What no one is really willing to say, in part because there’s so much built up resentment and guilt that it makes the admission possible, is that women aren’t able to be happy without men and can’t survive without them. Before I get pilloried for saying that, let me observe that it’s equally true that men can be happy and can’t survive without women. And both sexes are kidding themselves and indulging in a delusion that the divorce and independence of the sexes is a viable option in order to avoid the painful realities of confronting the actual problem of admitting our dependence on the other sex and having to deal with it.
    It’s easy to get confused. A woman can survive without a man. So can a man. But women can’t. There is no viable single sex version of the human species. We can survive and compensate for the loss of our partnership with the other sex in our individual lives, especially with the aid of modern technology that extends our individual capabilities and helps meet those needs that we cannot easily fill. But on a systemic level it’s completely unworkable.

    The need to have an intimate social partnership between the sexes is one of the preconditions of human life and one of the first problems we had to solve. And marriage was the emergent solution proposed by and agreed to and sustained by both sexes. Did it carry costs? Of course, everything that actually does something will always carry costs. But those costs were less expensive to society and human survival and development than the inherent costs imposed by the absence of marriage.
    I understand completely, it’s extremely hard to admit that we are dependent on anyone for our happiness or survival. But the systemic costs of sexual deregulation and sexual disassociation are only going to grow, and one of them is that a larger and larger portion of both men and women aren’t going to get what they want.

    Women won’t get the stable relationships many of them desire, because men will be too busy chasing low-cost alternatives in an essentially polyamorous and impulsive, short term sexual economy. And many men won’t get what they want because the reality of a short-term polyamorous relationship market, in concert with the radical inequality in selectivity between the sexes, means that a huge portion of men will fail out of the market, while a small number of extremely attractive men will take everything and have all the partners. That’s just what happens, there’s no way to avoid it happening, it’s simple economics.

     Marriage is, in a way, a compromise between an entirely individualistic and competitive relationship market and a socialized and managed romantic economy. You have competition and sorting for both sexes, but so long as each has a reasonable acceptable limit of only one long-term partner, ultimately most people will end up with someone. So you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get selection and competition, but the limits on acceptable possession mean that in the end the majority of everyone gets each according to their ability and each according to their need. And this solves the systemic problem of needing to find a way to bring the sexes together into long term cooperation, which is a problem that must be solved one way or another. 
   One of the primary functions of marriage is to help us manage our own needs, which are a function of our inherent strengths and weaknesses. And weaknesses are largely a direct consequence of having strengths, as all specialization that results in any kind of specified competence begets tradeoffs. Men have to find a way to manage their aggression and make it useful. And women did that for them, largely through marriage. But now women aren’t doing that and you’ve got a lot of aggressive, useless, unhappy men.

    Men, in turn, helped women manage their anxiety over their greater need for security, both economic and physical. But men aren’t doing that any more, and that’s produced a lot of anxiety and unhappiness among women. And this is just one example of the way the sexes benefit one another through specialization and cooperation. Both sexes have their alternatives to one another they can look to, but generally speaking no one has come up with a viable substitute for the innate need of half the human race for the other half.
   It’s entirely understandable why the sexes want to go different directions and be independent. Who wouldn’t? There’s an enormous cost to needing or having to work with someone who is radically different than you and whose willingness and ability to give you what you need in exchange for your precious autonomy and abilities is dubious at best. Men are a huge disappointment. And as costly as it is to say it, so are women.

    It’s costly because it’s generally easier to get men to admit that they need and want women, and women have much more freedom to reject you if you openly criticize them. Their natural predisposition to judge and reject men gives them a lot of bargaining power in their interactions with men, who are far less fastidious and far less competitively viable on average. Of course, men’s persistentlce and aggression and ability to ignore or resist the criticisms and concerns of others and willingness to cast down their competitors and risk being cast down themselves gives them their own advantages. But they need them because the judges they will face: one another, the selective pressures of the world, and the selective judgment of women, are incredibly harsh. 
     The vast differences in experimental results on mating selection between men and women show just how dire this divide is. Something like 60% of all women are deemed acceptable potential mates by men on platforms like Tinder. But only 4% of males are deemed acceptable by females. Tinder is a good place to look at these kinds of statistics because the nature of the platform helps eliminate confounding factors.

    Everyone, men and women, are basically looking for the same thing on Tinder. And yet even among these similar people playing a similar game, the difference in how the sexes play it reveals a preference differential of 1500%. That’s not just a curiosity, that’s catastrophic for both sexes. And it’s easy for women to dismiss this fact on the grounds that men are stupid and have no discretion, so of course they like everyone, and that women are only so selective because men are so unattractive.

    But these are huge, mololithic demographic facts that reveal stark difference in attitudes even when both sexes have agreed to the same terms. And it reveals the specific attitudes of both sexes as normally distributed, and therefore biologically and psychologically and evolutionarily innate and necessary. Quite likely because of the innate tension and complimentary asymmetry between the two, and the benefits of maintaining such dual strategies.

    Studies into the benefits of sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism have confirmed this, that one of the primary benefits of having two sexes in the first place is that, although it carries a very high cost compared to asexual reproduction and specification, it essentially lets a species have its cake and eat it too. The marriage, the unity and cooperation, of the two halves of a species, running two separate genomic lineages on one shared platform, allows them to simultaneously pursue and balance two different biological and reproductive strategies. It lets them be both risky and conservative, aggressive and cautious, consistent and variable, indiscriminate and selective.

    But that also means that the fundamental character of sex, as a biological phenomenon, is tension in dependence. Or I suppose you could call it complimentation in efficacy. We’re very effective and adaptable. But we depend on our antagonistic opposite for the free exercise and maintenance and development and regulation of that efficacy. That’s not an easy pill to swallow. We all want to think that we’re great and perfect and right and complete. But the facts of biology and evolution simply fly in the face of this idea. It’s a completely specious premise.

   We are great. We are specifically awesome. But only in the context of tension, opposition, complimentation, and cooperation with our counterparts. Our specific identity as a woman or man entails that by definition and necessity. To be man is to be incomplete and in need of woman. That’s what a species is. It’s a shared partnership for conquering the challenges of time and being. And while any single individual, man or woman, may be able to avoid or solve that systemic quandary, as a society and a species its simply not possible. And that’s something we will have to deal with, one way or another.