Marriage has become a bad deal for men in recent decades. I would say marriages started from 1990-present are bad deals for men, and the 1975-1989 started marriages were marching that way.
If you’ve gotten married since 1990, there’s about an 80% chance at least one of the following things has happened to you as a result of getting married…
- One or more partners has an affair. In recent decades, women’s cheating rates have nearly equaled men’s rates. Before 1990, men were having affairs much more than women.
- A divorce. Likely occurring because someone had an affair. Occasionally someone opts out of a marriage before an affair but realizes that they want to start having sex with others.
- A marriage that doesn’t end but isn’t exactly a great time. Often long periods of a dead bedroom. Often a lot of disagreements and unpleasant feelings.
Wifing up women with high notch counts is usually not a good idea and contributes to why most marriages are not good. Men having higher notch counts doesn’t help either, due to a greater propensity for seeking novelty. However, a high notch count is a worse scenario.
There are plenty of women that have not participated in a group sex event that have reasonably high notch counts. It’s not unusual to encounter a 30 year old single woman in a big city that hasn’t participated in group sex that still has 10+ lifetime partners. For a 30 year old woman, racking up 10 sexual partners in ~15 years of dating/relationships isn’t that difficult.
A lot of women born in the 1920s died before the pandemic started. Those women were old enough to remember going through The Great Depression and World War II. They generally had higher character. A lot of those women were good bets in marriage and many of them had marriages that survived.
The first generation of women in the 1970s who engaged in no fault divorces were women born between 1935-1944. These were the first generation of career women in big cities. Some of them had the first tastes of sexual freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The birth control pill started in 1960. A fictional example of this was Peggy Olson on “Mad Men”, whose character was born in 1939.
The women of the 1920s-1930s were still better options than the 1946-1964 Baby Boomer born women.
You’ll never know. You did the right thing getting out of that.