Comments by "buddermonger2000" (@buddermonger2000) on "Is the gender pay gap a myth? | Richard Reeves" video.

@Julia Sepúlveda The only other thing I will say is that women are the ones who initiate the divorce 70% of the time and 90% when college educated (college educated earning more generally). Women as a rule are hypergamous, which means that they date above their standing. Money is an unfortunate objective measure of one's economic standing and also their social standing in an era with weak class divides and incredibly weak social divides.
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@Julia Sepúlveda The only thing I will say is this: thoughts are revealed by actions and not words. There are a lot of women who say that they'd prefer the man to be the one to stay at home and take the cut, however, on average women who start to make more than their man divorce them at astonishing rates. It's not a certainty in any case, but in terms of women's attitudes, I'll say to, in general, trust not their words, but their choices. That goes for everyone regardless of birth.
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@Julia Sepúlveda On a separate note, it's not actually that great. Most of the factors basically boil down to "women more often feel unhappy in marriage because they're more emotionally attuned" and "women want to be like their friends who are divorced" and so overall, it just sounds incredibly selfish. These aren't so much explanations, but more so symptoms of greater problems it seems. All of these would be explanations if men actually divorced closer at the same rate. However, no, it's women who simply decide they no longer like their husbands. And this can be influenced by seeing what they think are red flags or their friends having a divorce. It's almost as if they don't want to resolve any conflicts or do something popular for fitting in more. Yes I'm aware other things were mentioned such as bearing the brunt of the labor, however they're basically all simply seeming like excuses a person would make for why they'd divorce as they don't want to give the real reason because it sounds terrible. They're worse off afterwards (which is the data posed), but they still are satisfied with the divorce. Either they're terrible at picking partners, or there's something deeply wrong which isn't being discussed. I'm not going to accuse them of knowing something they don't which is what I sound like I'm saying, but these really don't seem like good reasons to get a divorce. Humans are complex and make strange irrational choices, and each relationship must be looked at individually as you don't know what fights have occurred, what they feel, etc. However, This doesn't sound like a healthy situation nor does it sound like a truly root cause.
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@Julia Sepúlveda The reason I put it on them is because I truly doubt that such are coming on such a common rate. You made the assumption that it's the woman dragging the man to couple's therapy. You've made the implicit assumption that the man is the one who isn't trying, and it's quite interesting while being the exact thing that I'm basically suggesting isn't the case. And if the decision isn't made lightly, and if it's a stressful time where very few people aren't stressed because they had such a stressful relationship, then why get a divorce at all? It sounds like you're willingly going through something awful for very little benefit. Also, please don't misunderstand me. The reason I said them as if only one person was because I was explicitly talking about the woman's reason for wanting a divorce. So in this case it would be one person and their decision. However, when you've agreed to such a relationship with a person, you've gained a duty to them. To shirk them is indeed very selfish, and even more importantly, you've shown yourself to be unreliable. Now, as I've said, relationships are complex because they're made of people who are complex by nature and of histories almost impossible to understand without taking the same time those individuals did. Along with their choices, knowledge, and attitudes at the time. You would have to be the people themselves to properly understand. But in aggregate, women are the ones who are initiating it more. The person initiating is the one who has the problem. You have the problem, then it's yours to solve without hurting others until last resort. And if you're at a last resort, then it's truly unlikely for a divorce process to be more stressful rather than a relief.
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@Julia Sepúlveda I think the most important thing to note is that they're not just financially worse off but emotionally too. They are unhappier in the long run as well. It's actually quite concerning. My biggest point is this: you made the decision, due to a variety of factors that have made you feel unhappy, but afterward you take the decision to be even more unhappy. I know your entire point is based around putting in work that ends up fruitless, but that seems like a stereotype more than anything else. More importantly, it seems like rather than putting in effective work, or looking for real solutions based on the other person, that they'd rather look in women's magazines and toward other women for answers which eventually simply leads astray. This is a bit abstract, but I'm going to give a ridiculous example simply to get the idea across. If you're looking to break a brick wall by brushing it with a tooth brush, you can put in all of the work you want, but you'll never get anywhere. The problem is that you have to figure it out on terms relevant and not just what you're told. Human relationships are complicated and such phenomena are difficult on both parties. Very rarely is any one person at fault. However, I actually do have to support that it is fundamentally their own fault. Because they have to care about those things. They can simply choose to set their expectations lower. They can choose to not have a problem with what's going on. That is always a viable choice and you must choose to have such desires. Finally, there's a fundamental problem with looking for a relationship that benefits you. That's fundamentally one which will fail. If you're looking for a relationship as a benefit to you, you've already set it to eventual failure. They are family and you don't just cut off family due to a downturn. Even if you do eventually cut off family it's basically because they've done something so heinous or they're so lost and dependent on you to keep afloat their bad behavior that you have do it for their own good. Not that relationships should actively hurt you constantly, but it's basically the symptom of such commodification you brought up that you're looking for benefits. If you're looking for happiness then you're choosing pleasure and dooming your relationship from the start. Happiness is inherently fleeting. Address your own discontent within yourself and you'll eventually reach contentment in anything and live a richer life.
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@Julia Sepúlveda The BBC article said they were more stressed and that their quality of life suffered immensely. It really wasn't just about financial security but also other stresses. And the thing is that just as you've said it's 2 to tango, men absolutely can do the same thing. But here the reason they bite the bullet is because they are the ones who fundamentally are the ones upset. The one upset is the one who ends it. They're upset, they leave. You can simply choose to not be upset. Being upset is a choice. And while yes fundamentally you can find contentment in single life as well, at that point just never be in a relationship if you're just going to end it because you feel like you'll be more well off. And yes abusive parents exist, such things exist, but as I noted, relationships shouldn't actively harm you. But they're family. It doesn't matter if they're chosen. In fact, that makes it even more imperative that you stick together as you have even more reason to consider them family having made that choice yourself. To un-choose is to betray the entire idea of if. You made the choice. Don't make choices spuriously. Take the time and effort required to live with your choices. Work on yourself. Improve yourself. But no people don't actually do that. Especially women. They no longer believe the men are worth it and leave. This is at rates of 70% to 90%. They don't feel they have to improve. The man serves them and their desires. Should this stop, they leave. I think all of the attitudes you've displayed are evidence of this as that's what the conversation has fundamentally been around. Which brings back to quite well relating to why they divorce once they make less money. They no longer feel the man meets their desires, however deep seated and subconscious those desires are. This is not to suggest that they're just naturally feeling such ways, but it's more to do with the fact that women will say they just no longer feel attracted to him, feel something is off, feel they see red flags, etc, which are all reflective of subconscious attitudes which aren't well expressed in their own minds for reasons as various as blades of grass on the ground.
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@Julia Sepúlveda If you're in a relationship to contribute to your own well-being you have made the first mistake. Because there is near no relationship in existence that you will have for a long time which will contribute to your well-being the entire time. Such things are inherently short-term and self-interested. There are inevitable ups and downs and as imperfect creatures and so both parties will inevitably make Grevious mistakes. You care about the other person. If you stop caring about them, that signals a problem more with you than the other. And yes because it fundamentally is materialistic and no-fault divorce basically incentivizes that. Earlier you said marriages of love were recent but people were choosing their own partners for literally a thousand years in the West and romance novels have existed for basically the existence of the printing press (actual romance not erotica). Fundamentally, your care should extend into the mundane. If you only care for the novel and interesting, then you've already missed the point. Nothing will be novel forever. That's basically an oxymoron. You're saying you only join because you like them now, but if you see no future, if you aren't prepared for the inevitability of the mundane with relationships inherently intended to last decades, you've already made a fatal error. Finally, you said that I've a ride or die mentality. Well, marital vows explicitly state this. The most well-known line from those vows is "until death do us part" and so if you aren't prepared for that, don't get married. PS: That Bell Hooks like sounds like garbage to me. If you're looking to nurture spiritual growth, you've already put in a goal. Goals just kind of put built-in failure conditions. And it's even worse when the people involved aren't very spiritual like myself.
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@brini'staco The biggest thing here is that it must become a social norm. Women entered the workforce, and that became the social norm. It must become the social norm to take time to foster a family. How that is done with industrial populations is the challenge of the future. A possible idea would be seasonal work much more akin to old agricultural styles of having festivities when not in the growing seasons rather than year-round industrial work. Also a return to the church (or at least some way to foster communities which was the historic norm for populations), so that people can find partners when they're younger and start far younger when less established.
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@Julia Sepúlveda It's simply been a bit irrelevant, but to respond: if you're trying your best and it isn't working out, then you're simply going about it wrong. Simple as that. You are doing something wrong, and I thought I touched on this. You can do your best brushing a brick wall, but it won't get you through the wall. People working hard and not trying to actually figure out more central issues is a key factor in many problems. As for sharing a life with them, it should be quite obvious that it's difficult and to be ready for that difficulty mentally rather than assuming it to be something to just walk into. The biggest thing with sharing a life with a person is just being prepared for it to be difficult of which very few people are. As for the reason you can't find it before the 1700s, it's because there's just a lot less literature before then. The printing press was created in the mid to late 1600s. So first, the technology for the average person to actually publish works needed to be created and then proliferated to such an extent that it could be possible. Beforehand populations were not only far less literate (which leads to less personal writings), but also far less able to publish works since everything was copied down by hand. This basically led to mostly official documents being written down or books with at most a few hundred copies. Each of these was for specific information and not pleasure. Thus, in real terms, that tended to fall through the cracks. And "patriarchy" is simply a foolish word to describe much of it. You had family acceptability because people still found partners within their own communities and usually known their potential spouses since childhood. People were choosing their own spouses in the west basically since the church banned cousin marriage shortly after the fall of Rome and we have sources of basically to 1000 AD of the western European marriage pattern being one of choosing your partner and usually the feelings linked to that. This is actually why the eastern arranged marriages weren't as bad as is normally made out to be since the families involved tended to pick spouses from basically childhood friends. The evils of arranged marriages were mostly from political marriages in the nobility where we have all of the arranged marriage tragedies from. Also, you're right. I could change my expectations that marriage lasts forever. That's true. But it'd damage my relationships by telling my partner I have no faith in them, and also opening myself to going into a situation that I know I'll inevitably lose out from. At which point, I just wouldn't get married. Nip it at the bud. Now, you've not really proven anything tossing my words back to me. It's just worth adding the caveat that such changes in attitude should work to better yourself or the relationship (if you're even interested in preserving it, which you should if you actually managed to get married), and if you're just changing them to suit your desires it'll never take you anywhere. Misuse of anything won't get you anywhere. Honestly, betting on it not lasting is dooming it to failure as well. It sounds like there's a lot to doom these things to failure. Because there is. But this tended to be a bit more well known and better understood in the past of how to do it right. As with a great many things, there are so many ways to be wrong and so few to be right.
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@Julia Sepúlveda A relationship is a continuing action. To end, it is the most obvious sign of a failed relationship. Just because things continued well doesn't mean it didn't ultimately fail. The end of the relationship is ultimately the failure of it. Why it did or if it was necessary to are unrelated to that condition. It's why divorce is seen as a failure. Because it ultimately is. That sounds heartless and something you'd disagree to at first clearly, so I'll give another example. If you die, you fail to survive. If you hold your own in a fight but lose, you fail to win. If you drive very well but then crash, you fail to be a good driver. Such are the characteristics of continuing processes. You can still fail with the success being until you die. So, in that case, the relationship failed. It's also very important to understand that it is a failure because if you don't, you can't have a continuing relationship for a long time. Having lots of relationships indicates a problem with you. Having so many end indicates a problem with you. So it is very important to understand that it truly is a failure. Because there's another success condition. Also even if you hang around like-minded people, all you've done is shrink the pool to something which will inevitably fail. And while for you I understand you say you want that, in reality very few people truly do. All things are doomed to failure eventually unless the window is limited. How long you succeed is important, but if you're looking to fail, you will inevitably do so. Also, i will partially retract my statement about them marrying for love before then. While it was for love, it was one which was far less fleeting. One less dependant on passions and romantic love but ones far deeper. You still were marrying people you knew your entire life and loved them accordingly. They were people from your community and were supported by it. You didn't marry people you disliked (unless you were out of options) and knew better than to pursue based on those passions. Also were probably love-making with a few more people anyway because it was polite to have sex with friends and in front of the children in the 13th century. If you're not sleeping in the bed together naked you're being rude.
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@shawnpavlik3756 "A woman cannot desire a man who is beneath her" is less a statement of fact and more reflective of the reality of many blogs where older women can't find men who make more money than they do, the fact that women do statistically divorce men after making more money than they do (though this has started to shrink in the 90s, without significant data post that period), and that women generally have a pattern of hypergamy toward partner selection. While generalizations cannot be absolute, it's generally a rule to support when looking at relationships.
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Honestly, yes, the ideology of the current ruling coalition of nearly all developed countries is basically anti-life and a product of the industrial boom and change to year-round work. We need to find a way to create the time necessary to have a family without compromising enough money to simply not live.
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@James Rutterford No-one can agree 100% on everything with a person unless they don't think and or stay in their lane to such a degree that they only really say incredibly well sourced info that's basically common knowledge in their field. And even then, that's not absolute
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@Julia Sepúlveda It's really not pseudoscience. It's simply a phenomenon that has been observed. First off, you have wrong that we don't know how they lived. In most cultures, we know how they lived unless they were destroyed and leave no records. Secondly, women weren't slaves to their husbands. Especially in the West. The West got rid of the structures which truly oppressed women (the clan structure) when the Catholic church banned cousin marriage shortly after the fall of Rome. In the East, women were pawns of their clans, but honestly, so were the men in many ways, even if much more willing pawns. Thirdly, I'd like you to ask why it took so long for women to truly be independent in the way they are now and to think why it'd take until after the industrial revolution and specifically into the modern democratic order in which to do this. And why you think women didn't have power beforehand. I don't have an answer, but it sure is interesting to notice since basically nothing that doesn't work continues on. Lastly, I have no obsession with this. I never mentioned "high value" or anything of the sort. More than anything else, we look to people's choices and actions. Correlation is not causation, but when 2 things are correlated 9 times out of 10 there is a factor C which links the two together. Of these, women are the ones who file divorce, they are the ones who choose the men, not the other way around. They also at very high rates divorce men once they make less money than they themselves do. It's not about being high value. It's about perception and believing they are unworthy and the factors that go into that. It's a strange way to put it since it's not thought of that way, but I believe it's the most accurate way of putting it.
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@shawnpavlik3756 Which idea?
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