and control. I am starting to think marriage in America cannot be saved.30
Still others, such as the following commenter, have made commitments to marriage but found out they were on the short end of the stick from both the women and the law once they were in the middle of a divorce:
I met a woman that I was sure was my soul mate. I was deeply in love and so, I thought, was she. All this changed when I lost my high paying job through downsizing. To my credit, I went to work immediately and had two jobs, but still only made about 80% of my old income. My wife gave me a year and then began sleeping with a man, who hadn’t lost his job, in my bed while I was at work. She left with him, taking almost all of my savings and anything else she could carry. Her explanation was that she was “an expensive bitch” and she was unhappy because I worked so much. The adultery doesn’t seem to matter to the court and she got essentially everything. Besides the financial losses, I was so devastated by the betrayal that I could barely function for months. She treated me like garbage and I never worked harder at any endeavor in my life.31
Another commenter by the name of “confused” stated:
. . . the problem is that marriage is quite explicitly NOT a contract in our modern society. Instead, it’s a collection of whatever the judiciary/legislature decides it is today.32
Psychologically astute commenter Jack weighed in with:
It is said that men can’t handle intimacy. That’s not it at all. It is sadness that men can’t handle and they fear that intimacy will take them there.33
Barry states:
Personally I hate the idea that a woman can stop anything and everything I care about doing just by making my life a living hell until I concede to her demands. I must hold my tongue, hold my temper and “be the man there” while the spouse screams invectives and shouts how I should stop riding my bike, horse etc. if I loved her! And let’s not even go to the “I want you to stop riding the bike, horses etc. because YOU WANT TO,” not because I am bitching you off of the bike, horse etc. You name the hobby and the only recourse is divorce where the state takes all my toys and gives them to her. Yes, marriage ain’t what it used to be.34
Though some will dismiss these men’s voices as bitter rants on the Internet, in hearing the more angry or frustrated views of those who speak out, we can understand better what many other men secretly think but won’t say. In doing so, we can learn what truly needs to be changed for men to feel that marriage is a more rewarding experience. Next, let’s turn to what guys who like video games think of women and marriage.
WHAT GAMERS ARE SAYING ABOUT MARRIAGE
A lot of the guys who opt out aren’t particularly angry at women, they just don’t see much point to pursuing involvement with them.
—Vox Day, game designer and blogger at Alpha Game blog
Source: http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2012/02/introducing-hypergamouse.html
Vox Day is a blogger who runs the Alpha Game blog that is summed up with the following caption across the top: “Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.”35 He is also a game designer and author who is interested in the plight of the modern male. His site is a place for guys to discuss the difficulties of modern relationships, video games and just general guy stuff. Although not all of the men who go on the site are gamers—those who play video games—a number of them are, and it’s a good place to gather information on how gamers think in terms of marriage.
Before I turn to the marriage information, let’s learn a few important terms that will help add perspective to the data. Much of the conversation on the Alpha Game blog and many others that are interested in “pickup-artist theory”36 is about hypergamy, which is a term used for females’ tendency to want to “marry up.” James Taranto, in a Wall Street Journal article on American women, says that hypergamy “more broadly defined as the female tendency to mate with dominant or high-status males or to be selective about one’s choice of mate—is also widely observed in other species.”37
Vox Day, like so many of the pickup artist bloggers, has a male socio-sexual hierarchy that he uses to classify men. Here are a few of his classifications and their characteristics:
Alphas—the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust.
Betas—the lieutenants, the petty aristocracy. They’re popular, they do well with women, they’re pretty successful in life, and they may even be exceptionally good-looking. But they lack the Alpha’s natural self-confidence and strength of character.
Deltas—the normal guys. Deltas are the great majority of men. They can’t attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league. This is ironic, because Deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a Delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing of attendance upon her. In a social setting, the Deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man rhapsodizes about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he is almost certainly a Delta. Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly a little afraid of them.
Gammas—the obsequious ones, the posterior puckerers, the nice guys who attempt to score through white-knighting, faux-chivalry, flattery, and omnipresence. All men except true Alphas will occasionally fall into Gamma behavior from time to time . . .
Sigmas—the lone wolves. Occasionally mistaken for Alphas, particularly by women and Alphas, they are not leaders and will actively resist the attempt of others to draft them. Alphas instinctively view them as challenges and either dislike or warily respect them.
Omegas—the losers. Even the Gamma males despise them. That which doesn’t kill them can make them stronger, but most never surmount the desperate need to belong caused by their social rejection. Omegas can be the most dangerous of men because the pain of their constant rejection renders the suffering of others completely meaningless in their eyes.38
Hypergamy and the classifications are important to understand as we look at the world of gamers and men who are not the alphas of the male world: Think of The Big Bang Theory characters who would be seen as Gammas or Omegas, who are are the men on the lower end of the dating pool. Do the least and most desirable men avoid marriage? Let’s see.
Vox Day put up a request on his site for readers to reveal their demographic information and gathered general information about their marital status, desire for marriage and their self-perceived classification such as Alpha, Beta and so on. Here is what he found:
There were 141 male responses and 14 female responses. In order to more meaningfully calculate the income and partner averages, I threw out the top five and bottom five male outliers and the top and bottom female outliers.
First, the men. Their
