The Blind Leading The Dumb: Society’s Disservice
When it comes to relationships, sex, and reproduction modern people have a repulsive attitude towards young people, children, engaging in such activities. We tell them not until their older or more mature. Things like marriage and family building are abhorrent until we say that at a certain time these things are allowed. In many cultures and traditions across humanity and history, adulthood and maturity is whenever puberty hits.
This raises questions and highlights problems we have backed ourselves into as a society. We don’t want people to engage in activities that we deem mature or adult, and when we finally allow people to have control over their lives, we set them off on a relay race, a dash to the finish to catch up with all that’s expected of them.
For girls because of cultural and legal customs, they have to ignore about 6 years of their fertility, that’s 72 months of eggs that go unused in her life because it would be illegal for her to do anything with them. It’s not until the age of 18 that she’s expected to find a partner or someone who can be a potential good partner then begin a courtship, relationship that maybe leads to marriage and children. Due to her delay in entering “adulthood” she has far less time to acclimate and get used to her new found sexuality and the freedom that it comes with. At these later stages her body is in its prime but that is like saying a car with wear is same as new car with 0 wear, and as time goes on, it won’t get better (this is not to literally objectively women).
Under this dynamic a women has to speed run what she would have otherwise had time to prepare and plan for.
How does this affect men her own age.
Women typically want older guys, it’s in their genetics and makes perfect sense. Older men typically have their shit together, they are more stable in their lives. They have money, they have been in the world long enough to at least know how to navigate through it successfully or are on their way to success. These are the men that have their pick of women in any age range. They typically don’t want the women their own age and want the younger one who, I’m sorry to say, has better looks and prospects for giving a man children over the long term. It makes sense that younger women want the men who can provide for them and any children they might have together and so women pursue those men; it’s smart.
This leaves younger guys to make something of themselves in order to compete, they have to try harder in order to even be noticed by women their own age and by the time they have become these men, they want nothing to do with the women their own age who now want them but have been ignoring them for the older guys they now are. Wanting them for the things they can now provide that those men could have. Men inherently know that women, sex, relationships only come AFTER we have achieved everything else in our lives, and those things take time. A woman who wants kids, doesn’t have time to wait. We’ve delayed her and put her in a rush that no man her age will ever be able to keep up with.
Society says the right and proper thing to do is for the younger girls to find a young man with prospects and settle down with him. But what does that do to him? In order to make the fantasy a reality he now has to inadvertently work harder to provide for this person who expects a provider, meanwhile other men are advertising themselves as already established by the simple fact that they are established. If the man has kids before he has made something of himself, it may provide motivation to double his efforts, but that motivation is from what I view as undue or unnecessary stress put upon him by an unthinking society.
There’s a misalignment in the fantasies we want, our biology, our culture, customs, and laws. If this is the way we’re doing it, then are we saying that any culture or belief that views adulthood as something that begins when biology says it does is wrong or abhorrent? Do we owe it to women to figure out a way to delay their natural biology to fit and align with our societal framework and expectations?
Ideally a boy wouldn’t have to worry about establishing himself and could navigate the world at a steadier pace. We say openly how wrong or vile the other way is but other unfiltered wants and needs say otherwise. Younger women even at the biological level, want the older established man and the older established man wants the younger woman. He wants the trophy wife that can give him a dynasty. In the idea scenario the baller older dude marries the younger girl and by the time she’s 20 has already given him 10 children. By the time she’s 30, her oldest can get their driver’s license. As her children get older, she’s still young enough to keep up with them and her husband is at a level in his life where no matter the size of his gamily, he can provide and take care of all their needs. Rather than struggling with them hoping he can provide for their needs should anything unforeseen arise. However society views this approach with its stability as immoral. The other way where both people are unconsciously in a stressed state to make this reality happen is what we say we want.
My concern is why do we complain about the current state of relationships in the world if this is what we said we wanted? Relationship dynamics didn’t break down in the modern era, these are the practices that lead to it being what it is now. If things shifted tomorrow and went back to what we have always been used to and conditioned for, it would ultimately lead us back right to where we are now. We don’t like the outcomes we choose for ourselves.
Reproduction is possible before a human being is considered mature or an adult, so what are we doing to ourselves in spite of our biology? A girl has 12 years to establish herself before her fertility takes a head dive off a cliff in her 30s. If she cannot it’s her fault for not being good enough for the system we hate. We tell young people to sacrifice their youth for adulthood and then sacrifice their adulthood for maturity. Somehow children and family are the most adult and mature things we can do and we’re able to do one of these things biologically from a young age but such is illegal. People are afraid to even ask these questions. How can we have these moral opinions about things we’re afraid to talk about? I get the stigma associated with everything I’m saying but that’s only because no one has ever really thought about it. Everyone hates the outcome but refuses to address its causes; our choices. The Industrial Revolution needed workers, not families.
We live in a time where older women hate men their own age who they used to ignore who now ignore them for the younger women they used to be. Younger women who want these men for the same reasons these now older women did when they were younger chasing older men. We tell people to spend the first half of their fertile years denying biology, and the second half racing against it. We make them wait for adulthood, then demand they rush through it once they’re “allowed” in. This is not natural. It’s not moral. It’s not effective by any means for the individual.
What I’m seeing between older women, younger women, and older men isn’t misogyny or bitterness, it’s displacement or cognitive dissonance. Older women are angry because they played by the rules and still lost. Younger women are pursuing security and fertility-compatible men, just like older women once did. Older guys are ignoring women their age not necessarily out of malice, but because now they are the ones in demand and they remember how invisible they used to be. This isn’t personal. It’s structural. It’s what happens when we deny biology, then blame people for the fallout. When we’ve built our societies around economics it makes sense that relationships feel contractual. But if we don’t like how it turned out, why do we do it? If women’s biology peaks in her 20s, why are all the important things she’s expected to do or be only opened to her in her late teens? A few years after the law and culture says she’s an adult and allowed to do adulting, we’re telling her hurry up because that clock of hers is ticking louder. Biology is already not fair to women. Men, we can spawn a million kids on our death beds; that’s not the case for women, her biology is finite and be blame her when it runs out after mandating most of it away from her.
The other side of that is the amount of young people with children they cannot afford or know how to take care of. People having kids with people who aren’t stable enough to be a family nor ever will since they have human beings of their own to be responsible for. One would think this would be motivation enough to mature but it’s not. People often put their heads down and hustle through life not really learning because they’re busy stressing over their kid. We tell people that they’re free to do whatever they want and have as much sex as they want; be fruitful and multiply but not responsibly. We don’t even know what responsible actually looks like. I’ve laid it out and we’re afraid of it. Responsibility is understanding our nature and working within and with it rather than against it like we always have. It’s not losing our shit when someone calls it out. It’s thinking about why we do things instead of blindly doing them. Because we live in the outcome of the blind leading the dumb. We have a framework overlayed on life that punishes people for having biology.
Arranged marriages for most of human history is how some cultures avoided these problem. For us however and our ideals about freedom and autonomy that is counterproductive. However we don’t address the business side of marriage which it is otherwise it wouldn’t require a contract. And the other side of marriage which is about family and relationships. If anything marriage and relationships aren’t mutually exclusive. One is a business, the other is a life dynamic. No one needs to be married in order to have all the benefits and privileges of a family. A man and woman can simply be together and build a family. However because that isn’t the priority and economics is, the business side is what’s important or what we unconsciously tell ourselves. Meanwhile the parts that matter that feed or drain the soul are what we constantly lament about.
the problem is the practice and the ideology aren’t the same. The ideology is life but the practice is economics. A relationship is a home, a marriage is a mortgage.
