Girls don't want to have fun

Women only dare to have numerous children if they can count on their men to stay loyal

A few weeks ago I wrote that male investment is the crucial factor behind fertility rates. Basically, women care about two things:

1. What society tells them to do

2. Male love

For that reason, it is not enough for society to tell women to have many children. Women are indeed conformists - but they also like to please men. Young women's spare time interests largely revolve around looking good in the eyes of men. Their friendships revolve around talking about relationships to men.

Obviously, there is something women want very much from men. But what is that something? How do men need to be for women to find them good enough to form large families with?

There are two major high-fertility populations in the US. The Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews. If high fertility depends on men doing something right, exactly what are the men of these groups doing right? 

Amish ideals for men conform to a high degree with the mainstream Western ideal of a good father. Amish fathers are supposed to spend as much time as possible at home - going away to work is a (sometimes) necessary evil. They are supposed to actively participate in the lives of their children, work together with them and teach them practical skills. Amish women are not supposed to be traditional housewives with traditional breadwinner husbands. Instead, Amish households are supposed to be productive units in themselves, with mom and dad as co-CEOs. At least to some degree, the Amish family itself is the center of productive life. No wonder that Amish women are happier to dedicate themselves to family life than their mainstream sisters; in their culture, the family is the place where things happen. 

Amish women agree to have many children because their men are very family-oriented and support them in every way possible. That is a neat explanation. But it can't be the whole truth, because the other high-fertility group in the US, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, does not fit into that pattern. Ultra-Orthodox men are fairly absent from home. They sleep there, but they spend a lot of time in gender-segregated centers for religious learning. Even more curiously, under some circumstances they are not even expected to support their families financially. At least in some groups, men are encouraged to study religious scriptures instead of working for money during their first years of marriage. They can get a stipend, but wives commonly work to support the family. 

In Israel, this lifestyle has become systematic: Ultra-Orthodox women work outside the home much more than Ultra-Orthodox men. 80 percent of Ultra-Orthodox women are in the workforce. Only 53 percent of Ultra-Orthodox men are¹. I recently read a description of a day in an Ultra-Orthodox Israeli woman's life. Her husband went to the synagogue as soon as he woke up in the morning. Then he came home and gave his wife a piece of her favorite granola bar (because she didn't have the time to have breakfast and he was a very nice husband). Meanwhile, the wife had been busy packing lunch boxes for some of the nine children and serving breakfast on disposable plates. The wife and daughters left small children at daycare, did the laundry and made dinner for both themselves and the neighbors who had a new baby. The wife went to work as an organizer at a community center twice: Once in the morning and once in the evening. The husband did some shopping and cleaning, but was mostly occupied with his studies: He habitually took a nap in the afternoon to be able to study at the yeshiva until late at night. At midnight the couple had some tea together and talked about their day.²

The husband was described as very considerate and nice towards his wife and she seems completely satisfied with him. I read another text about a less nice Israeli Ultra-Orthodox husband. He came home from the yeshiva by the time the children went to bed and complained over things his wife hadn't done during the day.³ But in both cases, the husband spent little time at home and did not have a paid job. Practically and financially, the Ultra-Orthodox women are much like single mothers.

Their social role, however, is not that of single mothers. Leah Vincent, a former Ultra-Orthodox Jew from Pennsylvania, describes the lot of Ultra-Orthodox teenage girls:

“Brooklyn was home to thousands of Yeshivish girls impatiently waiting out the painful limbo between childhood and motherhood. Those who weren’t native to the city took up residence in tiny basements and attic apartments, finding jobs as secretaries or schoolteachers, each girl holding her breath as she waited to be picked—by a matchmaker, by a prospective mother-in-law, by a man—so her life could begin.”⁴

A man does not bring in money, at least not at first. He will not be physically present for most of the time. And still, he is the one who makes life begin. And subsequently, who makes life go on. 

All you need is love

In mainstream Western society, women are said to be materialistic and to prefer men who earn more than them. The Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Jews partially contradict that picture.

You could always say that the Ultra-Orthodox women don't count, because they are oppressed. But we are all disproportionately literate in our own culture. Transitioning between cultures is costly for everyone. Some groups indeed use an unusually dirty trick to increase the cost of exit: To make women pregnant in their early-to-mid teens, before they have had time to escape. The polygamist sect the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints are said to work in that manner, and some Third World Muslims too. But although there are reports of child marriage among Israeli Orthodox Jews, the average age of marriage among them is 22 for women and 23 for men, and on average women have their first child at 24⁵. Many of them use their young years to pursue higher studies, for example in software engineering. Technically speaking, they have decent opportunities to drop out and find a better man elsewhere. All in all, I have to assume that they follow their culture more or less as voluntarily as I follow mine.

And actually, being together with a man with small material resources is not exactly unheard of in mainstream Western society either. How many Western pop-songs, all sung by males, aren't there on the theme I have no money but I have so much love to give you? I have heard a few of them. One especially cheesy one, with the Backstreet Boys, goes this way:

My love is all I have to give

Without you I don't think I could live 

I wish I could give the world to you

But love is all I have to give

The Backstreet Boys appealed to girls and women who dreamed of marrying a resource-poor man. 

When I heard it as a teenager I felt a bit annoyed, because it was obviously not true: I knew enough about the music industry to tell that the man singing those lyrics could not possibly be poor. But the Backstreet Boys weren't created in order to bear witness of reality. They were created in order to please the tastes of teenage girls. If the Backstreet Boys sang my love is all I have to give, it must have been because that is a thing young females like to hear. 

All in all, I think we can make one preliminary conclusion: That resources are not the most important thing that women want from men.

Protection before provision

For a long time, women-seek-resources has been considered a self-evident truth in evolutionary psychology. It sounds indeed logical: Women aimed at landing a good deal, building up a nest and peacefully raising their children there.

There is one reason to question this assumption: Our past wasn't peaceful. I read a fantastic book last summer: Yanoama - The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Indians by Ettore Biocca. Helena was a mestizo girl with a native American mother and a white father who worked as a miner in the deep Amazonas. When Helena was 11 the family was attacked by a group of Yanomamö. Helena was wounded and kidnapped and lived with the Yanomamö for 24 years. She had four children with two different Yanomamö men.

Being a kidnapped woman hardly made Helena unique - the Yanomamö systematically kidnapped women from each other. They also stole women within the group - a man could challenge another man over his wife just because he felt like it. Male children were constantly at risk of being killed alongside their fathers: sons were expected to take revenge, so allowing them to live was considered unsafe.

In such an environment, it doesn't matter the most which man grows the most nutritious bananas for the children. It matters who is able to, and willing to, protect you and who can survive long enough to protect his sons until they can defend themselves. What is needed is not a man who dutifully makes his payment for the privilege of being a husband and father. What is needed is a man who passionately defends his wife and children, whenever they need to be defended. And only men of comparatively high social status count. Seeking the protection of a man who is not respected by other men would be meaningless and outrightly dangerous.

I assume this is the evolutionary logic behind the quest for male passion that women exhibit everywhere. Because that is a common denominator for women in different cultures: They want to be the objects of male love. 

The quest for love is a very common reason behind divorce. The typical cause of no-fault divorce is that a woman no longer feels that she is loved. If ensuring good provision for their children were women's most important goal, they would not initiate so many financially ruinous divorces. Countless women lower their children's standard of living through initiating divorce, for the only reason that they don't feel appreciated by their husbands. That kind of behavior would be foolish if women most of all cared about securing good provision for their children. But they don't. 

Attention granted

In mainstream Western marriages, it is difficult to see male provision, male social status and male dedication as separate phenomena. A man needs to earn money to uphold his social status. He then needs to direct most of the money to his wife and children in order to show his dedication. In a mainstream Western context, it is more or less impossible for a man to be dedicated to his wife without providing for her and/or offering considerable assistance with everyday life. If a mainstream Western man shirks on those duties and instead spends a lot of time with other men, his partner will strongly suspect that he is not that into her.

In that sense, The Ultra-Orthodox Jews can serve as a kind of control group. What happens when social status and income are separated? What happens when being dedicated to one's family and working for one's family on a practical level are not the same thing?

I must say I'm a bit surprised, but Ultra-Orthodox women seem rather content with being left with a heavy burden of childrearing, household chores and paid work. They are not fleeing their community in droves. To the contrary, American Ultra-Orthodox Jews are talking about a crisis in marriage arrangements⁶. There is a perception that there are too few eligible Ultra-Orthodox men and many young women remain involuntarily unmarried. In other words, the average young Ultra-Orthodox woman does not seem to feel pressured into a life overburdened with paid and domestic work. Rather, many young Ultra-Orthodox women are feeling impatient for that kind of life to start.

I think the difference between absent non-providers in mainstream society and among Ultra-Orthodox Jews is where the men are while not at home. When a mainstream Western man is with other men, he is likely to be somehow exploring alternative mating opportunities. Even if the groups of men are not actively chasing women, they are likely to be at places where there are women or to be talking about women as sexual objects. When Jewish men congregate to study, they are doing the opposite. Among other things, they talk about how men should avoid being tempted by other women than their wives. 

From the perspective of a wife wanting to keep her husband's attention, the absence of an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish husband is of another kind than the absence of a mainstream Western husband. In their quest to keep their male partners’ attention, Western women are on their own. The Ultra-Orthodox Jewish wives need to be less jealous, because their society is doing much of that work for them. 

Evolutionary psychologists have sometimes downplayed female jealousy, claiming that women are content as long as they and their children are adequately provided for. I think that those men failed to see female jealousy because it is so all-encompassing. Men tend to be sexually jealous. Women tend to be jealous of everything that could possibly lead men to drift away from them: Work, friends, hobbies. And for a good reason. If a mainstream Western man isn't constantly demonstrating his credentials as a family man, chances are that he will drift away at the next opportunity.

The exorbitant cost of divorce insurance

In Substack's best antinatalist document, Kryptogal points out that childbearing risks making a woman less physically attractive. She compares the loss in mate value to a man losing a few centimeters of his height for every child.

Why is that such a big deal? Because in mainstream Western society, the marriage market is competitive. Also after marriage and having children, women compete with each other. Mothers compete with non-mothers. For that reason, keeping up one's market value is crucial.

As everybody knows, mothers have lower mate value than fathers. Every additional child weighs the mother down more on the dating market than the father. Partially because of physical effects of childbearing, but mostly because mothers are expected to invest more in children than fathers. I suspect that this could be an important reason why mainstream Western women are unwilling to have many children: Women can't afford to lose too much in mate value compared to their men. 

It is generally said that mainstream Western women need to limit their number of children in order to safeguard their position on the labor market. But why do women feel that they need to have a good position on the labor market? Ultra-Orthodox women also have jobs. And they can still have 5-10 children.  

My guess is that ultimately, an important reason why women are eager to keep their positions on the labor market is the same as for men: To safeguard their mate value. A woman earning her own money has a higher mate value than a woman who is only capable of keeping a home and caring for children. 

But most of all, in an insecure market, women need to buy insurance for the case of divorce. I was recently made aware of the existence of a charity for divorced women in the Ultra-Orthodox community⁷. Among other things, it pays school fees for children with absent fathers. Why are there no such charities (as far as I know) in mainstream society? 

Because for us, divorce does not count as force majeure. Every woman is supposed to stay prepared to get divorced. When I grew up, I was warned against trusting a husband too much: He is always free to find someone younger and prettier, I was told. That is, no matter if I was a very good wife, his quest for youth and sexual variety might make him drift away regardless. I was strongly encouraged to buy insurance against such a scenario in the shape of a career of my own.

In mainstream Western society, divorce is not stigmatized. It is more or less expected. It is divorce without divorce insurance that is stigmatized. And even marriage without divorce insurance. The so-called soft girls and trad wives are perpetually assaulted with that possibility: What if he leaves you? 

Since divorce is an accepted outcome of marriage, everybody needs to be prepared. Women both need to be capable of supporting their families alone and preferably to uphold their mate value enough to remarry after a divorce (although the latter often turns out to be very difficult). 

The need for divorce insurance probably is one important reason behind falling fertility rates. It means that couples can only have as many children as they can take care of as single parents and, preferably, without the female party losing too much in mate value. 

The Amish and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews have low divorce rates: Around ten percent for Ultra-Orthodox Jews⁸, while the Amish do not recognize divorce as valid under any circumstances. In such an environment, people have less reason to keep up their value for the second run. And they get more motivated to invest some more in what they have. Some women and children really will be in dire circumstances when they are deserted or badly treated. Some people will be caught in loveless unions with dysfunctional partners. But people in well-functioning marriages will feel encouraged to make the most of their current and probably only family.

Another difficult compromise

All in all, I think what women are chasing is male attention and the social position that male attention brings. Women are building much of their lives around the quest for male attention. They will only want to have numerous children if that is likely to bring them continued male attention. Technically, women could use men as mere sperm donors and go about their own lives together with other females, much like most social animals are doing. They just don't seem to have the mindset.

This is not my favorite conclusion. I would rather want to say that women most of all want men who take their share of the dishes (I'm married to a man who does and it is great). But the evidence says otherwise: As long as women need to appear youthful, unchained and independent in order to compete successfully for the attention of men, they will not want to have more than two or three children. In such a competitive market, having children is risky business, and women are doing their best to bounce back as closely as possible to their former mate value as quickly as they can.

Unfortunately, this conclusion leads to an unpleasant trade-off between freedom and fertility. Women don't dare to invest in their role as mothers if their roles as wives are not comparatively secure. And marital security has hitherto only been obtained at a very high cost in terms of freedom. The only known methods to shield people from dating market forces are to restrict rights to divorce and to limit social interaction between the sexes. Both come with obvious disadvantages.

Finding a solution to this dilemma is a great challenge for the future. In the arena of production of goods, our society has been fine-tuning the balance between freedom to compete and security to invest for centuries. In the arena of production of human beings, we need an equally delicate balance between freedom and investment. 

Many people have claimed that anarcho-capitalism is the solution to every material problem. They were wrong. Many people claim that anarcho-dating is the solution to every human relationship problem. They are wrong too. In order to invest, people need a certain measure of security. Finding a balance between freedom and security in relationships is as difficult as finding a balance between freedom and security in material production. But it is just as necessary.

1. The Israel Democracy Institute, https://en.idi.org.il/articles/47009

2. Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar, Strictly Observant - Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media, 2024, 25-34 percent of e-book.

3. Leah Vincent, Cut me loose : sin and salvation after my ultra-Orthodox girlhood, 2014, 17 percent of e-book

4. Leah Vincent, Cut me loose : sin and salvation after my ultra-Orthodox girlhood, 2014, 31 percent of e-book

5. The Israel Democracy Institute, https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2022/?chapter=48263

6. For example on the podcast 18 Forty, https://18forty.org/podcast/how-different-jewish-communities-date/

7. An organization called Sister to Sister, https://causematch.com/sistertosister/

8. https://jewishaction.com/family/marriage/data-divorce-q-dr-yitzchak-schechter/