There is someone for everyone, but it is still hard work.
Perhaps there WAS, early enough on, but by no means does that remain so indefinitely.
For men, enough years slacking, running up debts, smoking pot, not developing work habits or a reliably-paying career, habitually changing romantic partners at the first conflict, trouble with the law, etc., all make a man unmarriable to women he might once have realistically aimed.
Likewise, for women, enough miles of penises (so she cannot bond, has STDs that made her infertile, etc.), debts, becoming age-barren, being coarsened by work environments, being sexually used-up, collecting bastard castoffs, recreational chemical habits, hoarding possessions (whether shoes, cr@p "art", or felines), being a known coalburner, becoming morbidly obese, consuming enough Lifetime/romance novels/consumer advertising so her expectations are so stratospheric she turns down 100% of the commitment-minded men all the way to the nursing home, or just frivorcing a good-as-she-could -get man that she never manages to replace, etc., are common enough marriageability enders.
In the words of Roger Devlin, in his essay "Home Economics":
"Most men eventually come to the melancholy realization that a woman's choice of mate is largely, and often principally, motivated by economic considerations. In their drive for power, the feminists gave out rosy promises to men that they could change this; that women sought providers only because they were being unfairly barred from the realm of production (which feminists assumed could only lie outside the home). Once women established themselves in the labor force, the pressure upon men to provide for them would be eased. Women would behave less materialistically and choose mates on the basis of personal qualities.
At the same time, and rather inconsistently, women were assured that putting their careers first would incidentally make them eagerly sought out by high-flying men. A popular female self-help book of the early 1980s, for example, was titled
Men Are Just Desserts.
As usual, the feminists treated as historically conditioned something that was in reality natural. The female tendency to seek provider-mates evolved long before the dawn of history, when economic considerations meant hunting ability and bare survival rather than Sports Utility Vehicles and Hawaiian vacations. Women attracted to men able to provide for offspring had more surviving offspring. So today they are simply hard-wired to seek such men.
What actually happens when a woman starts earning $100,000 a year, therefore, is not that she ceases to seek a man who can provide for her but that she perceives men as providers (and hence potential mates) only if they are earning even more. When the feminist project is carried out, the majority of men do not get less-materialistic wives; they simply do not get wives at all.
Even if there were enough wealthy men to go around, such men are rarely interested in marrying the corporate spinsters frantically pursuing them. That leads to a kind of tragicomic situation. There exists today a whole genre of self-help literature aimed at well-to-do professional women, promising to show them, as one author phrases it, "how to flatter, tease, dupe, and otherwise manipulate a man into marriage."
[4] A company in Manhattan charges such women $9,600 for a beauty and personality makeover that culminates in a make-believe wedding. The ersatz ceremonies are often impossible to complete because the "brides" break down crying. Professionally successful men, for their part, are starting to report frequent nuisance calls from dating agencies on behalf of these desperate women.
Obviously, most of those women are going to fail in their quest no matter how many self-help books they read or how much money they spend.
There is still a boy for every girl in the world, but there is not a higher-status boy for every menopausal career girl who foolishly sacrificed her nubile years to achieving wealth and status for herself. These women, in other words, are victims of their own success; their lives are what they have made them. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: a man would need a heart of stone to behold their situation without laughing.
In an affluent society, even men of well-below-average provisioning capability can easily reproduce at above replacement rate. They may, for that matter, be better husbands and fathers than most wealthy men. Considered rationally, therefore, general prosperity ought to lead to a flourishing society of moderately large families. But the female sex instinct, as the reader may possibly have noticed, is not rational. It is triggered by relative rather than absolute wealth, and so men's sexual attractiveness is still determined by their status within the social hierarchy as perceived by women.
Another factor now working against the marital prospects of ordinary men is the influence of "romantic" books and movies upon women's imaginations.
Hollywood comedy, for example, has long pandered to the primitive female instinct to seek a mate with limitless provisioning capability. A stock hero is the handsome, jet-setting bachelor. His wealth is simply
there, without his needing to go to any trouble to acquire it, leaving him free to devote full attention to romancing the heroine.
In "
That Touch of Mink" (1962), Cary Grant flies Doris Day to Philadelphia in his private jet for a plate of fettuccini. She tags along as he addresses the UN. They go to a Yankees game and sit in the dugout with the players (he owns the team, apparently). He furnishes her with a new wardrobe complete with private fashion show. He buys up all the tickets on a peak-season flight to Bermuda so she can have the airplane to herself. None of this fantasy is based upon the heroine's rational concern that the children be adequately provided for; it is pure female luxury. Grant is played off against a "creepy" rival whose unworthiness consists in his having to hold down an ordinary office job, vacationing in East New Jersey instead of Bermuda, and dining on TV dinners and inexpensive wine.
This movie, along with the many others like it, actually gets cited as an example of wholesome entertainment from a more innocent age. The average dull-witted conservative media critic cannot perceive anything objectionable since there is no explicit or extramarital sex. In fact, such "romantic" pictures amount to a kind of gold digger's pornography. In contrast to Jane Austen's plot lines, where real risks and difficulties are encountered and moral lessons can be learned, these movies are mere wish fulfillment. They set women up for disappointment by teaching them to have unrealistic expectations about love and life. And, of course, they create absurdly unattainable standards for men.
Or consider the related phenomenon of
pulp romance fiction. The market for such books mysteriously exploded around the same time women began entering the workforce in large numbers. The pioneering company, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., saw its earnings grow two-hundredfold in the decade of the 1970s.
[5] Today,
Harlequin has many competitors, and some sources report that the romance genre accounts for over half of paperback sales in the United States. The lesson to be drawn, it seems, is that when women become able to provide for themselves, they do not cease to think about men; instead, marriage to a real but imperfect provider is replaced by endless fantasizing about being swept up into the arms of impossibly perfect provider-mates.
I once knew a professionally successful registered nurse who owned thousands of those books; the walls of every room in her house were lined with them. She must have read them every waking hour not devoted to working or eating. Not coincidentally, she had neither husband nor children.
Warren Farrell explained as early as 1986 why such literature is the functional equivalent of pornography for women.
[6] But while a great deal has been written to deplore the spread of pornography in our society, almost no serious attention has been directed to the causes and effects of romance fiction. My hunch is that its influence is actually more pernicious than pornography, because women have so much greater natural power than men to determine real-world courtship and marriage patterns."