More Science Confirming Game Concepts: Long-Term Relationships Can Bring Out The Worst In Couples


From the original article on October 24, 2011. Author: Chateau Heartiste.

Digging through the archives of the Chateau Heartiste library, we find a post about the hazards of LTRs and marriage.

Now you can’t do anything without her, and she you. In the beginning, this is a necessary process to build the level of trust and bonding that distinguishes the LTR from any run of the mill fling. But it morphs into a hermetic pair-bond cocoon, a soft escapable prison that shields from the outside world more than it protects. Increasingly consanguineous, the LTR alienates friends and slackens ambitions.

Scary stuff. Science has something to say about the deleterious effects of marriage on the female body, as well:

•Women in their teens and early 20s who continued to date but didn’t cohabitate gained an average of 15 pounds over five years; their male counterparts added about 24 pounds.

•Newly married women in that age group packed on 24 pounds in five years; newly married men gained 30 pounds.

That degree of gain wasn’t seen in couples who were living together but not married. Women gained 3 pounds more than their single peers — 18 pounds — and men gained 24 pounds.

When you see photos of the groom stuffing the bride’s mouth full of wedding cake as she licks down every last ounce of sloppy creamed filling, you may as well be watching the groom disposing of his sex and love life down her maw. But as we all know, men get very, very stupid about marrying the first semi-decent pussy who comes along.

The latest from the scientific front presents more CH-confirming evidence that LTRs and marriage have negative consequences for their practitioners.

For better or for worse, in sickness and in health – there’s a long line of research that associates marriage with reducing unhealthy habits such as smoking, and promoting better health habits such as regular checkups. However, new research is emerging that suggests married straight couples and cohabiting gay and lesbian couples in long-term intimate relationships may pick up each other’s unhealthy habits as well. [...]

Corinne Reczek, a UC assistant professor of sociology, reports three distinct findings into how unhealthy habits were promoted through these long-term, intimate relationships: through the direct bad influence of one partner, through health habit synchronicity and through the notion of personal responsibility.

Reczek reports that gay, lesbian and straight couples all described the “bad influence” theme, while in straight partnerships, men were nearly always viewed as the “bad influence.” [ed: there go women again, abdicating all reason and accountability.]

[...] “Third, respondents utilized a discourse of personal responsibility to describe how even when they observe their partner partaking in an unhealthy habit, they do not attempt to change the habit, indicating that they were complicit in sustaining their partner’s unhealthy habits. The final theme was described primarily by straight men and women,” says Reczek.

So if your partner has unhealthy habits, (smoking, drinking to excess, overeating, underexercising, staying up late to watch Modern Family recordings or Jon Stewart smugly sing to the SWPL choir), you will likely pick up those bad habits. And thus we see how the fat acceptance movement gets its steam — osmotic inevitability. (In related news, according to the Red Cross, there are more obese than there are hungry in the world. We’ve entered the era of globulization.)

Of particular interest in the above study is the evidence that women, and presumably their lapdog betabitchboys, placed the blame for being a bad influence squarely on the men’s shoulders. It’s obvious to those in the know that this blame-shifting is complete bullshit, since (just to pick an easily discernible example at random) there are innumerable couples where the woman has gotten fat while the man stayed slim. Nothing will kill a man’s desire to please his woman in every way faster than the disfigurement of her body caused by bloating up from bellying up to the buffet.

Is there an enterprise in existence where women will blame themselves for something bad they did? To ask the question is to laugh at female absurdity. The rationalization hamster is a cosmic force on par with dark matter; you can’t see the little bugger, but goddamn is he everywhere, redirecting galactic phenomena at will.

Also interesting is the last line quoted above from the study. Partners are complicit in sustaining their SO’s bad habits because they don’t call them out on it. I think we can figure out who is most responsible for this dereliction of duty: sackless beta males who are afraid of the divorce raping and/or sex withholding they will assuredly receive if they displease their queen sovereigns by timidly mentioning in squeaky-voiced passing their increasing girth. Women, for their part, don’t attempt to change their partners’ bad habits for a different reason: they don’t have a clue how to articulate what is wrong with their beta boyfriends and hubbies.

This post, and others like it, is a helpful reminder to the “marriage is best” crowd that marriage — and, similarly, LTRs — hold special dangers for the man who allows himself to become ensnared. An LTR is a beautiful thing with the right woman and undertaken with the right alpha attitude, but it isn’t a panacea for all psychological, emotional or sexual needs, and it isn’t without its own problems that men who serially date don’t experience. When you commit to a woman with the intent of remaining monogamous, you acquire new obstacles to navigate and problems to avoid. Failure to recognize those LTR-inherent deficiencies and counteract them will lead to exile in betaville, where begging for blowjobs once per year and praying you don’t get reamed in court if she gets bored become part of the wonderful fabric of life.

As with everything you venture to explore, do it with your eyes open. Otherwise, you may as well hand your decision-making process over to a committee of cog-molding industrialists and ball-chopping feminists.


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