Dr. Orion Taraban runs the PsycHacks channel on YouTube. He noted in a video from January 2023 that while men and women can both be extremely loyal, they are loyal to different things. In that regard, he explains that women are loyal to their feelings. Thus, a woman's loyalty to a man is proportionate to how much she loves him. That is, she will remain loyal to a man as long as she loves him; but if she stops loving him, that loyalty will disappear. Men, conversely, tend to be loyal to a duty or an oath.
I saw an example of this in a recent Daily Mail piece, "I settled for a man I didn't love or desire. Here's the price I've paid for marrying Mr OK rather than Mr Right..." The basic gist of this woman's story is that she found a man that gave her "the tingles" and whom she married when 26 and with whom she had a kid. But he was a player (probably one of the things that made him interesting to her) and wound up having an affair, resulting in the two divorcing. That left her a single mother and with limited prospects. So she married a man she did not love because he would be able to provide for her and her daughter.
Although she had children with her second husband, she admits that she never loved him; and, as she describes it, she has contributed little to the marriage either romantically or financially. But on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary and the children grown up, she no longer needs her second husband. She states, "I don't want riches, or financial security [which he provided and of which she'll take half or more], but pure love and attraction."
While the article doesn't include the second husband's point of view, my guess is that he has been unhappy in the marriage for a long time, but has stuck around because of his duties to her and their children. None of his loyalty will be rewarded in the end, however.
I think the primary lesson from all of this for young (or youngish) single men is to be very careful of getting involved with single mothers because you can never be sure of their motives or their loyalty.
Does that include the men who leave their wives? All that loyalty to their oath and stuff? Because people are people. They do what they do. Some are weak, some are strong. Some are nice, some are jackasses. It’s not divided along gender lines.
ReplyDeleteWhen I write pieces like this, it is generally in reaction to something I've read. While the Daily Mail and other news sites love to run essays justifying women who blow up a marriage because they are bored, they don't seem to have similar pieces excusing men for ditching their wives. And, anyway, I don't have to write about men being a-holes or disloyal because the almost universal message from government, churches, and the media is "men are bad, women are good." As to there being a gender divide, there is, unfortunately, no getting around the fact that 70% of divorces are initiated by women (and going up to 90% when focusing just on college educated women).
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