re: The Future of Relationships between Men and Women? Is An All Out Gender War Inevitable?

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I read a lot of this stuff on a semi-academic level (ie, not directly involved and with no experience in the modern app world). Here's my takeaway, it's long -

- The historic social contract is men get affection, domestic life, children, softness and women get leadership, physical/economic security, etc. Each have historically been asked to restrain themselves - men their physical advantages/impulses, flaws in emotional maturity, etc. - women guarding themselves physically and emotionally and holding those things largely back for their future husbands.

- Men built a society where women can work and were encouraged to work. Men either built or allowed women to build departments and career paths that aren't productive and tend to eat away and subvert the actual mission of the business. This is where the "adult daycare" meme comes in. Men created technology to expand optionality for women. Men did most of these things to appease and please women, and in some cases, for grander, purely economic interests.

- The result is that women can work fairly low rigor but lucrative-enough jobs, get endless attention from men who would never have interest in seriously dating or marrying them, and often use the latter to supplement a lifestyle. FWIW I don't mean the sugar lifestyle, I just mean that average women in a large city can go work a bland HR/Marketing job and have men regularly take her to dinner, buy her drinks, so forth in pretty "normal" ways and stretch a pretty meager salary into something more exciting for day-to-day life. Men can't do this, for the most part.

- The worst case scenarios this are bad, they're the social media stories of high body counts and so forth. But I think the real problem is beneath that - plenty of "normal" women can do this for years, getting attention they might never really do much acting on, none of the horror stuff. But nonetheless, they're getting the dopamine hit constantly, probably occasionally getting into relationships/situation ships that aren't destined for anything. And often their natural matches are on the sidelines or slogging it out levels below them. And when they ultimately pivot back to their "natural" matches in their late 20s or early 30s, they're bringing a lot of calluses, baggage, etc. And the men are (understandably) often bringing some resentment.

- "Isn't this how it's always been" - and there is some truth to that. We bought drinks for women. Took them to dinner, etc. I think the difference is a) women previously respected their side of the "bargain" more, perhaps out of good faith, perhaps just out of the idea of reputation/shame/having a more engrained sense of "if I go too far here the thing I want most is in jeopardy" b) the hypergamy of the apps has made what used to exist in theory almost frictionless in reality c) a combination of those things and the modern notions of prioritizing a career over family, that you can always go find a husband who won't care about what you did in your 20s, and candidly, women lying to other women.

- The last part is important because I think it'll have the biggest impact to delay the correction. The correction, I think, is a 6 guy and a 6 girl getting married at 24, slogging it out for a few years, coming into their own together, starting a family. Not the 6 girl having frivolous fun until she's thirty while the 6 guy slogs and builds a career only to have the girl come to him at 30 with baggage and go "ok, you're solid now, now I'm ready for a boring life with you with kids."

-I think we're about to have more voluntarily childless women in the next couple of decades than perhaps we've ever had in world history. I think our misery quotient for women is going to be insane. I think it's already there in many respects, and we have plenty of data for it. But I think we're going to have to endure (and are enduring) a tailing era of dishonesty where women grapple with their choices - "Oh I left my husband for my career and I'm 55 and I'm so happy!" or "I've never for a second regretted being childfree" so forth. For some that will be true. For many it will be blatant lies to avoid looking their own decisions in the face.

TLDR: Men created a roadmap for women to make men miserable, women took it, and ultimately both will be miserable. Men have mostly spend the last 2 decades doing everything women asked in the renewed bargain, while women are behaving at all-time-bad levels and breaching their side of the "social contract." Men are only just now doing anything to "enforce" it and finding they have little leverage at the moment.

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I'm a happy woman with a happy marriage... my worldview is opposite yours- I figure maybe 20% are 'diseased'.

You do you, but if you're only 32 there's a lot more out there to explore in the world of companionship. Assuming 80% of women are bad apples AND assuming they think 80% of men are bad apples is a terrible way to go through life.

Seriously- go to church... not to meet women but to meet God.

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not the "Prince Charming" that all women want

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My goal is to not be as bitter.

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or even have an all out conflict with each other?

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