Welmer says something smart here. I’m of the generation that did quite well out of the property boom — at least in NZ. When we married, (in our 20s) we bought in a working class suburb: my ex-wife still has that house, and the area is now, on average worth six or seven times what we paid for the house.

For my ex and her peers, the men they courted and married — Late Baby Boomers — generally got established, generally had prospects, and generally did OK. It was no easy ride: Welmer did not live through the periods of 20% unemployment after the 1987 crash but that was around when we bought our house. But he’s right.

In hard times one needs a man.

What created this “independent woman” myth was the great prosperity of the baby boomer era, which lasted from roughly the mid 60s to the mid 2000s. Men abounded, and they were flush with cash. Businesses could afford to hire superfluous cute girls and give them nice salaries. Family courts could rob men blind and they’d still have enough left over for a reasonable lifestyle and a chance to start over. Men were harvesting the fat of the land, and there was more than enough to go around. My blue-collar father bought a house on Capitol Hill in Seattle when he was in his mid 20s. Today, that same house would sell for about a million dollars — even a well-compensated professional would have a hard time affording it.

Things have changed. Young men’s status is markedly lower, so there’s a lot less left over for young women, who are working harder than their mothers and getting less in return. Most young mothers need state assistance merely to give birth (actually, about half of all mothers need it today), which proves that young women are not exactly making money hand over fist themselves. When you’re poor, life is a lot easier if you can share with someone, and nobody shares more with girls than boys. So merely finding a man to share burdens is a considerable relief to young women. Is a feminist going to fix a car, carry a TV upstairs or take her to the hospital to give birth? Will the feminist voluntarily share any of what she earns with the young woman? Yeah, right…

Male scarcity in either numbers or resources effectively prevents feminism. Surplus enables it. In a sense, one could say that feminism’s own downfall is built in to the ideology itself, because it contributes to male scarcity.

One of the things I noted among my generation, even in the church, is that women see their marriages as fungible. After my marriage imploded, the ex had support from her best friend — who blew up her marriage. I’m seeing young men drop out of school, not because they are idiotic, but because the family has imploded and their are other priorities. Like working: like finding a safe place for them and their family, for being at home with their mother is not that.

The destruction to the faith and the spirits of their husbands and sons is not considered.

But I forget the economic side of this. These women have teenage kids, born in wedlock: they often have paid off the mortgage (or got it manageable). There is capital there — and under NZ law you get half of the shared property, which after a few years is all of it. But most women can only do that once. Because without capital to deal with the markedly high cost of accommodation (particularly measured against the average income, in Auckland of around 70,000: you are looking at paying over 10 times your wage to get into the suburb).

I’m quite aware, that if I ever moved back to Auckland, I could not afford the family home we once shared. And, finally, many of the jobs that these women have fought for are heading, quite rapidly, to being disestablished.

Our society has not been as wealthy as it seemed. For example, there is no economic recovery. Instead, we are in an outright depression masked by food stamps & other entitlements, unemployment payouts, disability insurance, government hiring, government spending, personal debt, inflated university enrollments, phony unemployment stats, a hollowed-out GNP, and the transition from well-compensated fulltime jobs into marginal part-time jobs. As proof of the depression we need only look to the median income, which has been falling for more than a dozen years and is now below 1989 levels.

Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. Consider the law profession, for instance. Our society could never actually afford the vast cadre of unnecessary “vanity lawyers” adorning government, universities, corporations, and foundations. Some of these lawyers were added for political reasons. Law became a route to institutional positions and elevated incomes for large numbers of women.

When the economic crunch hit, the party was over. Organizations are shedding lawyers, and applications to law school are plummeting accordingly. Some law schools are closing, and others are reducing the size of their incoming classes. Lawyers in non-elite jobs are struggling financially.

Like law, the university bubble (together with related, parasitic organizations) has provided large numbers of women with status, high-paying jobs, security, and the sort of pensions only the state can “afford”. The growth of the administrative cadre at universities has been particularly explosive. But now that bubble is popping, and healthy alternatives to this corrupt, unaffordable, ineffective system of higher education are already emerging.

So, the tide is going out and it’s increasingly obvious feminism has been swimming naked, keeping its head above water only because it could float on government money. Unfortunately for feminists, this is happening at the very moment men are increasingly aware of having been demonized and exploited during the past 40 years, and Atlas is starting to shrug…

I know a few unemployed or underemployed lawyers. I know a lot more underemployed counselors and psychologists: Internet therapy can now be delivered to smart-phones, and it is fairly effective.

So… women are smartening up. Most of them, the younger of them: they are trying to find good men while younger and treating the feminist covens with the contempt they deserve. Because it’s more economic to be married and build a life together than not. The profound irony is that men with jobs are becoming more scarce — particularly in the USA, which is not growing at all — just at the time that most women will listen to Vanessa and her friends, who were saying all this months ago.

Marrying someone who turns you on is more fun than marrying someone who does not turn you on, and having fun makes people happy. It just does, and I’m not discounting that.

But I disagree about the idea that those tingles are foundational to the success of the marriage. My own experience, and that of most of the women I know, and the divorce statistics, all support the idea that the most important thing to consider when selecting a spouse — other than making sure that they’re Christian — is money: how much they have, what they tend to do with it, and their ability to get more of it. This goes for both men and women, as spendthrift wives are a total PITA.

Economics is more important to marital success than romance. It’s a total daydream killer, but true fax are true fax. The number one predictor of marital dissolution is not lack-o-swagger, but arguing about finances. This is why most divorcées who remarry insist upon having separate bank accounts with their next spouse.

Just as all of us in the Happy Wives Club here married attractive men, we also married men with a steady income and/or a college degree. That’s not a coincidence. There is a direct correlation between income and divorce, and we need to be up front about that. Husbands are supposed to be providers (yes, even if she is also employed), and his ability and willingness to provide is an essential component of his fitness for marriage. Trust, but verify, on this one.

He may lose his job later, but at least he’s proven that he is able to get a job at all.

In the meantime, the consequences of the tail end of the boom remain. The excesses of the hippies have been pruned away, for we cannot afford the financial cost: most of us realize that the new age liberalism they espoused leads to spiritual bankruptcy as well.

The elite may double down and make the laws for marriage more unfair and what should be a lifetime together more like time limited concubinage, but we need to do the opposite. We need to contract to be faithful for life. It will be better for our souls. It will be better for our church and children. And it will starve the divorce industrial complex.

The alternative has been tried, and my generation has witnessed the destruction. Do not follow our life path: do better by avoiding the example we set, and the teaching that led us into gross error.