Dating Crisis Fuels Marriage Crisis

Katrina Trinko (below) is right. When I became single in 2021 it took me nearly a year to find a new partner. I met many possibles but only one ever wanted me. But I am 80 so maybe that figures

I can see no remedy for what she describes. Both men and women say, "There's no-one out there". Almost the whole singles population is invisible. The characteristic Leftist dissatisfaction with everything seems to have spread. Christian thankfulness for our blessings would be a healthier attitude. Selfishness is self-defeating in the end.

I think dating sites have spread Leftist dissatisfaction attitudes. They have made both sexes too critical and too fussy. Realism and tolerance are in short supply.

If you’re not looking to date this Valentine’s Day, be grateful. It’s a disaster out there.

Pair the lingering effects of the sexual revolution, of a world where too often sexual pleasure is prioritized over relationships founded on love and giving, with Big Tech’s noxious dating apps, where algorithms seem far better at perpetuating singledom than finding people soulmates, and you’ve got a hellscape.

Yes, conservatives—and all Americans who value the family—rightly fret over the state of marriage in the United States.

The number of 40-year-old Americans who never have been married is higher than ever at 25%, according to Pew Research Center. The number of births per woman has plummeted to 1.6. Nor is that because women want fewer children: Almost half of women want three or more children, according to Gallup.

For conservatives, who rightly view the family as the foundation of society, these numbers are horrifying—and a siren that our culture is languishing, our social ties dissipating. Loneliness is on the rise, and unsurprisingly, so are addiction rates and suicide rates.

But as an unmarried woman in my 30s, I also realize there’s no quick fix to this situation—and that married Americans are often unaware of how bleak the current dating landscape can be. Ultimately, if we’re going to have more healthy marriages, we need to change our dating culture.

Take this new lawsuit, which highlights just how insane the current dating world is.

The plaintiff, Nikko D’Ambrosio, alleges he was defamed in a private Chicago Facebook group for women, called “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups with this name began sprouting up in 2022, allowing thousands of women to swap information—rarely of the flattering variety—about local single men.

Although this seems like a recipe for idle gossip, it was also a way for women to warn other women of the bad behavior of particular local men so they could avoid them.

D’Ambrosio says he was defamed in the Chicago Facebook group, but was unable to join it to defend himself or get the moderators to remove the posts about him. In one post mentioned in his lawsuit, a woman wrote: “Very clingy very fast. Flaunted money very awkwardly and kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side, especially when he was on business calls.”

Another woman wrote: “I went out with him a few times just over a year ago—he told me what I wanted to hear until I slept with him and then he ghosted … I’d steer clear.” (The term “ghosted” refers to when a romantic interest stops responding to all forms of communication without announcing a breakup or an end of contact.)

These Facebook groups of women who warn each other about bad men are hugely popular: Over 200 such groups with 3.5 million members exist worldwide, according to a GoFundMe by Paola Sanchez, the founder of this network of groups (and a defendant in the lawsuit).

The groups’ wild popularity is just another sign of the desolate dating landscape in modern times. Online dating apps promise a world of romantic fulfillment and the ability to find a soulmate who shares your values, lives locally, and may be contacted from your living room.

But instead of romantic fulfillment, online daters are finding disappointment—and betrayal. According to a 2023 study, co-authored by Stanford University professor Elias Aboujaoude, almost two-thirds of Tinder users are either married or in a romantic relationship. (Tinder, an extremely popular dating app known for promoting casual flings, disputes the findings of the survey.)

Even when would-be partners aren’t married or hiding a girlfriend, it doesn’t mean they’re exactly pure of heart, seeking to find meaningful romantic relationships. Online dating has spurred a plethora of phrases to describe bad behavior.

In addition to “ghosting,” there’s “lovebombing,” which refers to a man or woman being effusively romantic and/or discussing a long-term future, before abruptly and suddenly withdrawing contact. There’s also “breadcrumbing,” which is when a person tries to keep a romantic interest engaged by sending very occasional messages without committing more fully.

Or there’s also the awful experience of being sent, to use a popular crude term that aptly describes it, a “dick pic.” According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 56% of women and 25% of men ages 18 to 49 say they’ve received an unsolicited, sexually explicit image or message.

Bring on the wedding bells, am I right?

It’s no wonder that millions of women are trying to avoid emotional pain and find out whether other locals on Facebook can speak to a man’s character. (Although men have formed some groups of their own to judge women’s character, those groups appear far less popular.)

But of course, it’s not that women are necessarily always being fair or honest, either: Are the men they are bashing on these groups always guilty? Is crucial context being left out?

The outcome of D’Ambrosio’s lawsuit isn’t certain. (In the interim, D’Ambrosio was convicted for tax fraud.) And although I don’t think that that these women’s Facebook groups are the answer to today’s dating woes, I do think they highlight just how awful things are right now.

But even if two people are able to find each other and start dating, it’s a more complicated path to marriage these days. Searching for monogamy? You might be surprised by a romantic partner’s desire to explore polyamory—after all, a third of singles have been in a nonmonogamous relationship, according to a 2023 survey by the dating site company Match.

Nonmonogamy isn’t the only way the zany ethics of the sexual revolution continue to infect romance. Pornography is changing men and women and what they sexually desire.

In her 2022 book “Rethinking Sex,” columnist Christine Emba recounted attending a holiday party and being asked by another woman, whom she hadn’t met before, what she thought about choking during sex. The woman was struggling because she liked everything else about the new guy she was seeing—he was attractive, had a good job, and was smart—but she couldn’t seem to shake the unease she felt about being choked during sex, even though she had consented to it.

Nor is this woman alone in her quandary. A fifth of women said they’ve been choked during sex. You know what wasn’t in the fairy tales I read growing up? A discussion between Cinderella and her fairy godmother about whether she should overlook the fact that Prince Charming could be turned on only by acting violently toward her.

Yet, in our porn-saturated world where men (and yes, some women) seem to need more and more extreme and horrific sexual actions to feel pleasure, this is where we’re at.

Of course, I’ve sketched a bleak picture—and to be fair, some singles are still finding love and pursuing marriage in today’s world. Among adults who are married or in a serious romantic relationship, 10% of them met that person online, according to Pew Research Center.

Yet overall, the dating landscape desperately needs improvement if we want to improve marriage rates.

For instance, even for singles who reject dating apps, the apps still have infected today’s dating world. Online and app dating has made it less likely that a young adult will approach another young adult who is a stranger; after all, the norm increasingly is that you meet someone online, not in real life. Approaching someone in real life can be seen as being “creepy”—which is unfair and awful, but I understand why some are reluctant to do it.

If you are living in a “Benedict Option” world, as writer Rod Dreher advocates in his popular book, there’s no guarantee of finding a spouse. In religious circles, women tend to outnumber men.

As former Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican known for championing family values, said during a recent Heritage Foundation panel on working-class Americans: “I wish I had a nickel for every young woman I know who’s just amazing—in their 20s and 30s and they can’t find a marriageable man. It’s pathetic. It’s awful. We’re just destroying our own culture, and we don’t talk about it. We as conservatives don’t talk about it.”

We don’t.

Of course, based on anecdotal evidence, marriageable single men are out there, but they can be hard to find—and, frankly, are too few.

Furthermore, religious men and women aren’t immune from the temptations of porn and other scourges of modern life; it’s not clear, even if such people are single, whether they are in a state to be a good spouse.

Of course, none of this is to claim that every single person is perfect and has zero responsibility for remaining single. Some are too picky. Some women, no doubt, place too much emphasis on height and income, while some men place too much emphasis on looks.

Both sexes struggle with the Hollywood-popularized idea of soulmates. It’s easy to think, particularly with the seeming abundance of matches on dating apps, that someone out there has the perfect personality, body, and temperament that will make you optimally happy. This is a noxious myth that forgoes the real joys of marriage for a fantasy of happily ever after.

And of course, there’s also a noble tradition in Christianity of being single for the sake of leading a life more focused on God. While marriage is a good for many, I’d never claim all people should strive to get married.

So where does this leave us?

As conservatives look to advocate marriage, it’s not enough to talk about its importance. We need to talk about healthy marriages. We need to talk about how porn warps imaginations (and hearts). We need to look at the bruised, wounded singles of today and not say, “Why aren’t you married?” but “Is there a way I can help?”

Maybe it’s married couples setting up mutual friends. Maybe it’s all of us praying. Maybe it’s helping a friend who is struggling become a better person—which will benefit the culture whether he ultimately gets married or not. Maybe sometimes it is, if asked for advice by a single friend, to gently nudge them away from excessive pickiness. Maybe it’s married couples with decades of success mentoring younger couples, helping them learn how to communicate and love in a healthy way.

Maybe it’s criticizing the dating landscape of today and saying, who is happy? Can sexual pleasure really be worth all this? Maybe it’s showing there can be a different way where you prioritize a selfless love, not just sexual pleasure. Maybe it’s more recently married couples, who survived today’s dating landscape, sharing how they kept hope and persisted.

Maybe it’s married couples being more honest about what each has compromised on for a spouse instead of furthering the soulmate myth with gauzy social media photos and holiday cards. Maybe it’s them talking more vulnerably about dating, about how sometimes an amazing love story starts not with fireworks, but with a slight interest that then blossoms into something greater—and perhaps more enduring than fireworks.

We don’t want people to slap a ring on it just because they hear marriage is good. We’re not looking for more divorces and lonely marriages and toxic marriages. We’re not looking to bring children into bad situations.

Instead, we need to present something more compelling: an alternative vision. Not talk of marriage as it is in fairy tales and in Hollywood movies, but as it is in real life. We need to talk about the beauty and the growth in a marriage where each spouses prioritizes the other one, where they tackle real challenges by honest conversations and genuine goodwill. We need to talk about how sexual pleasure is often found more in marriages and relationships that follow traditional norms, not in sleeping around.

And we need to build up singles who are trying not to cave into the wretched norms of the 2020s and yet who perhaps feel they are looking at never getting married as a result.

It’s so, so ugly out there in dating today. That’s a tragedy—and it’s going to take more than singles to fix it. If we want a culture with more and better marriages, we need to work together to make dating better.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/13/want-more-marriages-make-dating-less-brutal/

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The Left and Chaos

Dennis Prager

It is impossible to understand what is happening to America—and to the rest of the West—without understanding the most dynamic ideology of the last hundred years: leftism.

We need to begin with the understanding that leftism (or “progressivism”) and liberalism are not only not the same ideologies, they are in fact opposed to each other on virtually every major issue.

Leftism and liberalism have only two things in common:

One is belief in big government, which, given that individual and societal liberty decline as the state grows, is a significant similarity.

The other Left-liberal commonality is antipathy to the Right. This is even more important than commitment to big government because it explains why liberals vote for the Left despite the fact that liberals differ with far more left-wing positions than with conservative positions.

Unlike the Left, most liberals love their country. Unlike the Left, most liberals do not believe that there are more than two sexes/genders; that prepubescent boys and girls who claim they are members of the other sex should be given hormone blockers; that girls under 21 should be allowed to have their breasts surgically removed; or that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. So, too, liberals do not believe that capitalism is evil, that America is systemically racist, that all whites are racist, that Israel is the villain in the Middle East, and that Zionism is racist.

So, then, given that those leftist positions are as destructive as they are absurd, how are we to explain leftism?

This question has preoccupied me all my adult life. It is why I was one of fewer than 10 graduate students in all of Columbia University to major in what was called “Communist Affairs.” (I was a fellow at the Russian Institute at Columbia’s School of International Affairs.) In other words, I have studied the Left all my life.

Early on, I recognized that the Left opposes liberty—the clearest example being that wherever the Left gains power, whether at a university or in society as a whole, it suppresses free speech—and that it destroys everything it touches. But while I (and many others) have always understood that the Left (again, not liberalism) has always, everywhere, been a force for evil, I needed to understand why.

How can people believe that men give birth; that a country to which more than 4 million black people have emigrated and which twice elected a black president is systemically racist; that the freest country in the Middle East, one in which millions of Arabs live as equal citizens, is the villain, while its barbaric enemies are worthy of support?

Here are some answers:

Throughout their history, Americans have had three great providers of meaning: family, religion, and patriotism. Leftists lack the latter two (indeed, they seek to get rid of them), and increasing numbers of them lack the first.

Since human beings cannot live without meaning—it is as great a need as food, and even greater than sex—they seek meaning elsewhere. So they create new meanings through creating secular religions: socialism, communism, feminism, environmentalism, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), “anti-racism,” anti-Zionism, LGBTQIA+ pride, and trans activism, among others.

All these are united by one overarching aim: destroying the institutions of Western civilization (e.g., religion, art, music, the nuclear family, moral norms, schools and universities, free speech, capitalism, even medicine).

Those of us who appreciate Western civilization and wish to preserve it (while, of course, correcting its flaws) cannot understand why anyone would want to destroy it. That is a major reason it is so difficult for non-leftists to understand the Left.

After decades of mulling this over, I think I have discovered one answer that is not obvious even to all leftists.

What opened my eyes are the Left’s beliefs that men can become women and women can become men; men give birth; there are more than two genders/sexes; men who say they are women should be placed in women’s prisons, women’s colleges, and women’s shelters; men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; and children should be taken to drag queen shows.

All these positions represent … chaos.

The Left’s trans-positions are the most obvious areas of Left-induced chaos, but there are many others. These include the Left’s contempt for the ideal of the nuclear family (i.e., a married mother and father and children); its support for defunding police; its raising the dollar value of stolen goods that qualifies as a felony, which can only incentivize theft; and its support for progressive district attorneys.

Fighting crime represents order; crime represents chaos.

And why does leftism seek chaos? Because the Left hates the opposite of chaos: order. And order ultimately represents a religious view of life. Order represents divine order.

The proof is that no religious people say, “Men give birth.” Not all secular people believe men give birth, there are more than two sexes, men can compete in women’s sports, children should be exposed to drag queen shows, or children should be given hormone blockers if they claim to be a member of the other sex. But only secular people believe those things. Virtually no one who believes in the Bible and the God of the Bible believes them. We believe in a God-created social order.

Chaos is the normal state of the world. The second verse of the Bible states that the world was in a chaotic state. God then made order. Which is why the Left is undoing it.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/13/the-left-and-chaos/

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‘Gender-Based Political Violence’: Former Lawmaker Targeted for Calling a Man Who Identifies as a Woman a Man

Mexican authorities convicted civil society leader and former Mexican Congressman Rodrigo Iván Cortés of “gender-based political violence.” His crime? Criticizing a man who identifies as a transgender woman.

Cortés drew fire over posts on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, that referred to a trans-identifying Mexican congressional representative as a “man who self-ascribes as a woman,” according to ADF International, the organization representing him.

That trans-identifying lawmaker, who goes by the name Salma Luévano, filed a complaint against Cortés, arguing that his social media posts constituted a “denial of identity” and violated Luévano’s right to be “acknowledged as a woman.”

Luévano, asked via X if those who called him a man should be punished, responded: “Of course they should be punished. It’s hate speech, and hate speech is the precursor to hate crimes.”

In an interview with The Daily Signal, Cortés described how he was punished by the government for speaking up in defense of biological sex, his ongoing legal battle, and how he listened inside his home as assailants arrived and smashed his car.

Cortés warned that Americans should be “very worried” about whether such punishments for speech will soon become common in the United States.

“What is happening, in plain sight, before our eyes, the freedom of speech has been canceled,” he explained. “I cannot say even the truth in my country. The religious freedom is canceled. And they want to make the Christian teachings and the Bible itself as a hate speech.”

“I’m Catholic, and I believe that Christian teachings are important,” he said, when asked whether he regrets speaking up. “It’s not that I’m glad to say it, but I feel confirmed, because you must be sure that you are in the good fight, so at least that I feel that I am in the good fight.”

“They are taking things to upside down—principles, values, laws, terms,” he added, “I think I must give my testimony. I don’t know if I’m going to win. So far, I’m not, but at least I am saying the truth.”

The former lawmaker appealed, unsuccessfully, to Mexico’s Electoral Superior Chamber. And after he was convicted of “gender-based political violence,” the Superior Chamber imposed a fine of $19,244 Mexican pesos on him (the equivalent of about $1,000). The court also ordered him to “publish the court ruling and a compelled apology written by the court and imposed verbatim on Cortés, on his social media accounts, daily, for 30 days,” ADF International said.

“They sentenced me to deconstruct myself,” he told The Daily Signal, laughing. “How could I do that? How could I deconstruct myself?”

He also was ordered to take a “gender-based political violence” course and was entered into the National Registry of Sanctioned Persons for Violence Against Women in Politics—meaning that he cannot hold any public position at the municipal, state, or federal level, Cortés said.

ADF International filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in January on behalf of the former lawmaker, pleading that the commission will take his case and “hold Mexico to its duty to respect the fundamental right to free speech and expression,” Kristina Hjelkrem, ADF International’s attorney on the case, said in a statement.

“Disagreement is not discrimination, and peaceful dissent is not violence. Cortés spoke out, peacefully, in support of self-evident truth, and for that, he has been convicted as a violent offender and subjected to onerous punishments,” said Hjelkrem. “The Mexican government’s continued censorship of its citizens violates their international human rights obligations to uphold freedom of speech.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/13/former-lawmaker-convicted-gender-based-political-violence-speaks/

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Dissecting ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

As this author has mentioned again and again, “gender-affirming [read: gender-denying] care” is a treatment method without sufficient or even credible scientific evidence for people who claim they have gender dysphoria. It seems more and more obvious that it’s only in the U.S. and Canada that this treatment method is doggedly defended as a “right” for “transgender” people. Europe is largely starting to abandon this model.

To recap, the “gender-affirming” model of treatment starts with the psychologist validating the patient’s delusion that he or she is, in fact, the wrong gender. That typically leads the person who is under such a delusion down an ever more extreme treatment path: social transition, puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones, and then ultimately bodily mutilation. These individuals are encouraged throughout this process in the fruitless effort to be something they are not, wasting time and money and causing mental anguish. It’s the opposite of affirming gender.

The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak has now reported on even more evidence that “gender affirmation” or the “Dutch Protocol,” as it is known in Europe, is baseless and an illegitimate form of treatment. The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) and the legal group that represents it have analyzed 60 studies regarding probably the most crucial aspect of this entire debate: Does the process of “gender affirmation” actually improve the mental health outcomes of these gender dysphoric individuals, particularly youth?

Their findings have several important factors. First, none of these studies that support the notion that “gender affirmation” is effective has any data tracking patients’ mental health beyond a year after “transition.” European doctors have sought to remedy this, and their findings aren’t good for suicidality three to five years post-transitioning.

Other important analysis found that many people who have the rapid-onset/social contagion variety of gender dysphoria tend to attract those with dark tetrad personality traits, or were autistic, or had serious underlying mental illness comorbidities.

Perhaps the biggest bombshell of all is that the justification for “gender-affirming care” and thus transgenderism — i.e., if you don’t allow your child to transition they will commit suicide — is a lie. The Heritage Foundation had already conducted a study that disproved the lie of decreased suicidality post-transition. However, the ACP itself analyzed several studies.

Rosiak writes: “When activists cite studies that state that affirmed transgenders do better than non-affirmed ones, a look at the actual available data show[s] that the slight difference in suicidality between the two groups is far less notable than how unacceptably high the figure is for both groups. For example, in one study billed as promoting how essential it was to give puberty blockers to youth, 42% of those who received care still tried to kill themselves.”

Rosiak also points out: “A study using Denmark’s national database, reviewing 6.6 million individuals over four decades, found that transgender people were 3.5 times more likely to kill themselves compared to normal people. If accommodating and supporting transgender people was a sufficient treatment, then that disparity shouldn’t exist.”

It’s not a matter of society treating gender dysphoric people badly that leads to suicidality. Rather, it’s preexisting mental illness that is being masked by the gender dysphoria diagnosis or having dark tetrad personality types that contribute to this level of suicidality. One could also argue that the claims of suicidality, particularly among young people, are a socially constructed manipulation that preys on the fact that minors don’t actually understand what they are threatening to do when they say they are suicidal. They have no concept of long-term planning because their prefrontal cortexes aren’t fully developed until age 25. Moreover, they don’t fully understand that death is final and that they are being fed this storyline (one that all too many try to follow through with) in order to manipulate the adults in their lives into submission.

On a side note, political pundit Matt Walsh made the astute observation in a podcast earlier this week that threatening to commit suicide unless you give someone what they want in any other circumstance would cause people to classify that person as dangerously narcissistic and emotionally abusive. Transgenderism uses that threat as a political weapon. It’s probably not a coincidence.

The ACP is the conservative answer to the political American Academy of Pediatrics. Though the arguments that the ACP is trying to combat deals with children, its analysis is applicable to the greater transgender population. Its findings couldn’t have had better timing if it tried. Just last week, a story broke that the entirety of the justification possessed by the Department of Health and Human Services for its long-held stance that “gender affirmation” is the way to treat people with gender dysphoria was a two-page-long PDF brochure written by HHS itself. No long-term medical evidence, and certainly no specifics.

The only reason “gender affirmation” has so much power over our children and the medical establishment is because it’s a political, financial (hello life-long patients), and social fad. Transgenderism’s “gender-affirming care” model is a pernicious and destructive one that is going to leave behind a string of broken people and ultimately help no one.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/104350-dissecting-gender-affirming-care-2024-02-13

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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