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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.