Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

I won't go through each nonsense reason in turn, but this one is pertinent:

> Accountability and Conflict Resolution > > Resolution Mechanisms: Marriage often compels couples to work out their differences and disputes in a more committed manner, as there is more at stake.

The opposite is true. People take marriage as a binary thing, and over-react to "last straw" situations. They get divorced, and that's the end. People in committed relationships work things out, because there's a whole lot of grey.

I've been in a relationship longer than most married couples I know, and I'm still seeing divorces every day at my kids school.

Other things I'd consider:

* Longevity is associated with community, something the church is very good at

* Even elderly individuals are required to perform "a calling", giving them meaning and purpose later in life

* Mormons have a lot of children, and so when you're older you usually have a very strong social safety net

* Mormons have lower divorce rates, and divorce is correlated with greater mortality

As an agnostic and raising kids, I spend a lot of time now pondering how – if at all – to pass on as many of these benefits of Mormonism to my kids without mandating the magical beliefs, and I have to say it's difficult. But I think you do have to have some healthy middle-ground mix of conservatism and collectivisms just to strike a healthy balance with modern individualism and liberalism.

You're making a bad guess ;) I meant none of what you said, and am in fact against marriage (but that's another story).

Apologies, I'm typing this on a busy train.

We are, in fact, in agreement on much. However, we are viewing reality through different lenses.

> I here present a source of female and male unequal-ness as a comprehensive study across time and culture.

It seems to focus mostly on the last 1-2k years, and not so much on the hundreds of thousands of years before that. You said:

> For MOST of human civilization genders were not equal so both sexes evolved traits that are also unequal.

(emphasis mine). For most of human civilization, was a very, very long time and most written records have (unfortunately) been lost prior to a few thousand years ago. That was the part I was rebutting, because it was an invalid premise that is then used to deduce that there was some kind of genetic pre-disposition that was used throughout the remainder of your comment.

> I googled it too and found multiple resources within minutes.

I couldn't find the quote: "monogamy benefits men while polygamy benefits women and general female behavior shows it" since you made it sound like it was a popular thing. I admit, I didn't bother researching the entire topic, since it wasn't "a saying".

I'm not debating who it is useful for, I was saying that it is a non-issue. Women and men cheat, and cheating is when one person in a relationship breaks the rules of that relationship. It doesn't matter if it is an open relationship, monogamous relationship, polygamous relationship, friends with benefits, swingers, platonic friendship, or whatever. If you break the rules, you can't be trusted and the relationship must be ended.

In a monogamous relationship, one of those rules is usually against sex with another person. There's no "instincts" there, they broke the rules. End of discussion. The fact that it was sexual intercourse is a non-issue. The rules of the relationship were broken.

> It's an attack please present evidence.

I present to you: adoption. It's when a man (or woman) raises another man's child as their own. The adopted even get to inherit property in some parts of the world.

> As a woman we only want to date alphas. I won't date someone who makes less than me. Alphas exist in the animal world, it makes no sense to suddenly deny the existence of alphas in the human world.

Well, there is no such thing as "alphas." This comes from a debunked paper that got popular 50 years ago ... we are not wolves and even wolves don't have "alpha males" in the popular sense.[1] A pack of wolves is simply a family and it makes sense that mom & dad would/should be the only ones having sex instead of brothers/sisters. Even when it is a mixed family, the breeding pair changes, come and go.

Instead of saying that women want "alphas," I think it is simpler to just state the reality of the situation: women want men who can pay child support / alimony, in the event things go sideways. When shit hits the fan, you don't want a hot guy with no future (maybe sometimes, actually), you want a guy who can (monetarily) care for your children that you'll be inevitably stuck with because our society sucks at taking care of single mothers. Women have even come up with creative solutions to ensure they don't end up with "losers" getting them pregnant. Fixing society's issues here is probably the way to unfuck large portions of our society, but it is unlikely to happen because it is stuck in a feedback loop -- there is still a patriarchy who has no desire to fix this.

Anyway, like I said, I think we are saying the same stuff, just different ways of seeing it.

[1]: https://www.wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/267alphastat...