Singlehood, marriage, and happiness

The comment

"You make valid points for humans who want to survive life without undue misery, but this video has little to do with actually finding happiness. 

Would it kill you to mention the word love a couple of times in such a long video on relationships? Have you considered love as something more than just a physical connection? 

I’m sure my opinion is worthless to you as I’m in the 99.9% of people who are either not happily married according to your parameters or are lying to save face about it, but I believe that the majority of truly happily married people fall outside of these ‘sweet spots’ statistically speaking, simply because of unforeseen circumstances which, yes, in some cases can contribute to divorce, but in other cases can lead to people becoming more mature humans who actually know how to treat each other right. People change, and even an idiot with a neck beard who worked fast food for a bit can be a great guy. 

No, you can’t wait around for it to happen, but if you see the guy later on, doing something that you feel is brilliant and now qualifies as someone who you might have a successful and fulfilling life with then give him a chance. 

Also marriage is not for everyone. Shaming older women who didn’t do things ‘just right’ into telling young people not to what they did is not a matter of their repentance, because a lack of marriage is not a sin. Some of these women are actually happily single despite the stigmas, and so are many men. 

Many of the points you make are, to me, things that go without saying, or are amply provided for by human instinct and desire. 

As heinous a sin as it may seem to you in the culture you espouse, the other fact is that, in this era, raising children is not for everyone. And I know this goes against your confirmation bias, but a married couple can be happy and fulfilled without children of their own. It is harder in certain cultures though, if they feel that everyone else is pressuring or judging them for it. 

I’m sorry if I said anything upsetting, but there’s more to life than just trying to mitigate failure. Know yourself, learn truth, gain wisdom, and let go of fear. 

Sometimes in life we lose the things we value most because we need to learn their true worth. Sometimes we learn they were more valuable than we ever knew, but sometimes the things we valued most were the least important. I may not have all the things you think are important for happiness but I am a happy person: I don’t fake a smile, I have no regrets, I have aspirations and dreams and an enjoyment of my journey through life. One day I hope to be married to a man who knows how to enjoy the journey alongside me. Maybe we will even have kids, or maybe we won’t in this life. I know this is about how to have a happy marriage, but it’s okay to be happy in all stages of your life, whether marriage is yet to come, or not coming, or even come and gone. 

Diversity is the spice of life. Embrace your own path and make it joyful for yourself."

The reply

This is gold: "Sometimes in life we lose the things we value most because we need to learn their true worth. Sometimes we learn they were more valuable than we ever knew, but sometimes the things we valued most were the least important."

I completely agree with that beautiful couplet, and have said as much (though probably not as well) on more than one occasion.

I'd summarize most of what you said as an attempt to avoid uncomfortable actions or the guilt that comes from avoiding them through dishonestly attempting to dismantle my arguments, mostly through treating exceptions as the rule.

You said "Diversity is the spice of life. Embrace your own path and make it joyful for yourself." Do you really think there are that many options that billions of examples are insufficient to clearly show what they are and what they yield? Do you really think that somehow you are going to find a better way than has been demonstrated among the choices of so many other people for so long? Do you believe you are going to do something other than what has always been the best and find some substantively better--or even equal--result? And you think mine is the unreasonable position here?

Look, it's great if you can find a case of a pet wolf that never bites anyone. That does not mean that we should teach all children that wolves are no different than pet dogs. And if it were the case that 50% of children were being mauled by wolves, it would be extremely disingenuous to claim that "these things go without saying."

It doesn't matter if you "believe" there are happy people who arrived their in some other way than I've described. The question is are there things that a young person can do to maximize their chances and what difference would it make?

You say you are happy single, and there are indeed many men and women who say they are. The question is are you as happy as you *could* be, what difference is there, how would you know, and will this change over the remaining decades of your life? 

I agree that men can be single and still have a fulfilling life. I dispute your theory that this is possible for women. Marriage and children are fundamentally different in purpose and importance for men and women. It has been so from the beginning. Adam's mortal prescription was toil, Eve's was marriage and children.[1] These prescriptions are not part of "a culture I espouse," as you dismissively attempted to reduce it to. They are hard wired in us by our Creator. To hold a different position as a woman who has not yet had children is not just to ignore the voices of the millions of mothers you have easy access to who would tell you you're wrong, but to claim that you know more than God and can find happiness in some other way than he has ordained. Good luck with that. A woman who never marries and has kids is as much a woman as a man who spends his life in his mother's basement playing video games. Jesus and others (including Paul, for instance) explicitly condoned a solitary life for men, but that was never described for women. For women, marriage and children isn't a punishment, it is a gift.

You admit above that you still hope for a husband that meets your standards. Will you still hold your nonchalant outlook when you are too old to have that hope? If my perspective on this is anywhere near true, your present path only has two possible outcomes: 1) You will remain single until your age exceeds your ability to hope that a man good enough to marry will be interested in you or 2) through ignorance or desperation on the part of at least one of you, you'll marry only to find the relationship sour into a mutual regret markedly worse than being single. Why? Because you didn't see this opportunity for how important and rare it was and you were not willing to do what it took to achieve success. Wishful thinking and "it's all good" thinking might be enough to shoo away a pesky YouTube statement of uncomfortable truth, but platitudes like "it’s okay to be happy in all stages of your life, whether marriage is yet to come, or not coming, or even come and gone" are not going to comfort you in the event you come to age where you regret not marrying and having kids and you realize it is too late for one or both due to age. 

Even in the event there were a person (male or female) who was indeed as happy as they could be remaining single their whole lives, will they need our advice to find that outcome? Or should we bend our discussion of the matter to cover all potential edge cases--no matter how rare--at the expense of misdirecting the overwhelming majority of those who would not be nearly as happy single, and who will not find success through the soft paths of "do whatever--anything goes"? Look around you for the obvious answer. We need not be theoretical here. As a society, we've tried it your way and mine, and people are much more miserable, lonely, and unfulfilled in the present system than the former.

If any of this matters, we ought to say something about it and attempt to help young people do what must be done at a young age to incline towards the greatest happiness.

One-off post-notes:

You said: "You make valid points for humans who want to survive life without undue misery, but this video has little to do with actually finding happiness." I'm not sure where you are coming from in claiming that the video had little to do with finding happiness. Because I did not make the case that a well-chosen spouse is the key to the greatest happiness in life for men and women? I have and will continue to make that case in other materials. You obviously can't provide a full argument for every idea in every video (or blog, or chapter, or even book).

You said: "if you see the guy later on, doing something that you feel is brilliant and now qualifies as someone who you might have a successful and fulfilling life with then give him a chance." This presupposes he will want you, and overlooks the fact that men increase in appeal to women as they age, while women decrease in their appeal to men. Men have a modern but well-known saying to address women who think this ploy will work (seriously, you can google it): "If I wasn't good enough for you in your prime, you aren't good enough for me in mine."

You said: "Shaming older women who didn’t do things ‘just right’ into telling young people not to what they did is not a matter of their repentance, because a lack of marriage is not a sin." You omitted that I was speaking directly about older women who regret their decisions. Is "shaming" the most accurate verb to describe stating the facts about a harmful practice in order to help others avoid it? It obviously is not. If you have to resort to emotional dog whistles to make yourself feel better about your position, you should consider the possibility that your position is incorrect.

[1] - Preemptively responding the shrill shrieks of people clamoring about infertility: The existence of women tormented by infertility is an argument in favor of what I have said, not against it. Almost all modern infertility would not exist if women married young and did not take hormonal birth control before marrying. In the few cases that remained, there are sufficiently numerous and easy ways of providing maternal experiences for all such afflicted in the event that they marry young and well enough to have secured a quality man.