This week we are discussing what is going on with modern dating, marriage, and divorce.

In yesterday’s post “On Marrying Young,” I noted that divorce risk is strongly tiered by intelligence. Not everyone is a statistician, so it may not be clear exactly what I was talking about. Let’s show the IQ range per decile:

• 108-112 (7th decile)
• 113-118 (8th decile)
• 119+ (9th decile)

To put this in perspective, the minimum threshold for being gifted (not even a genius) is 130 at the 98th percentile. When it comes to extreme intelligence of the top 2% (> 130 IQ), marriage statistics become somewhat useless because there are not enough high IQ individuals in the sample to be statistically meaningful. So when I say…

Smart people should get married and everyone else should not.

…I can confidentially clarify this to be:

Smart people (IQ 108 to 129) will have the best shot at a successful marriage.

This includes people who are above-average, but still in the socially normal range of intelligence. This will include a large proportion of socially successful Asian, Jewish, and White men who work in skilled professions. Depending on your social environment, you may know dozens of men like this with successful marriages, especially if you are on the younger side. We will talk about age stratification tomorrow.

But be careful. If you are always around the truly elite men (the upper 2%)—perhaps because you are one yourself—you’ll find that such men sometimes have difficulty finding mates because there are not enough women to go around (due to greater male variability) and that the women in that category that are available tend to be high powered career women. It is difficult for top tier man to pair assortatively. Since such men are, by definition, outliers, what I write does not apply to them.

I suspect a sizable majority of men in the Dalrockian Manosphere are in one of these three deciles. As we will see as we continue this discussion, the Manosphere—with all its failed relationships—is increasingly made up of a bubble of statistical outliers that have banded together to swap notes. The resulting exchange of anecdotes reinforces a false perception about what life is like for the typical above-average married man.

Now, let’s continue our examination on who should (and shouldn’t) get married.

When it comes to finding a mate for life, there are two primary considerations that a man faces:

1. How can he maximize his chance of getting married?
2. How can he minimize his chance of divorce?

First, let’s begin by discussing the second question.

According to modern wisdom—such as that described by Sargan above—your best chance at avoiding divorce is to get married in your thirties, after you’ve had time to establish yourself. This advice is especially common in the Manosphere where most men who have been burnt recommend strongly against early marriage.

Much of this advice is fueled by the true, but highly deceptive (and statistically confounded) belief that those who get married young are most likely to divorce. But it is not age itself which is responsible for this effect. The strong negative correlation between age and divorce is not due to direct causation. If one controls for intelligence—and just the man’s intelligence at that—the relatively large age-related risks are minimized dramatically. Controlling for intelligence also has the beneficial side effect of accounting for most of a wide range of confounding demographic variables, including education, socioeconomic status, race, and even looks and female intelligence.

Can a man minimize his chance of divorce by delaying marriage into his late 20s or into his 30s? Yes, but this effect is quite small. Let’s consider a random group of one hundred 21 year-old men who have average or above-average intelligence. If all 100 men delay marriage until their thirties, how many divorces would all of them delaying marriage prevent? The answer is about 2 or 3. For the vast majority of young men, delaying marriage provides next-to-no meaningful protection aganist divorce.

By contrast, the protection from delaying marriage is slightly less than the theoretical benefit from being a two or three deciles more intelligent. In other words, if you think men shouldn’t get married young (due to the marginal increased divorce risk), then you should also think that less intelligent men shouldn’t get married at all, as the latter is inherently riskier than the former. Yes, your intelligence score tells you more about your divorce risk than the age you got married and how much life experience you have accumulated.

Second, let’s now examine that first question: how can a man maximize his chance of getting married? The answer to this is obvious. He should get married as soon as possible, as young as possible.

Let’s consider that group of one hundred 21 year-old men again. We said that delaying marriage would prevent 2 or 3 divorces, but what we didn’t talk about is how delaying marriage will prevent roughly 10 to 20 of those men from ever getting married at all. But perhaps worse than this is that the women he does have access to will mostly be of lower quality and there will be an even higher demand for the higher quality options. The typical man will need every ounce of that life experience he has gathered to make his marriage successful, with the result being that his odds of divorce remain roughly the same.

This comment just about summarizes it:

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how the times are changing.