Thread by @Sanilac_J

The large majority of men can never be fully satisfied with their relationships if their women don't make explicit efforts to please them. But it has now become a point of modern ideology that women should never make such efforts. The result is predictable. What's in it for men?

Let me explain further. Human nature is such that when all things are equal, men experience more desire and women experience more pleasure. This observation goes back to the ancient Greeks. We don't notice this unless we pay explicit attention to it. Why?

Markets are driven by desire, not pleasure. In fact, markets often fail to serve pleasure and instead create pain. Consider consumerism. People buy things that don't bring them enough pleasure to justify the expense. They have a craving similar to an addiction.

The entire modern economy is built around creating desire, which is a need for something you don't have. The huge marketing spend is about convincing people to desire things. Typically things they don't need and often things that don't help them and aren't worth it.

Our culture is downstream from this economy, and shaped by it. The result is that everything becomes driven by desire at the expense of pleasure. And desire looms so large we don't see its deficiencies, we don't see the gap with pleasure.

Now, how does this apply to men and women. As I said, men experience more desire and women more pleasure when all else is equal. But in the course of time desire without pleasure becomes dissatisfying. A gap that seems irrelevant becomes wearing.

I could write this analysis in more detail but I don't think people will like it or care about it. In fact there is a cottage industry pretending it isn't true. I wrote a thread a week or two ago explaining why the orgasm gap goes the opposite direction people think. Nobody cares

In any case the point is that for men to experience pleasure rather than just desire takes explicit effort by their women to create that pleasure. When women don't make that effort, desire predominates over pleasure in the long run. And that leads to dissatisfaction.

And modern ideology has caused women to double down on this. That's what I call aggressive indifference. Instead of just not trying very hard to please their mates, they are determined to very explicitly not try as hard as they can.

Now when we first see this we think, "they are not creating desire, so nobody will want them." But men have such an excess of desire that they chase them anyway. That's how they can get away with it. Markets are driven by desire, men have more, girls can get away with not trying.

The rub comes later. Because when men reflect on how much they should be investing in a relationship, whether they do so in clear terms or only go by vague feelings, they come away with a sense that they're just not worth investing in. That the juice is not worth the squeeze.

In sum. It should not be a surprise that relationship formation is declining. But the reason isn't so much that women are making themselves undesirable - men have an excess of desire so that is somewhat beside the point - but that they're making relationships "just not worth it."

Let me go a step further. Men have a natural reaction to this situation. "If desire is not really returning anything to justify my efforts, I need to either redirect it or desire less." Both mean fewer and less substantial relationships.

And the problem there is greater than it seems because it is men's excess of desire that drives initial relationship formation. Without it, women are too passive and nothing gets started.

People want to talk about improving the fertility rate, but that's downstream of the coupling rate. Now, why would men want to form more relationships if they don't perceive them as rewarding? Yet hyper-feminist ideology is intent on making them LESS rewarding.

In any case, all signs point toward this getting worse in the future rather than better.