the sex, but don’t sweat the ones who switch seats on the carousel. Instead, focus on learning about the men they reject you for. In every case you’ll see men who have college degrees, and the potential for good earnings. You need to pour all the energy you previously spent on Skanky Stacie into a concerted effort in becoming like that guy.
If you want to get married, you’ll be much more likely to find a marriageable woman at 27, than you were at 19. Hypergamy dictates as much. Be patient and focused, and say “no” to the ho’!
Waiting until you finish your education to marry is not reasonable for many men. Sometimes you just need to find a women you fall in love with and take a risk. Many people in medicine or even graduate programs in the sciences (BA, maybe Masters, PhD, post-doc then first job at 28-32) would be waiting a very long time to date seriously. If you don’t care about chastity this doesn’t matter as much, but if you are a Christian that does you are setting yourself up for a very difficult task.
You and Derek are talking past each other. The question of when to marry optimally is not easy from a probability view. Derek’s formulation is something like this: marriage is a random event that takes place with mostly equal probability sometime between the ages of 21-50. Using that formulation every year not married decreases probability because some of your chances have disappeared. You have defined the pool of eligible people differently and so get different results.
Both of you could be right or wrong on the actual outcome depending on how complicated you want to make it. For example if you want to marry a virgin than get married young as the pool of women who are virgins and would consider marrying a man their age + x is small and getting smaller as your age increases. Also as you get older you may change environments where you have the ability to meet such women. There will be some in undergrad, and few in graduate school.
Or how about if there is a certain quality of girl you want to marry? Say, a girl that has a certain level of education? There are no girls with masters degrees in HS, but you will meet more as you get older. There are also competing probabilities on quality as many of the best women you are interested in may be getting married away the longer you wait. In some sub cultures this is a very serious problem. You can assume that every female 18-21 is equally fine with marrying a 26 year old, but I doubt that is true (but I have no data). My guess is their is some early resistance to marrying older men for women when they are young and their perceived pool increases as they age (the average 18 yo might only consider men as old as 21 while the average 30 year old might consider a man that is 45).
My only point is the issue is not trivial from a probability standpoint despite hypergamy so the better point is to accept hypergamy not resolve the issue with claims of probability.