Overheard at the gym: MRA/MGTOW talk from med students

About two weeks ago, I was at the campus gym lifting weights, when I heard the phrase "get married" drifting over from a conversation some distance away. I looked over, and saw a group of three guys at a piece of equipment about twenty feet away from the one I was using. They were taking turns on it and chatting as they did so. I recognized one of them as a member of the class one year behind mine in medical school, though I really don't know him at all, so I assumed the others were med students as well. The part of the conversation I overheard went something like this:

"Me, getting married?"

"I'd never get married."

"I saw a thing on the news about some celebrity who just got divorced, and his wife wound up with more than half of all his money." [I thought they might have been referring to John Cleese.]

"I just don't get why you'd do that to yourself!"

"Well, I don't know, I guess some people do it if they want to have a family, you know..."

"Yeah, but you don't have to get married to have a family."

"True, but some people still feel like they should, I guess..."

I thought this was interesting just because of how my views have changed over the past year. If I had overheard this conversation one year ago, I would have felt in response a mixture of envy, jealousy, intimidation, resentment, and despair. Envy, because I would have assumed the reason the guys were talking this way is that they were selfish hedonists who happened to be blessed with the traits that make men attractive to women, and therefore they were going to take as much as they could get (of sex) while they could get it; and I wished I had the power to attract women that way. Jealousy, because I would have thought that by doing this they were monopolizing all the girls, corrupting many who would otherwise have remained innocent and naive and been attracted to a guy like me, turning them into sluts and party girls who were out of my league. Intimidation, because I would have assumed that anyone who lived their life that way was more socially dominant than I and would see me as a pathetic sniveling little wimp for clinging to traditional morality, and that they were on the side of the culture wars which was fighting to transform our society away from what I wanted it to be and toward something that was very unpleasant to me. Resentment that they would have the nerve to do this, and despair that their side in the culture wars was winning and their victory seemed inevitable.

All of this, because a few males indirectly implied that they thought it made more sense to have sex outside of marriage than within it.

Now that I have become familiar with the seduction community and the writings of F. Roger Devlin, and been clued into the real dynamics behind sexual relationships, I see things in a different light. I don't see these guys as heroes, nor innocent victims, but they are merely reacting to their environment. They see men in the news every day having their lives ruined and everything they have taken away in divorce court, all because their wives got "bored," and they understandably want to avoid that. They weren't objecting to marriage in theory, but to what it has become in practice in our society. Notably--something that would have escaped me a year ago, when I would have focused on their supposed caddishness and superiority to me in the dating market--they weren't complaining about the idea of settling down with one woman for the rest of your life. None of them explicitly said that they wanted to sleep around, and in fact they seemed to think having a family was still an acceptable goal. Fifty years ago, in a society that still held traditional sexual morality up as a public ideal, these guys would probably have gotten married without giving it much thought.

The point is that my own journey is illustrative of just how in the dark most of our society is. I can't say for certain what all the factors were which converged over the past year to change my point of view, but for most people, it is something that still hasn't happened. It must happen, particularly among social and religious conservatives, if we are to turn this ship around. Whether this will happen in time, or on a sufficient scale, remains to be seen, but the truth, at least in raw form, is out there.