A while back, I ran across this article with a provocative title: “Husbands of kind wives remain naïve to the evils of womankind.” Heh! So, I borrowed the clickbait portion for my title. This article isn’t actually about women, it’s about men.
So, in light of my earlier article on hypergamy, let’s dive in.
I think many men that have good wives who are actively trying to make their marriages work, have difficulty fathoming exactly what other men are up against when their wives actively work to tear their own home apart.
That’s not the problem at all. It’s rather easy to fathom how some men are struggling with spouses who want to blow up their marriages (or have already done so). As the data suggests, this may affect anywhere from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5 marriages. That’s common enough that most people will know at least one marriage that meets that description, even if it is not their own. Most of us are aware of one or more such marriages. This is especially true of those who visit Manosphere and Manosphere-adjacent social media sites and communities.
The point of disagreement is not naïveté. The disagreement is over the data (or lack thereof). On this blog, we insist—wherever possible—that claims be backed up by data. And the data does not support the claims being made in that article.
It seems like those sheltered men’s first inclination is to assume the best about any unkind wife and the worst about her husband, in any troubled marriage situation, as if the husband must just be a complete asshole to not even be able to get along with “the love of his life”.
This is not an assumption. It’s a data driven assessment.
Consider infidelity. Men cheat more often than woman. Now, consider substance abuse. Men are much more likely to be substance abusers than women. Collectively, these are two of the leading reasons given for divorce. Substance abuse is cited in roughly a third of divorces. Infidelity accounts for a similar figure, although some suggest that it is much higher.
If the first instinct is to blame the divorce on the husband, then this is correct more often than it is to blame the divorce on the wife. As with most stereotypes, it is more-or-less accurate.
But, there is, of course, a third option that the article failed to consider: sharing the blame.
Let’s consider the popular belief that the church and society are first inclined to blame the husband and give the wife a free pass. As the Manosphere has long claimed, this would mean that the church and society have created a perverse incentive for woman to blow up their marriages without having to suffer any consequences. But therein lies the inherent contradiction. If women are incentivized to blow up their marriages, but men still blow up marriages at a much greater rate, then if men and women were held to equal standards, male behavior would get relatively worse as women’s behavior got better. This would increase—not decrease—the disparity.
Stop and let that absorb: if we increased social pressure on women, then the stereotypical first inclination to assume the worst about the husband would become even more justified than it is now!
Or, put another way, the absolute pressure placed on men not to blow up their marriages is clearly justified already, as is placing relatively higher pressure on men compared to women. All of this is proper data driven behavior. From a statistical standpoint, society is actually not hard enough on men. To reach statistical parity of the sexes, men would have to be more strongly condemned and/or women would have to be given even greater leeway.
But, factor in an implicit general societal belief in patriarchy and reduced women’s agency, and we are seeing precisely what we should expect to see if we thought patriarchy was god-ordained. The author’s thesis is effectively anti-patriarchal.
That’s why we are data-driven on this blog. The alternative the author is suggesting is simply wrong and leads to absurd results.
At least that’s how I remember most of their intentionally emasculating and husband-disempowering church marriage counselling.
Therapy (and its cousin counseling) are definitely feminine-coded pursuits. As psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you, therapy for men generally needs to be problem-solving focused to be effective. Most women respond poorly to men trying to problem solve their relationships by instituting discrete things that can be worked on in lieu of fixing the emotional problems first.
But feelings-based talk therapy is largely ineffective and even counter-productive. Marital counseling, in particular, is known to get extremely poor results. This article in the Guardian notes that traditional couples talk therapy has a 17% success rate. That’s abysmal. It’s also a data-driven conclusion.
The author’s naïve assumptions about marriage did him no service and possibly—even probably—contributed to the dissolution of his marriage.
I was conned into marrying a skilled deceiver.
…
And I naïvely assumed the church would eventually help me in getting her straightened out.
And yet, even if completely true, this fact is not mutually exclusive with the a priori most probable outcome for the marriage. The fact that someone marries a deceiver tells you at least a little something about the nature of the one deceived. Put directly, some people are more likely to be deceived than others, because of who and what they are. Ultimately, due to assortative mating, marital outcomes are not statistically independent from the people involved.
Thus, naïvety is not the direct cause of marital failure, nor can marital failure be blamed on naïvety.
We often say, for good reason, that correlation does not imply causation. The author draws a correlative link between his personal naïvety and the dissolution of his marriage and concludes that naïvety ultimately enables the deception which causes the marital dissolution. But he has not demonstrated causation, only shown anecdotal correlation.
If we take at face value the correlation between naïvety and marital dissolution, then the existence of naïve men in good marriages is de facto data-driven proof that there is no implied causation.
Those who haven’t been innocent of all wrong and yet been proverbially crucified as a criminal by their wife and church, can’t seem to fathom why, after I metaphorically died to my former life and rose again, those who joined together and nailed me to the cross no longer held any religious power over me.
No one is ever completely innocent of their choices. Each man has free will, and his outcomes are not determined for him. No modern man’s marriage just happens to him by accident. Many things in marriage happen as a logical consequence of one’s choices, even if the chain of causation is obscure.
Of course just because someone says they are completely innocent does not mean they are. I can think of one way that a man would believe himself to be innocent, but was actually responsible: demanding that the church hold your wife to a heretical standard that the church—past and present—doesn’t ascribe to, and then publicly excoriating said church for rejecting your novel theological stance. In fact, it sounds pretty naïve to expect that to work. Did the bridal vows include a promise of patriarchal headship and were those vows duly witnessed by said church? If not, then there is no call to enforce them.
But, most importantly, even if this man’s marriage was the extremely rare exception of a man who did absolutely nothing wrong and could not have been expected to have made any different choices—to have thrown off all semblance of patriarchy and asserted no agency—this would simply have been a rare anecdotal exception to the rule. It would hardly be normative. In fact, it would be especially illustrative for why we shouldn’t rely on anecdotes to determine our beliefs and behaviors.
I find the author’s statements to be, ironically, extremely naïve. The author speaks of solid marriages—as if they are all made up of a naïve man who lucked into a marriage with a nice woman—while portraying himself an expert in who and what makes up a solid marriage. He clearly is not an expert, but that doesn’t stop him from talking down to married men. To wit:
To be quite frank, I now can see that only those of us Christian men who have endured particularly evil wives stand much of a chance of having the blinding scales fall from our eyes.
His view of “naïve” men in strong marriages is a caricature, and, frankly, a bit slanderous.
The key reasoning error, in my view, is his presumption that men in failed marriages are interchangeable cogs with men in successful marriages. Sure, the author has shown and admitted that he was naïve. It purportedly took his marital failure to cause “the blinding scales to fall” from his eyes. But, why should his faults apply equally to married men who have a proven track record? After all, there is a strong possibility that if he originally had the supposed “naïvety” found in men with good marriages, his outcome would have been different.
This implied insistence that men are interchangeable cogs is illustrative. The author is expressing a blankslatist viewpoint. His naïvety and your naïvety and my naïvety must all be equal. There can be no inherent differences: you and I, allegedly, could not have achieved a meaningfully different outcome if we had been in his shoes. If you or I could have had a different outcome than him, than that would mean that there was something about him specifically that contributed to his marital dissolution. He would have to recant his claim of complete innocence and take at least some of the blame for the marital failure. So, in order to avoid personal culpability, all men in strong marriages must actually be victims of naïvety. It’s absurd.
The claim of naïvety isn’t data-driven. It isn’t analytical. It isn’t rooted in evidence. By contrast, there is a very strong correlation between the failed relationships of Manosphere participants and introverted INTJ and INTJ-adjacent personalities. It’s not hard to suspect that:
Aspects of the men themselves leads them towards these outcomes.
The author really does think that his own naïvety caused his marriage to fail and that those in strong marriages are similarly naïve in the way that he was. But this conclusion does not logically follow. On the contrary, having a good marriage is a strong indication that the husband is not naïve, but has a good understanding of his wife. Men who are more aware (i.e. less naïve) prior to marriage are more likely to have better outcomes. By contrast, men who are more naïve prior to marriage—like the author—are more likely to have worse outcomes, not better.
Naïvety does not lead to better outcomes.
Had the author not been so naïve upfront, he may well not have had the same outcome that he did. Having been deceived and come out the other side does not make one inherently less naïve. The opposite is likely the case.
I’ll say this as gently as I can. Failing at marriage does not make you an expert at making a marriage work. In fact, the belief that those who have failed at marriage are better suited to helping men in troubled marriages is itself quite naïve. Yes, the author knows how to make a marriage fail, but that doesn’t imply that he knows anything about how to make a marriage work.
It looks like the author’s naïvety is still there, in full force.
Paul taught in the New Testament that a divorced man was ineligible to hold any kind of leadership role in the church. He was to remain under the authority of elders, deacons, and teachers, submitting to them rather than try to be one of them himself.
Why would a man who went through a failed marriage think he should be teaching about marriage to other men? I have no idea, but I agree with Paul.
Those whom God hasn’t delivered from blindness refuse to accept it. Nor can they fathom why the defiler should be in submission to her husband in everything.
This is a good example of why divorced men should not be teaching church doctrine. The combination of complete certainty with complete naïvety is a devastating combination. Notably, we see ideological dogmatism where we would expect to see a data-driven approach.
For a man whose wife is seeking goals that are congruent with his own, and who consequently works towards their mutual benefit, it is probably hard to see much difference in letting his wife lead or leading himself, since they are both on the same team working towards the same goals. He has probably had little experience with the opposite situation, where his wife is trying her very best to kill all of his hopes and dreams and to humiliate him into submitting to her in everything. And without having that deeply uncomfortable experience that other men have had, he is left spiritually naïve and is still apt to idolize his wife, never fully appreciating God’s holy hierarchy.
I understand that this is the author’s thesis, but it just doesn’t logically follow that having a good wife makes one either spiritually naïve or causes one to idolize their wife. Nor does a rejection of the so-called “God’s holy hierarchy”—something that does not exist in God’s Holy Word—imply the either naïvety or idolatry. In the past, this author has routinely made this invalid logical leap.
It’s demonstrably simple to have witnessed both good and bad marriages—being well aware of the dynamics involved in each—while simultaneously rejecting both idolatry and medieval doctrinal heresy of headship. That is, notably, the opposite of being naïve. It is, by contrast, well-informed.
Scripture teaches that a good marriage and family—what the author calls spiritually naïve—are affirmative evidence of spiritual maturity, while a failed marriage and family is invalidating. Men with solid marriages and families are meant to lead the church, while men who are divorced are meant to be submissive.
This stands, once again, as a good example of why divorced men should not teach, but should learn in quietness and subjection.
Many men have good marriages because they have kind and submissive wives who keep their marriages fun, and so they often give naïve advice, to other husbands under satanic attack, to submit to their wicked wives. Even as it isn’t fitting in God’s kingdom for a husband to obey his wife as head, neither should men hearken to naïve simps who spew ignorant alternatives to God’s holy order of patriarchy. Their marital good fortune has usually left them as Feminist fools, living lives of naïvety.
Did you notice the example here of the invalid logical leap that I mentioned above? The author implies that a rejection of doctrinal heresy—of medieval headship and fake patriarchy—implies idolatry, as if you can’t oppose both heresy and idolatry at the same time.
It’s pretty funny that I get criticized for giving non-naïve advice, for “keeping it real.” My discussion of intelligence with respect to divorce and hypergamy, for example, was not well-received by critics.
While a man with a kind wife might have initially known some elementary things about women that led him to select a nicer wife, his learning about women’s defiling nature generally slows upon his entrance into his dream of “happily ever after”. His pleasing wife keeps him submerged within his pleasurable fantasy and oblivious to the multitude of things which some men continue to learn about women the hard way.
Ah, yes. As if having a good marriage is proof that you really have a bad marriage that just hasn’t reached its breaking point yet. Yes, we’ve heard that already.
One of my biggest criticisms of the Manosphere is that it presumes that all data points support the conclusions that it is making. Yes, that is circular reasoning. The point is, the Manosphere has already concluded that no matter how good a marriage is, it’s actually a bad marriage in disguise. It has either failed or is a ticking time bomb just waiting to for the right unlucky trigger to fail. Marriages that last are just lucky. There is no such thing as a good marriage, just lucky men. So, some wives might be “nicer” but all have a core “defiling nature.” Meanwhile, men are just varying degrees of naïve simps.
The retort is straightforward. Good marriages actively militate against this author’s thesis. They do not support it. The former viewpoint (of myself) is a simple deduction, while the latter viewpoint (of the author) is wishful, magical thinking.
I agree with your general point, but I do not have your faith in data.
As an ex-epidemiologist, I regarded most (nearly all) data wrt health and medicine to be *bad* data – and badly-interpreted (due to a combination of the poor quality – careerist – people in academia; and the perverse incentives relating to research, publication and status).
And bad data is worse than none, because it is actively misleading.
On these grounds, and given that I regard the problem of bad data overwhelmingly to be the norm; we are thrown back on personal knowledge and experience – that is, on anecdote.
The validity of anecdote depends on the honesty and competence of those providing anecdotes – we need to regard the source as a “good witness”; and that of course means that we need to be able to evaluate the person – which usually cannot be done without some degree of sustained personal interaction.
My problem with the anecdotal data on Manosphere sites is that either the people are very obviously bad witnesses (not honest, or not competent to know what thy claim) or else I don’t know anything about them (often they are Anonymous or Pseudonymous!) and therefore must assume they are bad witnesses, who ought to be ignored…
Because a bad witness, like bad data, is actively misleading.
Bruce,
These are fair points.
That’s understandable.
I would prefer *good* data, but it is difficult to sort the good from the bad. It is not impossible though. The domain of data analysis involves trying to extract a signal from the noise, and this requires technical skill and insight. It’s not a hopeless occupation. Indeed, one could say that all data is necessarily bad, because all data is inherently uncertain. What “pays the bills” for statisticians (or should, if not for The Science™) is the ability to do proper data analysis.
During 2020 and 2021, I took the time to analyze all sorts of data. People made all sorts of claims about what this or that. I would go in and analyze the data to show why the conclusions made were false. I could evaluate what turned out to be false claims about NPIs, full hospitals, etc. because I knew how to perform the data analysis on these claims.
During that time you were not fooled because you understood the spiritual significance of what was going on. But, I was not fooled because I could correctly interpret the data, even as frustratingly fake much of it was (and still is). In fact, identifying what was (and wasn’t) fake revealed much about what was going on.
Similarly, when I wrote “What about intelligence” I noted that IQ is incredibly useful even though its errors are well known and many are unavoidable. Being “bad” data isn’t enough to make it useless.
But most people are not mathematicians. I commonly say that people who have never taken calculus and/or are not intelligent enough to truly understand calculus should almost never look at a data graph and try to explain it. But, this stops no one from trying. Being misled is basically a given for the majority of people.
As someone who understands mathematics and data analysis quite well, I don’t find bad data to be the kind of problem that other people have with it. It’s a problem to be overcome, nothing more. Moreover, analysis of bad data often reveals unexpected truths (as it did in 2021).
No, the bigger problem to me is not with finding the truth of a thing, it’s with accepting it. The problem is people, not data. This is exactly what you seem to be saying.
For example, no matter how many times you explain something, no matter how clear and unambiguous your clearly expressed views might be, someone will—intentionally or unintentionally—fail to understand it and will invertedly attribute something completely other to you.
Peace,
DR
Derek
You’re old BFF has some probs with this article(& is wondering if you could show how WEAK & PATHETIC ”married” gamey game could fix ALL probs with divorce licensed ”marriage” like his idols DAL’,Athol Kay & Susan Walsh did):
Psudeonoymous Commenter(ex ”RP”-gamer that is now a blackpill Anti-gamer cuz his daughter has NO divorce license)says:
26 November, 2025 at 6:16 pm
https://derekramsey.com/2025/11/26/the-evils-of-womankind/#comments
It’s rather easy to fathom how some men are struggling with spouses who want to blow up their marriages (or have already done so). As the data suggests, this may affect anywhere from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5 marriages
With no sources or data or citations given whatsoever.
The truth is that women file at least – AT LEAST – 70% of divorces.
Women cheat as often as men do. In recent years, women have pulled even with men in the infidelity department.
The main reason women blow up their marriages is not over infidelity or substance abuse. Women fuck and marry cheats, drunks, and drug addicts all the time. Women love cheats, drunks, and drug addicts because “excitement and drama”. So, no, women aren’t leaving marriages because of infidelity or substance abuse. They’re leaving marriages for lack of sexual attraction and because they just don’t want to fuck their boring ass broke ass husbands anymore.
At least men admit that. At least men, or the men here, are trying to do something about that.
The woman was of defective character and was enabled to conceal those defects until after the marriage. That’s not the man’s fault.
Again: at least we men admit that and take responsibility for our own faults of Not enuff gamey game . We men have our own faults thrown(such as NOT enuff gamey game in our republican & democrat strutting & d@ngs) in our faces on a daily basis. We are well aware of our faults and problems,such as being super lame gamey gamers with such failorous soccerdad & mom idols as DAL’,Athol Kay & Susan Walsh – we are required to deal with and address them every single second of every single day as reddish blackpillers now. It would be nice if we could acknowledge women’s faults and contributions to the failures of their marriages. It isn’t all men’s fault like DAL’,Athol Kay & Susan Walsh said & I happily believed until DAL’ abandoned ALL gamey game MEN in JAN ’20.
Perhaps. But succeeding at marriage does not make you an expert on intersexual relationships, human nature, psychology, sociology, or mental/emotional pathology. Or marriage. Marital “success” is “didn’t get divorced”, really. Remaining married does not mean one has a solid marriage or solid family. One cannot examine the author’s marriage to assess whether it is solid because he will not divulge details about it. That is his prerogative; but one who makes such claims ought permit them to be examined fully. Whether or not the author has a “solid” marriage and family is something others will judge, particularly when he demands the submission of other men.
Perhaps. But at least ”men” admit that; and are trying to do something about it(such as learning non-gamey game blackpill as I have over the last 5 years).
As if I’ve never cited the sources of these statistics before! As if I’ve never discussed this topic before!
It turns out that if you cite the sources, nobody cares. Nobody engages. But, if you leave them out, they complain. They engage. That creates perverse incentives, wouldn’t you say?
In any case, since you can’t please anyone, why bother trying? The effort I make is commensurate with the expected value to be extracted.
Right, my beliefs are, in fact, informed by the data. This is true regardless of whether I cite and link the data upon which my beliefs are founded. Either read my previous articles or do your own independent homework, if you are unsatisfied. Don’t like my conclusions? Oh well, you are entitled to your own.
Infidelity and substance abuse are in the top 5 of virtually every list of reasons for divorce. Usually financial stress is in there too. Even back when we had at-fault divorce was still a thing, infidelity and substance abuse were also commonly cited.
As we’ve discussed in the past, this is only true among a particular demographic of women. It is lower among women in general. But even if we took this claim at face value, for sake of argument, the ratio of male/female infidelity does not predict who files for divorce anyway. It’s a bit of a non sequitur.
I fear that this is just another version of the (false) syllogism of politics: something must be done, this is something, so it must be done.
So someone who is data driven and rejects the heavy use of anecdotes must use anecdotes to fallaciously support an argument from authority? I think not. Nice try. I’m not that foolish.
Women do file most divorces.
Now, with that said.
I knew a guy at IBM, early 2000’s. By all accounts he was an “assh*le”
He was cocky. Always right. Everything was a joke. He took an M-80 threw it into a break room at IBM, blew someone’s eardrugims. Wasnt fired. Why? He had patents. He was a “wunderkid” and he had a checkbook of good genetics, jawline, hair, height.
He charmed all the HR babes at IBM I am sure. He was “made” to apologize to the dept and he “learned” from his mistakes. Wasnt fired. Wasnt suspended. In fact, he was in the end “sorry / not sorry”. He was quick with putdowns and shutdowns to most everyone. The type of guy who would not flush a toilet in the bathroom, leave a mess in the bowl.”cause its funny” type of guy, or take a dump in the urinal.
Just a cocky asshole. Anyone else would have been fired. Sued.
His wife was some mousey Eleanor Roosevelt type of young woman. Round shoulders. Flat plain hair. A Jody Arias type. Not ugly. Not *hot* or an “easy nine or ten”
He probably married her for the fact he knocked her up on an acasual fling. Or she was connected to money / property.
Anyway, it WASNT a match. At company parties at Christmas and the like. He negged her constantly in front of coworkers. He spoke like an “assh*le” to her. It was a poorly kept secret in my dept he was banging the hot college intern in our dept that semester (1998)
He was 29? 30? She was 19.
Of course, he could get away with this.
Well……one day in the year 2000. He mentioned that his wife was divorcing him.
Gee….you think?
We all had to “feel bad” for him / pretend nonsense because he was such an awesome guy.
It was odd that it wasnt “funny” or a “joke” anymore. Suddenly she was a “b*tch” and “typical woman” and he suddenly is a Ward Cleaver type of dad doing everything for his toddler and wife. Suddenly he’s an amazing husband, puts his wife first / how could she do this?
As an addict, I too went through this thinking when “bad” things happened to me directly or indirectly through my addiction. Never MY fault!!!! lol!
So……in the end, okay. Women DO divorce and file more. A fact. Agreed. Do many do this for no reason? Yup
But, call it a hunch, many file because they are tired of a husband like this
But, call it a hunch, many file because they are tired of a husband like this
Yes, exactly. You have landed on what is probably the consensus explanation, at least outside the Manosphere. Who files for divorce is not a clean indication of fault. But, since we don’t have at-fault divorces anymore, we can’t reliably tell how we used to how it really is.
@Derek – I was actually helped in understanding the Birdemic by checking the official mortality rates for the few months before this source was utterly contaminated; where I noted that the influenza-attributed deaths for 2017-18 (I think it was – 2 years before) had been higher than the officially cited Birdemic deaths for 2019-20.
From this I knew that there was not a dangerous pandemic, and that mortality was not the reason for lockdowns. This was confirmed by discovering that the WHO definition of “pandemic” had been changed in autumn of 2019, just a few months before the Birdemic was announced; so that to be categorized officially as a pandemic no longer required that an infectious disease had a high mortality rate.
In essence, any newly-defined infectious disease that spread across several countries was (and is) automatically categorized as a “pandemic” – even if it had zero mortality.
But of course the officials in 2020 still used the word pandemic as-if it meant the same as it had the year before.
So the Birdemic was, by official definitions, a non-dangerous new infectious disease.
But my main point is that when you know data from the inside, with some degree of specialist knowledge; it can be seen that many of the problems of bad data cannot be identified statistically. The problems are those of assumptions, sampling, and sometimes tiny (buried) tweaks of analysis – or, indeed, the kinds of tests, measures, and numerical outputs deployed.
There are so many potential distortions that unless the authors are honest both in intention and expression (which is very rare) – the twists and lies cannot reliably be detected by an outsider – at least not without a huge amount of work using primary data.
I learned this from my old mentor the psychiatrist David Healy, who had gone inside the licensing drug trials for various of the “new” classes of drugs launched in the 1980s and 90s. In one instance a 9% death by suicide rate in the drug group (none in the placebo group) was not published, because they explicitly quoted only those side effects that had 10 percent or greater frequency. Nobody would have imagined that such a bland omission would include suicides; but it did. The drug was licensed, made many billions, and apparently killed plenty by suicide.
My point is you can’t see this from analysing the data, and modern researchers are full of such tricks – when they are expedient.
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The author of the linked piece comes across as a nutcase. It reads less like theology than the diary of a ghost who can’t let go — and the writing is dreadful.
Jesse,
His wife left him. He gets a partial pass.
Even so, the commentary made there are nevertheless illustrative and representative of many (now) single men. As for me, I write about whatever inspires me, regardless of the quality of what I’m writing about.
Peace,
DR