Male and female approaches to pairing have intrinsically conflicted agendas. They assess one another’s mate value from perspectives, based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities. The boy looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, and fidelity.
His assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources.
The selection of the winning bachelor in the animal kingdom typically involves male competition……rams slamming their heads together, peacocks dragging around colourful, predator-attracting tails, men bearing expensive gifts, and vowing eternal love over candlelight.
What does the winning male suitor supposedly get for all his preening and showing off? Men offer goods and services (prehistorically primarily meat, shelter, protection, and status) in exchange for exclusive, relatively consistent pairing access.
In other words, it’s the kind of willingness and ability of a man to provide for a woman and her children, the willingness and ability of a man to protect a woman and her children.
The girl also looks for the above willingness and the abilities in the prospective man, his physical health, (maybe square jaw, symmetrical body, firm handshake), good job, signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, and the likelihood that he sticks around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children.
She seeks a simple combination of mature masculinity and romantic allure (masculine chivalry)….. well-rounded, adaptable, and capable of handling just about any situation. In most mammals, the female has a much higher investment in offspring. She’s stuck with gestation, lactation, and extended nurturing of the young.
Because of this inequality in unavoidable sacrifice, she’s the more hesitant participant, needing to be convinced it’s a good idea—while the male, with his slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am approach to reproduction, is eager to do the convincing.
As lions lay claim to a kill, humans lay claim to particular men/women, something people of both sexes lay claim to valuables, the proprietary creature proceeds to advertise and exercise the intention of defending it from rivals.
For orangutans, giraffes, and most other mammal species our child support laws are absurd. Most male mammals have no involvement with either their offspring or their offspring’s mother.
Our high level of male parental investment (MPI) forms the basis for the supposed universality of marriage. In every human culture, the family is the atom of social organisation. Fathers everywhere feel love for their children.
This love goads fathers into helping feed and defend their children, and teach them useful things. The issue of paternity is at the core of much of men’s behaviour. Men were, and continue to be, preoccupied with paternity. For now, MPI translates into advantages for that man’s children (more food, protection, and education—other kids be damned).
Paternal care has been especially important because human offspring require so much care and investment, take longer to mature, and have many more complex social, cultural, and cognitive developmental challenges than other primate faces. In school, women learn that if they work hard and perform well, they get an ‘A’ on their report cards.
‘A’ gets them into a good college and likely lands them a great job. While this makes women pursuing higher education more attractive, it’s not the case with boys today, most of whom spend time playing computer games, football/cricket.
The latter hardly read outside of school. Trained to think that they needn’t work hard because men would drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women (thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction, transportation, and travel), that’s not the case anymore.
On the pretext of financial problems, and to support their families many of them discontinue education. Girls study more and spend more time doing homework. In effect, they leapfrog over boys in the race to colleges and professional schools.
Young women are now better qualified. It means that increasingly well-qualified young women are competing with well-qualified young men for the higher-paid jobs but, if seeking marital relationships, also competing with each other for highly qualified partners.
The economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood both in terms of employment and earnings. An educated-man drought in that age group, a time when people are most likely to get together and start a family, means increased unemployment in men which has a devastating effect on the marriage market as new family units are made by employed men and not employed women.
Having lost their edge in the financial contribution to the household many men are left with little to offer, and hence won’t marry… the job dynamics discourages the building up of new family units. In the zero-sum game, if women continue to wish to partner with someone who has an equal or higher level of education, there are an even smaller number of ideal men that women are competing for. Thus the educational man drought is potentially far bigger than the overall man drought.
Women today are confused when it comes to the role a man can play in their lives. She either needs him to be more like a woman or she feels she doesn’t need him at all.
Neither approach works. Being more independent, qualified, and self-sufficient, modern women want a man to share their life with but don’t really feel the need for a man.
They want a man but to need him makes them cringe. When they do need him they often want him to be someone he isn’t and can’t be. Women who are independent and successful often remain alone, because they don’t realise why they need a man.
Statistically, the more financially successful a woman is the lower her chances to marry and the greatest possibility of divorce.
Imagine a cruel cycle of matchmaking, rejection, silence, and then again, more matchmaking in such a situation leads to days stretching to weeks and weeks turning into months and months progressing into years leaving men and women unmarried, even as they approach their 40s as also the rising level of infertility and growing old without heirs.
The lopsided unemployment share favouring men results in creating hordes of frustrated young men/women that prowl, promenade and nose around the streets, leading to moral degradation and drug menace in the society.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.