Why I Don’t Feel Sorry For The Lonely Men
It’s hard to feel sorry for people who don’t put in the effort
The age I am means I am currently witnessing the women in my cohort get married and have children. On two occasions, I have seen female friends strong-arm their long-term boyfriends into marrying them in almost identical circumstances.
The first occurred when I was living in Washington, D.C., when a couple I was friendly with dramatically broke up after living together for three years only to reconcile and get married. The woman had made an ultimatum: we get married or we split up. He said he wasn’t ready to get married; “why can’t things just stay the same?”, so she moved out of the home they shared.
The man in this relationship slept with several other women before realising that starting a whole new relationship from scratch was too much of a hassle, and he was engaged to his previous longterm girlfriend after only a few months of them being split up.
The second occurred in Dubai, where the woman, in a couple who had been dating for three-four years, made a similar ultimatum. We get married, or we split up. The man chose to move out of their shared apartment, but after a few months and a dispute with his bank over whether rent payments to his Iranian landlord violated sanctions rules, he decided that being single was just too much hassle, and he reconciled with his previous girlfriend. They are now married.
Whilst I would be horrified if a man married me because it was the path of least resistance, both of these women seem relatively happy and now have children with the men they successfully cajoled into marrying them. Forgive me, however, if I don’t believe their glowing social media declarations of love. If those men loved their girlfriends so much, why did they have to be strong-armed into marrying them?
Neither of these men appeared to me to want marriage and children as much as the women they were in a relationship with. They were still willing, however, to give their girlfriends a ‘shut-up ring’ and to go along with marrying them in order to not be alone.
A reluctant recognition that the women they were dating enriched their lives even if they weren’t madly in love with them enough to marry them of their own volition. Despite increasing reports that men are lonelier and lonelier than ever, men appear less interested in marriage and family than ever, too.
Even though various internet communities for men extol the virtues of being an MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), i.e., a man who eschews marriage and family because it’s too risky, men seem to cope with long-term celibacy very poorly; significantly more poorly than women do.
Data shows that single, childless women are the happiest cohort of women. Whereas unmarried, childless men are not doing so well. Some members of the disturbing Incel (involuntary celibate) movement have even resorted to violence to punish a society they believe has disadvantaged them, denying them every opportunity for sex and female companionship.
On the one hand, I feel quite sorry for men. They appear to have not been conditioned to be the good husbands and fathers women want. Even religious men do not appear to make better husbands than secular men. With the decline of religion in society, there are fewer and fewer societal incentives pressuring and convincing men to get married and have babies.
On the other hand, it’s not hard for men to guess what women want from their life partners. My sympathy for lonely men is cut short, especially for men like Incels, when they seem to only want women for sex and are aggressive and rude towards ugly, overweight, or older women who might otherwise make excellent companions, wives, and mothers. It is, after all, not flattering or romantic to be wanted for sex and nothing else.
Whilst men online want to blame women, and feminists in particular, for their dating woes, one has to wonder why men put so little effort into making themselves into good partners, boyfriends, husbands, and fathers One explanation is the potent, placating combination of video games and easily accessible internet porn robs men of the few remaining incentives to find a wife and have children.
Another explanation is that most men were never a good deal for most women. The rise in happy, single, childless women represents an unspoken truth: for women, being with a bad partner is worse than being with no partner. Female emancipation has meant that women are no longer legally and financially dependent on men and are therefore no longer choosing to be with them.
The worst-case scenario is a woman finds herself trapped in her own home with the person most likely to physically harm and abuse her. For women, no one is more likely to kill you than a male intimate partner. The likelihood of that happening rises when a woman gets pregnant. A more common scenario is the malaise and frustration of being married to a useless, incompetent man who likes that he has someone to do the domestic labour of his life but doesn’t really care about the person doing it so long as it’s being done. The gendered expectation of care means women take on, or are expected to take on, more domestic labour and childcare even if they are employed.
It is for this reason, marriage remains a better deal for most men than it does for most women, as evidenced by the fact that married men are the happiest cohort of men, but single women are the happiest cohort of women.
Why, then, are men so reluctant to put more effort into their relationships and commit as soon as possible? My theory is that men just don’t want to be married. If they can persuade a woman to act like a wife without having to assume the legal responsibilities of having a wife, that's what they’d prefer to settle for instead. Without societal or religious pressure to get married, men prefer not to.
This is why I have never and would never cohabit with a man. Cohabitation is a deal that benefits men to the detriment of women. Despite all their bleating about loneliness, it never seems to occur to angry men on the internet that marriage is a great solution to the question of sex and companionship or that they should put more effort into their relationships with women.
Men bemoan the fact that women hardly interact with them on dating apps, but so many women I know are fleeing dating apps because the men on them are rude, vulgar, aggressive, and not looking for anything other than hookups. Every woman I know has received unsolicited pictures of random, unsolicited genitals and other horror stories.
What perplexes me most of all is why men think they can get their needs met without meeting women’s needs too. I refuse to believe that men are so stupid that they don’t realise they have to meet their partners needs to get their own met.
I, as an Arab woman, have been conditioned to be little more than an excellent wife and mother since the moment I was born. I have felt this pressure acutely since I was a teenage girl. Not being wanted by men was the worst crime a woman could be guilty of. Even if it was little wonder that grown men weren’t interested in an awkward teen…
As a result, I spent my early twenties (and more money than I’m willing to admit) improving my appearance in every way, shape, and form possible, short of plastic surgery. In addition to buying makeup, clothing, skincare, haircare, getting braces, spending endless hours at the gym, and starving myself, I also took cooking classes, sewing classes and read Goodhousekeeping magazine for cleaning tips.
I have never seen a man as anxious about failing to appear as “good husband material” as I have been about failing to apear as “good wife material”.
I spent hours on dating apps, at various different forms of in-person meetups, and even signed up to a professional matchmaker. Even when men had spent money to be introduced to women, they still “weren’t quite sure what they wanted”, ghosted, or declared that they just didn’t want to be married — they were just looking for a girlfriend.
It’s hard to feel sorry for men when so many of them are simply not putting in the effort they need to form the relationships that women also want. The reason men don’t put effort into something is they don’t really want it. The number one reason I’ve broken up with men is they didn’t want to marry me or they didn’t want marriage with me. Once a man declares his intentions are not to marry you, only a masochist would stay.
Lonely men need to think about what they actually want. Just hookups and sex, or lasting companionship, a soulmate, marriage, children or no children? If most men just want hookups and most women want marriage, that’s an incompatibility that means there are going to be more single men and single women as both sexes refuse to accept what they don’t want.
Rather than accepting that they don’t want to commit to women ergo women who want marriage are not going to reciprocate their advances, men shame and abuse women who reject them, or are single and happy, or don’t want to settle for cohabitation. No one is entitled to sex or a relationship. If women don’t want to be used for just sex, and men don’t want to get married, that’s a celibacy men have to learn to deal with, hopefully with grace.
Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett
