A literal Chad faces the very horror story that the MGTOWs cite to justify their fear of marriage and reaches a pair of surprising conclusions.
I am in the middle of a very ugly divorce. My wife and kids have been AWOL for over three months. Two days before Christmas I got a knock on my door from an officer of the court presenting me with a bill of divorce, ending 14 years of marriage. I loved my wife dearly, and I thought the feeling was mutual despite some differences. We had a few fights, but I didn’t think they were too bad. She was more distant than normal in the months leading up to it. She says it was my conversion to Catholicism, but I know that’s just the excuse, her golden ticket out.
We have five very young children who are now without a father. I received recent news that she will be petitioning the court to move into my house with the children, kicking me out, which will render me literally homeless. In addition I’ll have to pay a huge amount of alimony and child support, so I will also be poor. Whether the judge will honor that or not, or to what degree, remains to be seen.
So the MGTOW’s were right. I stand to lose everything I have built over a decade and a half, or at least a substantial amount of it.
They’re not wrong. Feminism and the gynocentric society we have currently found ourselves in has made marriage a huge risk to men. Feminism has rendered women–even the conservative ones–opportunists who will marry you and then suck you dry, draining your finances on yoga classes, 10-day retreat trips, and countless therapy sessions. Then when you’re in enough debt she hires a sleazy lawyer to drum up humiliations of you in the courtroom. As the nail in the coffin, the state comes in to attach this woman scorned to you for another couple decades like a parasite, leeching alimony and child support from your hard work.
Looking at just those facts, they’re 100% right. Besides the five beautiful children that came out of this marriage, marrying her was a mistake, a big one.
Now for the plot twist. That marriage was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Then another twist. The divorce is possibly the second best.
Now, it’s true that the Christian marriage advocates are, for the most part, blathering morons. Pretty much all the stuff they say about the beauty and perfection of a marital relationship is total nonsense based on relative ignorance; they know about as much of the materialist joys of modern hedonism as a medieval Catholic monk. They’re teetotallers comparing a nice cup of tea to cocaine. The joys of the godless may be but for a moment, but they are real.
To put it simply, if either materialism or hedonism is your absolute priority, then don’t get married. Chase the dragon until you die with all your toys.
However, in like manner, the joys and satisfactions of marriage cannot be understood from the outside. They are more akin to the satisfaction of the architect in seeing his vision come to life in brick and stone, or to those of the writer holding his first novel in his hands. There is a sense of purpose and accomplishment in building a family, and it is something that remains even in the aftermath of a failed marriage.
As one gets older, the more import one places on one’s legacy and the less one places on transitory pleasures and ephemeral happiness. And also, the more you realize that your regrets tend to be based more on the risks you failed to take rather than the failures you experienced.
But these are things that can only be contemplated on the other side of the fence. Even so, it should be kept in mind that decisions made on the sole basis of fear are reliably suboptimal, and if one is to err, it is always best to err on the side of eusociality and eucivility rather than their opposites.
UPDATE: A woman shares her own experience as a child of divorce, which may help explain why women are increasingly choosing to stay married based on their realization that the grass on the other side of the fence is not so green.
I’ve never understood these women. I lived that life, as the daughter of a woman who destroyed everything we had for “greener pastures”. My Mom never remarried, nor found a partner to share her life. She was never financially stable after the divorce. She harassed, bashed and degraded my father, even after his death some 30 years later. She died alone at home, of suicide, at age 67.