Exploring Marriage: Consent vs. Arrangement

In this episode, Malcolm Collins delves into the game theory of gender dynamics and explores how different societies have handled gender roles, using historical context and data-driven analysis. He discusses the primary problem marriage solves—the prolonged dependency of human offspring—and compares human and chimpanzee productivity graphs. Malcolm reviews a piece by Arctotherium titled 'Human Reproduction as a Prisoner's Dilemma: The Decline of Marriage in the West,' offering insights into adversarial reproductive strategies and varying historical gender cooperation models. He highlights the consequences of modern shifts in societal norms, including unilateral divorce and welfare state implications on marriage and gender dynamics. The episode concludes with a conversation on the reasons behind declining marriage rates and the broader societal impacts. Tags: #GenderDynamics #GameTheory #MarriageDecline #SocialNorms #HistoricalContext #ReproductiveStrategies #WelfareState #DivorceRates

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Malcolm Collins: This is Malcolm Collins. Today we are going to be exploring the game theory of gender dynamics. How different societies have dealt with the game theory of gender dynamics. Multiple local optimums. So we're not just going to argue that pure Monogamy is the only local optimum and we're going to be using lots and lots of data to do this.

And we're going to be exploring this through a piece that I thought was very well done by Aporia, one of the best magazines out there. They've gotten in trouble a lot with Hope Not Hate, which is how you know they're good. This piece is written by Arctotherium. And it's titled, Human Reproduction as a Prisoner's Dilemma, The Decline of Marriage in the West.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the title doesn't suggest that things are moving in a great direction for

Malcolm Collins: marriage. Well, no, they're not, but I think solving the marriage problem is a big segment of the way to solving the population problem.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: I think [00:01:00] he lays this out with data in a way that is clearer than I had thought.

other people lay it out and brings up a few of the less obvious problems. If you're only looking at this from a modern context of what's wrong with the dating markets, instead of looking at a historic context. So let's dive into it. Simone get started here with this graph. I'll put on screen.

Simone Collins: The core problem marriage exists to solve is that it takes almost 20 years and an enormous amount of work and resources to raise children. And he shows this graph.

Malcolm Collins: Which it compares humans and chimpanzees in terms of the net productivity of humans and the net productivity of chimps over their lifetime.

Simone Collins: . The caption reads, In hunter gatherer societies, it takes almost 20 years for the average person to become a net producer of food. Until then, they are dependent on others, mostly their parents, who have a direct genetic stake in their survival. The numbers are similar for agrarian societies.

Malcolm Collins: Is, is this Up and [00:02:00] down line here is the amount of food that an individual is producing over their lifetime, or their net productivity.

So you see in humans, if you're looking at hunter gatherers, they don't end up net producers of food until they're around the age of 19. And then they shoot way up and they're like huge producers of food compared to chimps. Whereas chimps actually become food neutral at around the age of five and they go up almost immediately.

It appears that this period where chimps are lower because it immediately snaps to like, I'm a net producer of food at the age of five. But I don't contribute to the tribe yet is the period of which they are just like cling mode to mom because it's not going up and down. And then after that, at the age.

of a little under 15. They start producing for the tribe. My guess is this is just when they reach sexual maturity and start caring for children of their own.

Simone Collins: He continues, this makes human reproduction analogous to a prisoner's dilemma. Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other [00:03:00] options.

In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment. Defection. If human reproduction is analogous to a prisoner's dilemma, what does defection look like? A natural consequence of sexual reproduction is adversarial reproductive strategies. Females must expend significant biological resources, but can be certain of maternity, which allows maternal investment to pay off as soon as a child is born.

Males don't need to spend much biologically, but can't be certain of paternity. Making parental investment inherently risky by default. This leads to two idealized strategies that maximize the benefits for each sex in humans. The idealized male strategy is to have as many wives slash exclusive sex partners as he can afford plus opportunistic extra pair couplings consensual or otherwise the idealized female strategy.

Is to secure investment from a man while retaining the option to trade up for a more attractive man at any time plus opportunistic hidden extra pair couplings [00:04:00] with attractive men,

Malcolm Collins: both of these strategies, I assume most of our audience will understand what he means by that and see that as obviously true.

This is just like, obviously the genetically favorable thing for both parties. It is a

Simone Collins: truth universally acknowledged. Both of these strategies greatly damage the interests of the opposite sex. Cuckoldry is equivalent to death for a man from a Darwinian perspective. And in evolutionary environments requiring paternal investment, abandonment is equivalent to death for a woman.

Losing decades of youth and all of the resources invested in a pairing is devastating for both.

Malcolm Collins: So all of this, I think, is just laying out what we all know is true, like the obvious prisoner's dilemma that all couples are facing. Now he goes into the different strategies that people have chosen to deal with this in a historic context.

Simone Collins: Men defect, slash, women cooperate. A defect slash [00:05:00] cooperate society in which men act to secure the collective interests of their sex without regard to those of women looks like Meiji Japan, which was monogamous, or early 20th century Arabia, which was polygamous. In these societies, women are effectively property.

Divorce is common, Meiji Japan had the highest divorce rate of any country with records in the world, and devastating to women, who lose their children, economic status, virginity, and youth.

Malcolm Collins: So if you look at this chart here, which I find really interesting, it shows that in late 19th century Japan, they divorce rates several times higher than those of Northwestern Europe or the Anglosphere.

And these are really high. The divorce rates of Japan of this period are higher than what America's was in like the 1950s. Which is absolutely wild. Most countries did not reach this until you get around, let's say, 1950s, 1960s. And what this means is they can be like, okay, what does he mean that this [00:06:00] is an ideal situation in both Saudi Arabia and Japan if Japan was a monogamous society during this period?

What he's saying is these men functionally have multiple wives. So Because in Saudi Arabia, they just literally have a harem of wives that they're breeding with simultaneously in Meiji, Japan, which you may have is you are a rich man, you marry or just upper society man, given how frequent divorces were here you marry, you know, one girl when you're, you know, 18 and you stay married to her until she 30.

Or 35 and not producing kids as easily. You just marry the next wife. Then when she hits 30, you just marry the next wife. Basically who's the actor who does that, but doesn't have kids? Leonardo

Simone Collins: DiCaprio.

Malcolm Collins: Leonardo DiCaprio ing it. That's what they were doing in Meiji Japan.

Simone Collins: Thank God. He continues, however, a simple comparison of divorce rates between different marriage regimes is misleading since divorce is at the whim of the husband in defect slash cooperate societies, men are free to invest [00:07:00] in their family and children, which is not true in societies where men can lose their families against their will.

Furthermore. Paternal certainty in defect slash cooperate societies is guaranteed, which means such societies can be highly functional, especially when they have monogamy to reduce male , sexual competition. Meiji Japan was phenomenally successful economically, demographically, and territorially until destroyed by an overwhelming outside force.

Malcolm Collins: So this is really interesting. What he's pointing out here is so when you have a prisoner's dilemma, there are two strategies, right? Which is to say, or sort of three potential outcomes. No, I'll reword that. Sorry for potential outcomes. Both sites cooperate. Both sites defect. Or one side defects, whichever one it is here.

What he's showing is a side in which societally everyone basically agrees that males are defecting. That is what is happening in polygynous cultures where they are hurting the women's outcome and like, say, Saudi Arabia, where they take on [00:08:00] tons of different wives or in majority Japan, where they dispose of a wife.

The moment she's no longer reproductive age. That is hugely deleterious for women, but when men socially make this choice, which is deleterious for women, those societies stay competitive on a geopolitical scene,

Simone Collins: which is

Malcolm Collins: really fascinating.

Simone Collins: That is interesting. Depressing. Unfortunately,

Malcolm Collins: while men might be the disposable gender even within these societies, because more men in Saudi Arabia and in Meijing, Japan are actually disposable.

Like the lower category of men that's not breeding at all is larger in the societies where male defection, these are not better societies for men. These are better societies for the very best men.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is a very, very small number. It's like maybe 20 percent of men or, or less are getting all the benefit.

Yeah. But basically most men are worse off and most women are worse off. Most men are

Malcolm Collins: worse off and most women are worse off, but they appear to function. That is not true of the [00:09:00] men defect, women defect condition or the women defect condition.

This is something that always gets me when men laud men who go into these men defect women cooperate relationships, like, say, Andrew Tate, where they'll have, like, 5 or 6 different women that are supposedly producing their children, in that these scenarios actively hurt. Average and below average men, the very men who are often looking up to these individuals who are betraying them as much as they are betraying the women that they are in a relationship with.

To laud this behavior is to cuck yourself, Because ultimately this behavior, when normalized, cucks a large percentage of males in a society.

Let's go into men defect, women defect.

Simone Collins: Yes, as Arctotherium describes it, a defect defect society looks like the most primitive parts of sub Saharan Africa or the Amazon rainforest.

Women sleep around while adult men [00:10:00] prey on women and children and regularly kill each other for access to women. As men have multiple wives and wives are not loyal, there is no respite from intra sexual competition. You can always be replaced. And he includes a graph here

Malcolm Collins: among Himba of Southern Africa, the vast majority of married men and women have extra sexual pair partners and 48 percent of Children are not the husbands.

That is wildly high percent reporting extra pair partners. If you look at the 15 to 25 range for men, it's a hundred percent. For women, it's over 75%. So they're around 80 percent of the 26 to 35 range. Again, men, a hundred percent for women over 75% the 36 to 46 range men. over 75 percent women over 75%.

That is wild. During your entire reproductive life cycle. You are for around 75 percent of people sleeping with other partners

Simone Collins: when you're not incentivized to invest in the future, to think long term [00:11:00] as Arctotherium rights without paternal Certainty men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing, or resting rather than working.

Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action. In war, they shatter like glass when faced with an enemy that expect chastity and fidelity from women. He shows a graph then of ethnicities and historic plow use, noting that defect defect societies tend to be ones without a history of plow and plow use pre 1500.

Plow agriculture requires male labor to sustain a family, which meant that groups that didn't enforce paternity certainly could not survive. Defect defect societies are reliably the poorest, most technologically backwards, and most violent. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. When, when, when It's almost like a tragedy of the commons issue of just like, why would I invest in anything?

Why would I not just try to take

Malcolm Collins: the commons issue? This is the issue of socialized land use. So [00:12:00] what a lot of people don't realize is one of the biggest problems with socialized land use, like the government giving you a property. And we saw this in a lot of communist countries is when people do not own a property, there is no advantage to improving that property.

Right. And so what you saw in these communist countries is that people's houses would fall apart. They would even like partially strip them of valuable materials themselves They became like dust piles really quickly Where in countries where they gave people houses to own and then potentially sell in the future what people did to those houses was?

Work to improve them because that improves their value. If you own property in the U S like even if you inherit it, even if you get it for free, you have a value in one maintaining and to improving that property. This is what we're seeing at the level of a family. If your family is like a net cost to you, like I know I'm going to be with my wife in 20 years or 30 years.

I have a reason to [00:13:00] work to both improve my relationship with her. If we're having some level of discord and to improve her as a human being, as a mother, as an employable asset in our society, et cetera, and you have a motivation to do that for me as well. In these other societies, there is no motivation.

Simone Collins: I really want to double click on this point when there's no reason to invest in the core thing that a human owns, their family, Then it makes sense to spend your life optimizing for in the moment recreation. And what are the forms of recreation that you can access with no accumulated resources? It's dancing, fighting, and resting. And that's why you see that so much in these societies.

And it's something we're beginning to see more within our own society as people become more sexually promiscuous and less stable in their relationships.

However, in our society, [00:14:00] because the resources needed to access different forms of recreation are lower, this can appear like playing lots of video games. I'd also note that this Tendency to invest in a family or, you know, a woman that you own or kids that you own is likely why there's a big boost to earnings both when a man is married and again when they have children.

Because men in those scenarios just have less motivation to rest and more motivation to invest.

Even in the cooperate defect where men would leave women. Those wives probably had very little incentive to invest in their husbands and help to build up their careers, probably knowing that their husbands would drop them, like, and in those

Malcolm Collins: societies that worked because women were largely unproductive.

Anyway, as economic assets. So it didn't matter that the husbands were [00:15:00] not attempting to improve them. One of those societies would likely be curb stomped by a modern, truly monogamous society. Yeah. Just technologically and economically if they went to war. But if that. Other society is captured by the woke mind virus or something like that.

It's irrelevant because they are just not going to like the, the bureaucracies are going to suffocate them.

So this is really interesting of how bad you get as a society when you hit a boast defect condition.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: intergenerationally speaking.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but let's get to the good, the good one. Men cooperate, women cooperate.

Arctotherium writes, the Western solution to the prisoner's dilemma can be summarized as follows. One, monogamy. Two, marriage by mutual consent. Three high standards of premarital chastity, especially for women and fidelity for divorce is difficult. The marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved.

And [00:16:00] five men materially support their wives and children. Let's deal with each pillar. In turn, Monogamy. Polygamy is a natural attractor state for humans since it satisfies the desires of powerful men to have multiple wives and the desires of women to have elite husbands. Monogamy requires both elite men and many women to sacrifice their desires.

In exchange, it provides strong checks on negative sum intersexual competition. Powerful married men are not constantly on the lookout for another wife and can devote their efforts to other pursuits, while less powerful men, who would be shut out of marriage in a polygamous society, have fewer evolutionary incentives to stab their compatriots in the back.

The result is a much more cohesive and powerful society, but it's not just male coordination that benefits from monogamy. As Joseph Heinrich in 2020 notes, it's Quote, because of how monogamous marriage influences social dynamics and cultural evolution, inhibiting female choice [00:17:00] by prohibiting women from freely choosing to marry men who are already married, results in both women and children doing better in the long run on average.

This occurs because of how the social dynamics unleashed by Polygyny influenced household formation, men's psychology, and husband's willingness to invest in their wives and children. End quote. Rather than invest in additional wives, men in monogamous societies invest in their original wife and children, with the result that almost everyone is better off.

Malcolm Collins: So this is what I was saying earlier and it's just a really important point when you quote unquote own your wife, you know, women are like Own your wife There is value or are they like?

Simone Collins: Own your wife

Malcolm Collins: Or or your wife owning you when it's a mutual state of ownership, which is what true monogamy is Oh, i'm, sorry.

This is so There was this song that was sent to us by one of our fans and it is like the worst. It's just a woman complaining and they got like big fans, everyone in the crowd.

Speaker 2: All day, every day, therapist, mother, [00:18:00] maid, nymph, then a virgin, guest, then a servant, just an appendage, lift to attend him, 24 7, baby machine, you make me do too much labor.

Malcolm Collins: And it's like, you cannot have a happy relationship if you don't want to do labor for your husband, because clearly you're describing a scenario where the husband is doing labor for you, like going out working, everything like that, but you are completely unappreciative of this.

When we are both appreciative if whatever relationship you decided works for you. And that's the thing that I think people miss when they try to go like trad was relationships and everything like that is they focus on the wrong parts of trad, they focus on husband does all the work in the factory or, or just whatever to bring home the money.

The wife stays at home, raises the kids. You don't really need to do things that way. There are other ways that things can be done. Lots of other historic ways that things can be done. As we mentioned, Sword and Shield relationships like the Vikings, where the wife manages the farm and does the stable source of [00:19:00] income, and the husband does the reward source of income.

Well, I think

Simone Collins: it's, again, it's more of a fantasy, this idea that the wife isn't Doing work aside from just cooking meals and raising the children, like managing, there's so much more than that. And also assisting a husband in his career is a big part of what I think many who are like people who are seen as housewives are doing.

Well, and that's what

Malcolm Collins: they said, you know, we did an episode on what people used to tell people to look for in a wife. So if you go to like the early Puritan period or something like that, they're always like, make sure your house can manage the household well and manage the servants well, and people hear that.

And they, they think that means like. Cook and clean. It's like, no, like if you look at what's, you know, Sam, Adam's wife is doing

Simone Collins: hiring procurement. They're doing HR. They're doing coaching. They're doing conflict management. They're doing is run the farm.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It means you are running the asset that is producing income.

for the family. That is what it means when they say be able to run the household. Well, that means while the husband is out in [00:20:00] Washington doing his politics stuff, the wife is running the farm, bringing in the income, selling the goods. This is not a woman who isn't productive. The point I'm making here is when you think about traditionalism Monogamy, or meaningful phonogamy, and we'll talk about what that means, is the actual part of traditionalism that works here, which means the husband and the wife persistently own each other.

And yeah, commit to each other. Just commit. Commit. Commit, commit. And I don't even think that this needs to be like, not that sexual or whatever. Like, I, there are some couples I know where the husband and wife are totally committed to others the other, and they have outside sexual relations sometimes.

And people can be like, how is that not breaking this? And it's like, it literally doesn't break any of this. Because what this is about is probability that the kids are the husbands or the wives. Is one partner going to leave the other partner in these scenarios? I'm thinking of that is [00:21:00] not a risk at all.

And so I think that people can misunderstand what the meaningful part of a traditional relationship is, which is owning your wife. And I want that to be clipped out of context. Because when it really is wife owning the husband as well, it is a permanent stake that creates a motivation for investment.

Simone Collins: Well then let's bring this back to reasonableness by pointing out his second pillar, marriage by mutual consent. He writes, this comes from Catholic doctrine, quote, What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder, unquote. And particularly benefits women who cannot be forcibly married against their will.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, but this guy has a huge bias here. There was another piece that we did where it was looking at you can check it out is Asian low fertility genetic. And we point out that if you look at Anglo Saxon courts going into the pre Christian period, there was a strong belief [00:22:00] that you should stay married to whoever you choose to marry.

So the idea of who you choose to marry existed in these territories. Okay. Okay. Pre Catholicism.

And a lot of Catholic areas actually had arranged marriages, as we know from like anyone who has studied royal history of that time period. So I don't like understand what they're going for. My understanding is that the Protestant areas actually had less arranged marriage or less pressured marriage than the Catholic areas.

But whatever the case may be, I don't know, remember

Simone Collins: the podcast we did looking at Scott Alexander's review of the book on the early rise of Christianity talked about how basically like empowering to women Christianity was, you know, it was like, be nice to your wife. Wives matter. Don't kill your children.

I don't know. I see this pretty Catholic to give women. Consent and

Malcolm Collins: avoid. No, but we're, we're talking here about do arranged marriages trump what the family would prefer. And if you're talking about noble arranged

Simone Collins: marriages involve [00:23:00] consent from women, I don't know why people think arranged marriages mean I'm going to force you to marry.

What he's talking about

Malcolm Collins: here is not that this line that he read from the Bible, because I know how this applies, what therefore God has joined together, let no man put us under is not. saying a woman can turn down a guy who her family has chosen for her. It's saying if a woman eloped without the family's knowledge, then she gets to marry that guy.

This is like the shotgun married line. This is not the women can turn down an arranged marriage line. And it was applied pretty liberally. So it did mean that basically you could within even Catholic countries, my understanding, largely speaking, If you wanted to get out of like an arranged marriage or what your family wanted to do, if you eloped with someone, that still counted as marriage.

Simone Collins: Well, okay, leaning back into the more traditional leanings of his five pillars. High standards of premarital chastity, especially for women and fidelity. This ensures two things. First, and most importantly, it ensures paternal certainty and minimizes sexual [00:24:00] jealousy. Second, it makes marriage the gateway to sex, which strongly encourages young people to get themselves into the long term pair bond that is the ideal environment to have and raise children.

Actually, you and I have been talking about this a lot recently, this, this argument that Uncontrolled sex drive is not actually the major driver of birth rates and prenatalism, but we, we, we have talked about the fact that like there are plenty of religions. I think the LDS church is a really good example of this presently that use marriage as the gateway to sex, forcing you to marry younger, which does help with fertility.

Malcolm Collins: It causes people to make. Catastrophically bad decisions about who they marry because they are marrying to gain access to sex and I think that just people need to be much like this This is one. I I actually pretty strongly disagree with i'm not saying that women should sleep around a lot before marriage I don't know because

Simone Collins: sleeping around before marriage also is a it's It's procrastination.[00:25:00]

It's distracting procrastination. Yeah, you should be focused on getting married. Yeah, it's

Malcolm Collins: distracting, I agree. But I think that's a very different motivation than what he's talking about here. Which is the way that some traditional systems used it.

Simone Collins: I mean, I think he's looking at it more from a male perspective, but also throughout the history of, like, Catholicism and Christianity.

It was just well known that men would sleep around a ton and then get married. Like, it didn't really count for men. So

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that is true. We, we, this expectation was from women and I, and there's an expectation. You know, and the way he's writing this here, he knows that he means for women.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But, I, I Well, he writes in parentheses, especially for women when it comes to premarital chastity.

He's explicit about that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I, I do not Think for the game theory as he has laid out. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but for the game series, he has laid out to maintain steady. So long as you have a security around paternity, I do not see this as that much of breaking the entire contract. [00:26:00]

Simone Collins: All right, he continues.

Divorce is difficult. The marriage contract can be created by mutual consent, but cannot be unilaterally dissolved. This allows for greater specialization of labor within the household and greater investment in, quote, relationship capital, end quote, including children. It also shifts the balance of power within the relationship to the more committed partner.

Oh. Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Do you, so this one gets really interesting because he goes into it a bit more and I had never thought of it this way. Is making divorce easy, fits the balance in the relationship to the less committed partner. When, when divorce is easier. Oh, because you can just

Simone Collins: walk away. But why would divorce being harder give more power to the person who's more committed?

Malcolm Collins: Because you're not giving it to the person who's less committed. Yeah, but the less committed

Simone Collins: person can just quiet quit. Like, that's true. I

Malcolm Collins: think, I think what he's thinking of here is he's more focused on his later argument about it, giving power to the less committed partner [00:27:00] when divorce is easier.

And the reality is you can just quiet quit in this situation. It doesn't give more power to the more committed partner. Like if you wanted to leave

Simone Collins: me, but you couldn't, you just be like, well, I'm just going to be a dick to you and I'm not going to help out with anything. And I could do the same. Right.

And that, that doesn't,

Malcolm Collins: it does, at least it does at least not make the situation harder. And I will note to the previous comment when I was like fidelity in women before marriage and I was like, I don't know if that's really necessary to maintain the bargain. Somebody might take that to mean like, oh, he's just justifying his wife slipping around.

Actually, Simone had only ever kissed one person other than me when we first met. Yeah, people are gross.

Simone Collins: I don't think people understand. Like I. I was just talking with Malcolm. I literally wouldn't be married if Malcolm didn't exist in the world. There is only one person in this world for me. I would be, not an incel, I would be an intentionally celibate, never interact with human kind of person.

Well, that's not helpful for people. I know it's not helpful, but I'm just Yeah, like I'm just to clear up anything. The point

Malcolm Collins: I'm [00:28:00] making here is this isn't cope. My wife actually did not, like, she did not sleep with anyone. She did not do anything more than kiss anyone else before meeting me. I am not saying this is cope for me.

And I slept around a lot beforehand. So this is like low male sexual fidelity. I'm just thinking about my own children and like if I told my kids to incredibly heavily discount any potential female partner. Now, I know it does increase the risk of divorce, but I think as soon as you say, I'm not dating women who have slept.

Around before marriage you have so wiped such a large portion of women off the pool in a modern dating market

Simone Collins: Unless you start early

Malcolm Collins: unless you start early. Yeah, but I mean you have got to start really early I think before you have a feeling of how this woman's gonna turn out I i'm really not pro marriage before like 19 I think you really need to reach that age for a woman

Simone Collins: Yeah, but Malcolm, look at the plummeting rates of sex.

The number, the percentage of women who actually haven't had [00:29:00] sex by we'll say age 25, 26 is actually increasing over time. And I, I, I'm not of this hopeless. Now. I'm also not of like it. I don't think that being a virgin is a prerequisite for a good marriage for anyone. And I think they're good arguments, especially for sex before marriage between people who have committed to each other because you kind of want to make sure you're sexually compatible.

I mean, it's not like the most important thing, but It kind of matters to me, like, I'd be really concerned about, you and I had sex once. We had

Malcolm Collins: sex before marriage.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So. But you, you being a San Franciscan, like far lefty when we met, it was not even like a question of if we were going to have sex.

You planned to use me for sex before marriage.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And then never married.

Malcolm Collins: To be

Simone Collins: fair, but yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That was the plan. She wanted you to try sex so she could say she done it and then live alone forever. That was, you, what you wanted to, I was a sex toy to this harlot who [00:30:00] seduced me with her pragmatism and diligence.

Anyway, keep going. Okay,

Simone Collins: where was I? Ah, yes. Okay. Men materially shush, shush, shush, shush. Men materially support their wives and children. They are not expected to provide for children that are not theirs, nor for children born outside of wedlock. If men do not have access to their children, they are not expected to support them unless they are personally at fault.

This should be seen as a contract between the prospective husband and wife. Like any reasonable contract, both parties are giving Something up and getting something in return. I, it seems reasonable.

Malcolm Collins: I wrong agree with the way this is worded here in divorce law and paternal support, which is, I think this another big problem with no fault divorce is a woman can leave a guy, then take the kids and expect.

Support for the children she had with him, which really messes up the dynamics of marriage. I think if a woman like [00:31:00] if a woman is at fault in a divorce, like she was cheating on the man or something, if she expects to have access to the children, the man does not need to pay her at you mean

Simone Collins: exclusive access.

Like if he doesn't get to be around the children, I think

Malcolm Collins: if it's like 50 50 paternity care, like, like childcare, she, she still doesn't get any child.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Well, yeah. If he's shouldering the burden and taking care of the kids. No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: He's not shouldering the burden entirely. This guy is earning more.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. But okay. Yeah. But let's say that. He spends 10 days with the kids and then she spends 10 days with the kids. Then, yeah, no one needs to support anyone else. In

Malcolm Collins: a traditional divorce course, you understand, he still has to pay her. Really? Yes, he has to pay her if he earned more than her. So imagine she was a stay at home wife and he was out as a lawyer or something like that.

And then they get divorced. That's even in the absence of

Simone Collins: kids, though. That's different.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, it's not in the absence of kids because in the absence of kids, you're not paying child support.

Simone Collins: Okay. So this [00:32:00] isn't, you're not talking about alimony or also child support is still

Malcolm Collins: child support to the person who in the relationship earned less money, whether it's the man or the woman.

I didn't know that.

Simone Collins: Okay. Sorry. That's wild. Just when I think things couldn't get worse for men who. The point being

Malcolm Collins: is I am 100 percent pro child support in instances in which there is a no fault divorce, i. e. both people are just like, we don't get along anymore because that's required to maintain any sort of same contract where the man just doesn't leave a woman when she reaches too old in age.

And you need it whenever a man is at fault, the man was cheating. The man was doing something against the initial marriage contract. However, if the woman decides on the divorce and the man doesn't want it. Or if the woman, and she can't prove that he was beating her, she can't prove that he was cheating on her, she can't prove or worse, he can prove that she was doing those things to him.

No, no money, no child support because this [00:33:00] removes the incentive to live that kind of lifestyle, which hurts everyone in society.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it, it does, but I guess it also encourages less prudent marriage decisions when you feel like you can just get out of it, especially if you feel like you can get out of it and get money.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, so I was talking with this is at the Heritage Foundation and I was talking with a lawyer there who so this is a conservative community that he was talking about in California, right? And he was talking about how it became in the same way that like transgenderism swept through the community, like a trend more recently.

Do you remember talking about the path to divorce? Swept through the community like a trend and it was almost seen as sort of like low class to like not have an ex it was like well, oh like you're only on your

Simone Collins: first marriage, huh? It's a little

Malcolm Collins: pedestrian and low class to only be on your first marriage And the women would go to other women and be like, oh, yeah Don't you want to like, you know, you could leave him you can get all the money that he has right [00:34:00] now like And it actually worked as a sign of class because the men who were earning more wives felt like they could get more out of a divorce.

So it really was a signaling that the class status of the man, whether his wife had attempted to divorce him to be able to stay at home and do nothing and live off of like child supported alimony. That's a

Simone Collins: big deal. But yeah, a divorce catch. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and it's like a long term this ended up terrible for the people who got like swept up in this trend No, but it was seen as like a trendy cool thing, especially if you do it amicably, right?

Simone Collins: I don't know. I I don't know financially supporting someone unless he was like these people were like Continuing to sleep with all of their ex wives. It was basically a harem if that's what is being described. I don't think No,

Malcolm Collins: but it's like now what you're missing is okay I've got an ex wife and i'm sleeping with 20 year old secretaries and stuff like that [00:35:00] because i'm super rich that's that's what was happening in these communities, you know, i'm i'm sleeping with my My kid's babysitter or whatever, right?

Like Look, these are not, these are not communities that you and I would consider high class, but we're talking about like LA nouveau riche, I could see how this could swipe, like flow through a community. And I was pointing out, and it's interesting in our age range, like if I look at our friends who are married, I don't know anyone who's divorced.

I don't know anyone in our friend group who's divorced. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah, good for our friends.

Malcolm Collins: And they're like, well, it's because you're young. This hits when you hit your early forties,

Simone Collins: I guess. Yeah. My friend's parents started getting divorced around like the fifth grade, you know, 10 11. And all of our kids are super young, so give it time, I guess.

We'll see. To be determined. Let's continue. So, he writes, Breaking the bargain. Pillars one [00:36:00] and two of the solution remain intact. Western countries are still formally monogamous and marriage is still by mutual consent. Though without any broad religious or philosophical justification, this may change.

Popular support for legalizing polygamy has surged in the 21st century U. S. But pillars three to five were systematically demolished by mid 20th century, mostly between 1916, 1980. Yeah. So here you see a

Malcolm Collins: graph and what this graph shows is the chronology of events in the women's rights movement in the U S.

He says, I include the scare quotes here because this movement should be seen as a zero sum struggle for political and economic power. Affirmative. He

Simone Collins: put women's rights. Yes,

Malcolm Collins: correctly included as a major achievement by Goblin. And if you look here, you see most of the major changes happened between 1965 and 19, let's say, 80.

[00:37:00] And then you see there were some after that, but the vast majority 1965 and 1980. So you're looking for things that happened post then. And this is where you see women just gaining a huge amount of power in society.

Simone Collins: Gosh, yeah. He writes, this is a chronology of laws because lies are laws are highly legible.

What matters is people's behavior. Sufficiently strong social norms are indistinguishable from laws and laws. Are interpreted by judges, meaning legal practice may change dramatically without any significant change to official statutes. That's true. The sexual revolution, there are, there no longer exists any expectation of chastity until marriage, but within marriage, there's still the expectation of fidelity.

Though without any enforcement mechanism beyond social stigma. To marry. Rather than a gateway to sexual opportunity, marriage has become a chain restricting it. He shows a graph of women's sexual [00:38:00] partners before their first marriage, from the 1970s to the 2010s.

He writes, Note that these numbers are lower than reality because they are self reported. When hooked up to a lie detector, women claim about one more sex partner than they do when asked normally. The graph shows that the number of women who have one partner before marriage has allegedly plummeted from a little over 40 percent in the 1970s to around 22 and a half percent in the 2010s.

Whereas four to five partners has increased from about 6 percent in the 1970s to about 28 percent in 2010. I think what

Malcolm Collins: people are missing here is how rare, even historically, virgin women were before married. And this is even when they might be lying, were in a historic context. If you look at the 1970s, it was only around 20 percent of women were virgins before marriage.

Yeah, this doesn't even

Simone Collins: show two partners,

Malcolm Collins: or sorry, zero partners. It doesn't show zero partners. It [00:39:00] does. It shows virgins before marriage. Well, virgins before marriage. Before marriage. Okay,

Simone Collins: I see. It's, it's literally

Malcolm Collins: the rarest, but they started

Simone Collins: out as 20 percent and now they're at like 5%. Oh, look at you, Malcolm.

I mean, not that I was, we were, you're a 5 percent or 5 percent married though. So I guess I would still

Malcolm Collins: count as in the 2010s. So we'd be maybe past then. I don't know. But the point is, is, Oh yeah, well no, I, I, I think that this is what it's asking. Like maybe the partner other than

Simone Collins: spouse probably is what they mean to be asking about.

But also it's notable as it having over 10 partners. Was maybe around two and a half percent of women in the 1970s, and it's up to about 20%, like 18%, almost 20% in, well, and then another,

Malcolm Collins: hold on, hold on. Another 20% is, is, is four to five partners. Yeah. And then another the 40%

Simone Collins: have had over four partners.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Which is. Well, no, no, no more because six to nine percent is at what is that like fourteen [00:40:00] percent? Oh lord. Yeah. Okay. Yeah Well, okay. Anyway, people are sleeping around more so he continues whereas the pre 70s dispensation aligned sex drives with pair bonding desired for raising children The present one sets them in conflict with each other.

Malcolm Collins: So I really want to pull this apart because I find this particularly interesting and I'm not denying that this is happening. I just don't know if realistically the way he wants to nudge culture is the only way to fix this or even the most realistic way to fix this. So the point that he's making here is marriage now constricts sexual access rather than gives sexual access.

So if I am a man . And I enjoy sleeping with lots of women. Now when I get married, I get less sexual access than I had before marriage.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Which I mean, I think for high value men, but only for high value men, cause no one else gets to sleep around. It does act as a disincentive to marry.

And here I'd note for anyone who [00:41:00] wants to be like, well, sex in marriage is more magical. You know, you can have better relationships with just one partner. And it's like, look, this might be true with women, but just statistically, this is obviously not true with men. If you look at the studies on this, men prefer variation in their sexual partners and the evolutionary reason why is really obvious because multiple women can carry your kids simultaneously as a man, of course, you're going to have.

preference for sleeping with a woman who is different from women who you have recently been sleeping with.

I say this because if the way that you are attempting to motivate a potential behavior is through lying to an individual, i. e. well, as a man, you're really better off just sleeping with one woman. That will be more pleasurable for you. , you will eventually fail if a person makes major life decisions around a false promise and then comes to realize that.

Malcolm Collins: It very much acts as a disincentive to marry. [00:42:00] And for women. It is the same thing. It is a disincentive to marry if they enjoy sleeping with lots of partners or if they enjoy sleeping with a high value partner, they couldn't get to marry them and is sleeping with other females, which is more likely. Now the question is are there other ways around this?

Outside of convincing all of young people to be more chaste because that seems like a very losing battle especially if I am talking to Like like let's be honest here if I am talking to me as a kid like this is what I try to imagine my kids as being and I was like Hey it's like better for society, man.

If like that girl, look, I know she's hot. I know she's willing to sleep with you, but like, don't sleep with her because like in a vague, like social sense, this is sort of better for the low value men. When she does marry, she'll be better. I'd be like, you can write off. This girl is down a [00:43:00] clown and I have access to her tonight and I may not have access to her tomorrow and you can.

Right off. Because how do you convince a young guy of this, right? Yeah. Or, oh my gosh you know, so it's really, really, really, really hard because you don't really have something big to offer them. Now, young woman, I can at least say, oh, you'll have access to better Partners for marriage. If you don't sleep around a lot now.

And then the young woman will say to me you don't understand like high value guys will not really consider dating you these days. If you're not sleeping with them. Even the ones who are willing to be monogamous and I'd have to say. That's kind of true. I mean, there are a few, like, really religious guys, but I'm thinking of your average high value male they're gonna have a really, like, me, for example, right?

Would I have seriously considered marrying you if you didn't date me for, like, a year beforehand? No, I wouldn't have. Would I have dated you for a year if we weren't having sex? [00:44:00] Absolutely not. So when you remove this, you cause a lot of damage within the existing social structure in terms of actually finding partners.

And so then it's like, okay, well then how do you actually solve this problem? And it is remembering that sexuality and arousal is vestigial and unimportant to finding purpose in life or what you should want for your life. When you go to a kid, and you demystify sex, not through saying sex is evil, or sex is scary, and stay away from sex, and everything like that, but you're just like, sex is totally unimportant, and to be honest, masturbation, if you just want arousal, is generally gonna be easier.

It's generally gonna be better, it's generally gonna be easier, and it's gonna be a much more efficient use of your time.

Simone Collins: Much more convenient.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. More convenient. And when a guy, like, accepts this, or a girl accepts this because they have [00:45:00] slept with other people, they're like, oh, wow, yeah, sex is kind of clunky and boring, and I don't Well, I,

Simone Collins: I just, I, I slightly disagree.

Because for, for a lot of people, I, in fact, you, even yourself argue the Pregnant is Guide to Sexuality. Sex for men right, oh boy. Sex for men is largely, for many men at least, about proving a narrative to themselves. I agree. It's not really about enjoyment and then sex for women. I think often like those women who have higher sex drives, it's more about the dynamics and not about the actual.

I agree. So I don't, I guess you could use, I mean women do use like romance novels and various like fantasy scenarios to just do that in their imagination, but I do think that some women find it hard to not do that with their reality. The

Malcolm Collins: point I'm making here is that it is easier, if I am talking to a young man, to break the narrative that sex has value in or out of marriage.

Not that, oh, wait for marriage so you can get this awesome sex. Because this causes problems. Like, this is why, if you [00:46:00] look at, like, the Girl Defined sisters, like, one of them seems to be in, like, a very serious crisis with their marriage because they thought that sex was going to be, like, this amazing thing when they got married.

Instead They're pretty solid, yeah. But, like,

Simone Collins: they went through an adjustment because she did wait until marriage for sex. And then they expected sex was going to be amazing and then it wasn't. Instead, what you tell

Malcolm Collins: them is Sex is like, I go to this young guy. He's like, I get to have sex with this girl.

And I'm like, I want you to really focus on having sex with this girl and ask yourself afterwards. Did you just waste a whole day seducing this girl? Would you could have just stayed at home and masturbated? Video games. I mean, like, yeah, there are other masturbated and played video games. Was this.

Better than that. We need to parse out

Simone Collins: marriage from pleasure. Like, there are more efficient ways to inject pleasure directly into your bloodstream. I'm not talking about the use of substances. But, I mean, like, metaphorically. And, [00:47:00] and then, then you need to separately figure out your life and your values and your, like, okay?

You're making weird things.

Malcolm Collins: If you motivate marriage with sex, you're going to have a bad time because it causes people to focus on the wrong traits in marriage. Well,

Simone Collins: and it gets people also to anchor marriage around pleasure in general and enjoyment when that's not exactly what marriage has ever been about.

If

you know,

Malcolm Collins: say sex. does not matter that much. You may use it to try to increase your feeling of self worth or your personal narrative. But if you are doing that, you are living in life that is pointless and without value. You may use it because you're not like objectively getting more pleasure than it from like good masturbation.

Because with good masturbation, you can do literally anything. You can be in literally any scenario. So like you, you're not getting more from it than that. And so it's not a magical thing in or out of marriage. The point of marriage where you will get more pleasure and more [00:48:00] fulfillment from marriage isn't the sex you're going to have on your marriage night.

It is from the children that you will have with your partner. Children are strictly better than sex or masturbation.

Simone Collins: Well, you're literally creating the future of humanity. And that's the other thing is I think it's. There's way too much anchoring in the discussion of family planning and prenatalism in general around children, having children.

Because it takes the focus away from how profound it is, what you're actually doing. You're creating people who are going to live full lives and have impacts on the world and in turn have children. Like, you are creating the, the equivalent of yourself. You know, a fully conscious. adult human, you know, God willing if they can make it that far, right?

So it's just so much more meaningful. Like imagine everything you've experienced in your entire life and double

Malcolm Collins: this, this, this, this argument here is around like the magic of sex. [00:49:00] Like if you wait to get married, oh, you'll have this magical sex. Don't say that. Don't say that because it's not magical.

Simone Collins: So stupid.

Yeah. No, because all

Malcolm Collins: these people end up like seriously disillusioned with their religion, with their, with their, a

Simone Collins: big argument that Malcolm has made to sum it up more quickly is if you, if you build your religion around a bunch of lies that are easily disprovable with the internet or life experience, you're going to get a lot of detractors because maybe even a bet that's provably wrong.

Just opens you up to vulnerability. That's why politicians don't answer questions straight.

Malcolm Collins: The point here is tell kids the truth. Not that sex within marriage is magical, but children within marriage are magical. And sex is largely pointless and vestigial in humans. And that you can generally, if you're arousal maxing, do that without using another person as a human fleshlight.

The point of marriage and what is magical for marriage [00:50:00] isn't the marriage night sex. It is the kids that you will have, whether those kids are created through sex or something else, like IVF, et cetera, given how hard it is for many couples to have kids.

Simone Collins: Unilateral divorce. The most obvious effect of unilateral, i. e. no fault divorce, is more divorces. He includes a graph ratio of divorces to marriages in the United States, ranging from 1860 to the year 2020. He describes the graph with there's much talk about the decline in US divorce rates since the 80s, but the reason for this is that marriage rates have also dropped note that the rise in divorce post World War Two corresponds to marriage becoming much less selective with the spike.

Post no fault divorce corresponds to the institution becoming much more selective.

Malcolm Collins: So what you'll see here, and this is really interesting, if you look at this, this graph here, yeah, you see the divorce rate rising over time. But when no fault divorce was introduced in the it looks like [00:51:00] 19, like 73 or 4 here, you immediately had a spike.

And I think this is the like ratio of divorces per year per marriage. Around 0. 3 to around 0. 5 and what's fascinating is this around 0. 5 number that it settled at. This was before the 1980s. So like 1975 has stayed steady until about today. It looks like so what we're actually seeing is not a drop in divorces, but a drop in marriages, which makes it look like we have a big drop in divorces as a society.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: Continue. He writes, It's worth considering what this actually means. Each divorce represents years of effort and investment wasted and often perpetual and unwanted obligations. It often means broken families and the misery that accompanies them. In the United States, only 52 percent of first marriages survive the first 20 years required to raise children.

[00:52:00] And he includes a table. of the probability that a first marriage will remain intact, survive, at specified durations among women aged 15 to 44 years by selected characteristics. This is using United States data from 1995, 2002, and 2006 to 2010.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Okay, well let's see what this actually The

Simone Collins: characteristics include all women, and then broken down by Hispanic origin and race, age at first marriage, education, religion raised.

He describes Well,

Malcolm Collins: hold on. I'm just looking here to try to find out what it is. Okay, so it was white couples I'll just look at this. Okay

Simone Collins: Well, he explains he says this table also shows my marriage has become an upper class institution Murray Society no longer works to keep marriages intact, meaning it requires a certain amount of foresight and a lack of impulsiveness to maintain it.

Oh, girl, girl. You want to move around? You can move around. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So this table shows why marriage [00:53:00] has become an upper class institution. Society no longer works to keep marriages intact, meaning it requires a certain amount of foresight and lack of impulsiveness to maintain one. And so we just, you know, being white people, I'm going to use the white group here. If we look at what percent of marriages are surviving for five years, you're looking at 80%.

But once you get to 20 years, you're only looking at 54%, which is much lower than I thought. Now keep in mind, this includes marriages of the older generation because it's looking at 20 years from 2006 to 2010. And in truce, when I look at older people, they get divorced at really high rates. So when I look at like our friend group, like basically no one gets divorced.

I, Genuinely believes that this rate is falling because when I at least think you think it's gonna

Simone Collins: stick You think it's gonna stick that people are not gonna get divorced later in life

Malcolm Collins: I I do not think they're gonna get divorced later when I think of my friends who are married I just know so few of them that I can imagine getting.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: they're solid Yeah, but I felt that way about my friend's parents until they all got divorced. So [00:54:00] What do I know?

Malcolm Collins: Right? Well, I'm okay. Let's look at education, right? So, oh, this is interesting. If both partners have a bachelor's degree, the probability that they will still be married in 20 years is 78%.

That's Arctotherium's

Simone Collins: point that this is a social class thing now.

Malcolm Collins: Well, but how does this make sense that you like stay married for so long? Yeah. How does that, what? Explain. Like, what do you mean it's a social thing to not get divorced? Like,

Simone Collins: I think there may be stronger, perhaps stronger social norms, maybe more conscientiousness of thought into the marriage in the first place.

Malcolm Collins: Interesting. And by the way Or maybe better sourcing of resources?

Simone Collins: I don't know. Like

Malcolm Collins: If you're like, I'm religious. This will protect me. If you are not religious at all, the probability that they, like, most people are atheists, right? The probability that they'll still be married in 20 years is 43%. All right.

So that's, that's low. Right? Like I'm like, that's less than half. So [00:55:00] you're like, Oh, it must be much higher for Protestants and Catholics. For Protestants, it's 50%. And for Catholics, it's 53%. And you might be like, wait, that sounds even lower than like the average. Well, what's going on here? It's other religions that are boosting it being at 65 percent for other religions.

I assume this is because there's more first generation immigrants than the other religions categories, which have you know, more traditional mindsets around saying. . And so it's like, where, what is this other religion? It's probably like Muslims, first generation immigrants, Hindus, stuff like that. Arranged marriages. Anyway.

Simone Collins: He continues, but unilateral divorce doesn't just destabilize marriage.

It also changes the power dynamics within marriage from favoring the more committed partner to favoring the less committed partner. Hence, quote, under unilateral divorce, the distribution of resources within marriage favors the spouse who wished to divorce, end quote. This is from Reynoso in 2024. In addition to destabilizing marriage, unilateral divorce [00:56:00] incentivizes poor behavior within it, since the threat of ending the marriage on unfavorable terms for the undutiful partner no longer exists.

This, quote, weakens the bargaining power of dutiful partners who wish their marriage to continue. Who wished to end their marriage because of serious mistreatment by the other partner end quote. That's from Roe Thorne 1999 He continues unilateral divorce is sometimes portrayed as an advance in human freedom But this is a mistake by removing the ability to credibly commit the long term relationship unilateral divorce prevents couples from reaching a mutually beneficial bargain that Greatly assists in raising children without forced marriage, which has never been a part of the Western tradition unilateral divorce actually removes an important choice.

In the words of Robert wrote for 1999.

Quote, to get married is. No longer such a major commitment and no longer offers the degree of security, which at once did since divorce is now relatively easy and the [00:57:00] responsibilities and rights of the married and unmarried are increasingly similar. These developments are often presented as an advance in human freedoms and say allow individuals to exit unilaterally from unhappy relationships at minimum cost to themselves and with the minimum delay.

However. This is a one sided view, since it ignores the benefits and freedoms associated with trust and security. The fact that individuals can now exist easily and unilaterally, oh, can now exit easily and unilaterally from a relationship that makes it difficult for couples to make credible commitments to each other.

They can promise anything they want, but most of these promises are no longer legally enforceable, and many are undermined by social policies, which reward those who break their promises. So that ends the quote because it no longer guarantees security or anything else. Marriage is much less useful and therefore less appealing writes Arctotherian.

So this

Malcolm Collins: is a really important point. And I think it's made really powerfully here, more powerfully than [00:58:00] I've seen in other places. Because what we're seeing here is that as soon as, and this is actually really interesting about the introduction of no fault divorce laws, is while divorces spiked on like a per year level after no law fault divorce laws going into the 1980s, they then stayed stable and yet they had been rising for a long time before that.

It's almost like they reached their natural level of I might trade up or attempt to trade up at this stage. And he's saying that as soon as you get this, marriage becomes dramatically less useful to most partners. And if you're like, oh, well, if I do the valuable thing and like, get married young and move forwards, the, the marriage rate, remember I was talking about like, oh, don't.

You really start dating until 19, right? Yeah. If you marry at under 20 years old, the percentage of those marriages that still exist within 20 years is only 37%. So you're looking at an, like a fairly small, you're really [00:59:00] taking out a bet against yourself with this sort of thing. And this is, is helped by these effects that we have talked about.

The person who is being. Less like, okay, if one person is investing less in the relationship than the other person, the person investing less is the person most advanced by the divorce. So if I am a guy

Simone Collins: most advantaged by the divorce,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So if I have a guy and I have like a really dutiful wife who's really working to care for the kids and everything like that, and I'm sleeping with my secretary and I'm sleeping with like a bunch of other people.

And my wife doesn't know about this and then she finds out about this and she gets angry at me and I'm like, whatever, I want to keep doing this. I, as that guy, am benefited from divorcing that woman. If I am a woman, and I am adding very little to the relationship, and I'm just really posting off of the money that relationship offers me, and I just don't want a job and the husband's like, well, you know, we really gotta pull together, like, you need to get a job, etc.

I am advantaged because I can get money from him, I can get in terms of alimony, in terms of child [01:00:00] support, by ending that marriage. Whoever is the freeloader in the relationship, whoever is breaking more of the terms of the marriage contract is the person advantaged by Hmm.

Simone Collins: Mm hmm. Okay. All right, Arctotherium writes, The welfare state, given that women will do most child rearing and that men are more productive, most of the funding will involve some sort of reforest transfer from men to women.

As with all redistribution, this would seem to carry the risk of punishing work. Yet in the case of marriage, it doesn't. A man provides for his wife and children, who he has some legal and social claim on, as well as an obvious genetic interest in. The welfare state changes this. And of course, you've talked about this all the time with that concept that really blew my mind.

It's like, Single women really being nuns married to the state. He shows a graph of net fiscal impact per capita broken down by [01:01:00] male. Women basically are negative, except for a little slight positive between the age of, like, 45 to 60.

Malcolm Collins: So all women are a drain on the state except for women between the age of 44 and 64.

All other women are a net drain on the state that are helped by men between the ages of around 25 and 69 where men are net contributors to the system.

Simone Collins: This is mind blowing. This is mind blowing. Also, this graph is a great argument for euthanasia because while children cost a little bit in the beginning of 20 years of their lives, the, the, the cost to the state.

of people over the age of 70 just gets huge. Like, honestly, if people were euthanized at the age of, like, 70, the state would be so much better off. Oh god, it's terrible.

Malcolm Collins: Even, even, [01:02:00] yeah,

Something that was pointed out on the discord that I thought was really funny is that Simone is so much more

Interesting to listen to.

than Malcolm because When Malcolm says something that's like crazy or out there You know that he's heavily motivated by, , trying to entertain the audience, or shock people, or troll people.

But when Simone says something, you know every time she's totally serious.

And I feel like we play into the stereotype we're developing. Of just, for every problem, the solution is, well, can't you just kill them? This is literally Simone right here.

Speaker 3: I had the group liquidated, you little s**t. They were insolent.

Malcolm Collins: gosh,

Simone Collins: you

Malcolm Collins: fix so many of society's problems if you use the nice people at

Simone Collins: 69.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I guess you could just say, are they still contributing or not?

Because a lot of people still contribute after [01:03:00] this age, right? That's true.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And you can just, you could also, I mean, the state could also just say, You know, actually a fairly pernicious policy that I hadn't thought of before is just be like, after age 70, you get no social support from the state, which would really motivate people to invest in children as like, yeah, this is the only thing that's going to support me after I'm 70, because the state's not going to do it.

That, oh, did I solve social

Malcolm Collins: security for the United States? Euthanasia for everyone who doesn't have over No, no, no, I

Simone Collins: mean, sure. The only free state service you can get is Humane euthanasia. Everything else is off the table.

I mean, come on, it

would Anyway, yeah. He continues, Rather than merely supporting their own wife and children, men are expected to support women to whom they have no relation and from whom they can claim nothing in return.

Not only is this much less motivating, But it also removes a major incentive for women to marry in the first place. To your point about women being married to the state, the [01:04:00] state can simply extract a potential husband's wealth and transfer it to her. No marriage required in the long run. This is bad for women, too.

Even if they can raise children alone with support from the state, very few women want to do this. And by making marriage less attractive, the welfare state misaligns the short term financial incentives of young women. With their long term social incentives as potential mothers. I think these are very valid points.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: The Western Solution, a brief summary. If the Western European marriage pattern represented a cooperate cooperate solution to the prisoner's dilemma of human reproduction Our current dispensation represents an attempt to force a cooperate defect equilibrium on men.

Men are expected to spend their lives working for women and children that are not their own. They can be ejected from a marriage at any time, for any reason, and by default will lose their children in the process. It is little wonder that, as in the Roman Empire, quote, marriage became [01:05:00] unfashionable, especially among the men, but perhaps it would be More just to say that marriage on these terms was despised, for there seemed to be few advantages to be gained, many to be lost, unquote.

Unwin, 1934. Conservative commentators often lament this attitude and blame influencers like Andrew Tate, but they confuse the cause for the effect. Men didn't suddenly change their attitude toward marriage. Marriage itself changed and men's attitudes have slowly adjusted to the new reality.

Browbeating and hectoring, man up, can't replace the old incentives. Consequences of co operate defect. Men have the power to collectively force women , into disadvantageous marriage contract when they give up men in exchange for little. Although western men did not do this historically.

But the reverse is not true. Men have always had the option not to marry. And the alteration of marriage norms has made marriage less attractive for women too with predictable results. And he includes a graph.

Malcolm Collins: This graph [01:06:00] is insane right here. So if you look at the graph, if you look at the number of people who are married, you can see just how much we should expect marriage rates to drop going forwards.

So you're looking at the number of people per decade who got married. Yes, you saw little drops between the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and then a slightly more modest drop until the 1980s, but you see an astronomical drop going in to the 1990s. Where it is looking like you may only have, by the age of 30, around 25 percent of people born during the month.

Oh no, it's higher than 25%. What is that? Because this is like a logarithmic graph here. It looks like it might be like a 35%,

35 percent of, of people born in the 1990s married by the age of 30. Now, if you contrast this with people who were born in the 1980s, how many were married? It was 6 Over [01:07:00] 60%. It looks like around 65%. So you're looking at 35 percent one decade later, being married at the age of 30. Whereas like 62 or 3 percent being married for people born in the 1980s.

And it's like, what did you go one decade before that to the 1970s? Just to see how quickly we've fallen there. It looks like we're looking at around 75 percent to our year. What, 35%? This is horrifying drop.

It takes generations to see these effects in full. Not only are we the product of millennial, of selection for marriageability, social norms are sticky. At first, men see their fathers.

who worked hard to get married and their older acquaintances doing the same, and they imitate them. Women aspire to marry as their mothers did. Even when laws have changed, the norms do not immediately disappear. But they get weaker every generation. People see that marriage no longer offers stability.

They see their peers and parents ruined by divorce. They see that they can get the [01:08:00] economic and sexual benefits of marriage without giving up options. And the old norms erode. Current marital status and this is a graph here that divides whites and african americans So you can see that this hit the african american community earlier, which used to be in a better position as you can see in these graphs when I say better position, I mean more of them were getting married and staying married, but the trend hit them sooner Just provides a good illustration of what I mean when the incentives change marriage collapsed among blacks who are not the product of Millennium of Selection for Western Marriage, Almost Overnight.

Oh, that's an interesting take on why it collapsed so quickly for Blacks. I don't, is it that advantage stuff? No, I think it's that wokeism hit them further, but whatever. I mean,

Simone Collins: like, we went through these, like, well, one in the conversation with Curtis Yarvin, and then I think in another

Malcolm Collins: episode, where it's just like this It's called The Documentation of Black Culture, check it out, great episode.

Yeah. In whites, it has lasted longer, but each generation is less marriage minded than the last. Everyone [01:09:00] is responding to new incentives, but not at the same rate. I actually say that what we're actually seeing here is a little different than what he's describing because when I see our generation, I do believe that we will see this in our generation.

Marriages will like divorce rates are going to plummet. Because again, I just look at like the people I know who are married, like none of them seem at all likely to ever get divorced. And it's that we had a generation. Where people expected the scaffolding of the legal system to make their marriages strong and protect their marriages in the way it did the previous generation.

And that's the way the boomers were about so many things. And now we're entering a generation where people are like, Oh, I actually need to be responsible for who I choose as a partner in making this a solid marriage, which previous generations didn't feel as strongly.

Simone Collins: Just a quick pause. If there's a ton more, and I think there is Indy, like, I'm not going to get a word in edgewise for like another 30 minutes at this point because Indy is really tired.

So should we just pause this?

Malcolm Collins: No, I actually think we should make the rest of this a separate [01:10:00] episode. I don't know,

Simone Collins: I'll

Malcolm Collins: This episode's an hour and fifteen minutes long. That's a long episode.

Simone Collins: I'm gonna say

Malcolm Collins: we'll make another episode on marriages falling apart, and why that's terrible for society.

Simone Collins: I don't know, because like, I still haven't really gotten to the so what. I guess the so what for this is Like it's when you have no fault divorce, things fall apart. Is that kind of what we've concluded? Cause he, he's looking at more than just that, but I think we've converged on no fault divorce being the issue.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think no fault divorce is the issue. I think that this is one of the issues that he points to. I think no fault divorce is when the societal scaffolding is no longer holding a marriage together, but I think fixing that societal scaffolding is something we can aspire to, but not. Count on. And I think that we need to build our own scaffolding was the understanding that we won't get what our parents generation got.

You know, we, we are not them. We are not living in that world. And even before no fault divorce came [01:11:00] onto the table, as you can see from that graph, the divorce rate was going up. So, you know, we were gonna hit here eventually. In fact, if it continued to increase at the rate it was from 1880 to 1980, and you project it forward to 2024, we might actually be at the same rate of divorce we are now, even without no fault divorce.

No fault divorce just allowed it to jump to, like, its normalized state which is really weird. I don't know why it hasn't gone up since then. It's when it was going up historically, that's I don't understand. But clearly it appears to be at like a osmosis point right now, where it's like the natural divorce rate when anyone can screw over anyone.

But I think it's going to go down because I think new social norms are developing. And I think that a lot of these blackmailed people are still Approaching marriage the wrong way. They're approaching marriage around arousal or sexuality and not with the focus of their children and their religion [01:12:00] and their tradition.

Or they're approaching marriage with that and then in the middle of their marriage, they change their religion or something like that. In which case, you're kind of the one who defected. I, I, like, even if you're a smart, amazing person and you're like, I just realized this was wrong, I'm like, fine, but like the assumed contract when you guys got married is that you were going to continue to follow this value system, right?

Like I don't like I want you to do well. Recently a fan reached out to us with this scenario and I was like, I feel bad, but like, yeah, you broke the contract more than your wife did. If you're the one who left Christianity and not her. Especially if that was like the foundation of your interest in each other.

But, Simone, your, your thoughts. And you can talk over a yelling baby.

Simone Collins: No, it's bad audio. I, and I can't think straight when I have a crying baby that I can't take care of. Alright, alright, I love you.

Malcolm Collins: I'm looking forward to dinner.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Moppy

Malcolm Collins: dofu? [01:13:00]

Simone Collins: Moppy

dofu.

Malcolm Collins: And you can warm up the house a bit. You know, it's a little cold, even for me these days.

So what I'm literally wearing a full jacket. Yes.

Simone Collins: Well, and our bill literally, despite our house being on average, well below 55 degrees in all rooms is over 600. So yeah, which is insane. It's the middle of winter, sweetheart.

Malcolm Collins: Just,

Simone Collins: well, maybe we have to actually make,

Malcolm Collins: okay. We'll make the game work. We'll make the game work. We'll make it make so much money. It'll have the most money.

Simone Collins: The way money works is if you cut your income in half and plan on removing entirely, maybe don't double your heating bill or in this case like triple.

This is insane. Although I, I've seen some social media content suggesting that a lot of people are seeing insane price hikes on their electricity, not just because of this, [01:14:00] but because some States like the state of New York. Have introduced legislation or regulation that requires energy companies to spend a lot of money on green energy infrastructure development.

But what these companies are doing is just passing on all of the. Infrastructure development costs and more to the consumer. They're just kind of like sliding in additional income increases. It's very annoying, and that's also happening with us. That's

Malcolm Collins: happening in Pennsylvania.

Simone Collins: Well, we've received multiple emails from our energy providers saying we've invested in building more infrastructure.

And for that reason, you're going to see slightly higher energy costs. That's tough. I don't know. Like, well, they're kind of like. If you need financial assistance, we have payment plans but it's kind of just like saying tough s**t. Like you're not, you're, you're not going to get out of paying for this.

Like maybe you can go into debt.

Speaker 4: Yeah. [01:15:00] Don't you think one at a time is easier?

And you have your rocks. You're a strange, covetous dragon, Toastie. Hey! Oh, Titan, you want to steal Toasty's fork? I think she takes great pleasure. Okay, go ahead, steal. Go steal.

Go steal. Steal. Steal. Go ahead. We gotta keep this. Oh, Toasty, that's nice. Titan, you want some of these? Okay, take. Go ahead. Aw, that's so nice. Well, thank you for sharing, Torsten.