A Case of Courtship
It’s an old, old tale
Boy meets girl
The Steader Map to healthy sustainable families is
1. Get Married
2. Have Kids
3. Raise your kids to do the same
The details matter but that’s it.
All of those are solved problems except getting married.
Today’s transmission is a successful courtship case study along with some analysis from the steader chats.
From one of our Mormon guys:
My oldest (living) daughter is getting married in June. 20 years old. He's 21 and the youngest of five children from a nice respectable Arizona family. He's a mechanical engineering student, thrifty, hard-working, etc. I am pleased.
He is nothing like an aggressive Andrew Tate figure.
They both want a bunch of kids
They met at BYU. They are in the same student ward [parish].
By making her pay for her schooling herself, she ended up in some pretty cheap housing, and it turns out that filtered pretty well for people with compatible outlooks
We hit the values formations pretty hard. We made it clear that her main goal at college was getting married.
We didn't set her up with this guy or have any idea who he was but we did ask her frequently how dating was going, giver her advice and encouragement, and about two weeks before she met this guy we signed her up for Keeper.ai
They are both quite intelligent. She’s maybe a bit more so, and he's an inch shorter than her, but he can wallop her at chess. They are both physically fit but not extremely athletic. He’s a runner, she’s a swimmer. I think she might have been able to pull a more eugenic match with time, but I think the incremental gains to progeny quality would not have been worth the risk of not getting married and also the delay in childbearing/reduced potential family size. His parents are also fit and smart.
We know there are some autists out there who worry about things like genetic quality despite society telling them they shouldn’t. To them, we say that if your spouse is reasonably fit and intelligent, ditto the family, marriage and kids now is worth a lot more than a hypothetical superspouse later. This isn’t just moralizing, its true from a number-crunching min-max perspective also.
Steader comments:
BYU is only $3,248 a semester. AFAICT there is nothing like this for Catholics.
My wife and parents met for the first time two weeks before our wedding date.
Live footage from steader households
The thing that LDS girls are good at is to marry potential rather than accomplishment.
I've seen so many Mormon guys punching out of their league on women. Premature baldness, skinny IT guys married to Nordic hotties.
No game either, it's pretty phenomenal and one reason I've been skeptical of classical gentile accounts of PUA.
It turns out that if you actually dam sexuality the market clears.
It turns out that if you're not horny enough to get married, you're not horny enough to be permitted sex.
Words of wisdom. It is probably impossible to achieve countermajoritarian results without some kind of countermajoritarian sexual ethic.
You have to operate in the society you have, not the one you wish you had. (Unless you have a full-stack alternative society (which you don't (unless you're Amish))).
The women I've known who were "cloistered" are not success cases. They have an understanding of modesty which is so autistic that it inhibits any expression of femininity at all, and they are so frigid talking to men that they drive away all suitors.
The success cases that I know of look like this:
-strong inculcation of moral values
-shaping the peer group through choice of school and church (including the possibility of home-schooling)
-firm rules against vectors of failures
My cousin has three teenage daughters, and it seems to be working well for him. All of their friends are from church or sports teams (and these heavily overlap). They are not allowed to have their own cell phones, but they are allowed to use social media on their mom's phone. Their parents follow their accounts so that they can see what's going on and put a stop to misbehavior.
I would point out that the LDS do not have a full alternative stack, but rather provide a ready-made formula for the three points above. But this is not that hard to implement in any denomination you want, so long as you keep your eye on the ball.
The 'cloistered' cases either result in faildaughters who never marry at all but wear shapeless denim dresses into old age, or the occasional strong-willed one who escapes and turns into a whore.
The 'monitored' cases mostly result in well-adjusted normals
Words of wisdom. Though being a ‘normal’ probably just removes the extirpation event a generation further down. You have to raise them just weird enough, or make the weirdness rewarding enough, that they want to pass it on.
Must steer the daughter so as to avoid the Scylla of sluttiness and Charybdis of frigidity.
We don’t have final answers here; take it as food for thought. The courtship problem is ultimately more than just a family problem. It is one for neighborhoods and communities and denominations to address and take seriously.
Photos below.
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