THE GROUCHY GUY: WHY GROUCHY GUYS DREAD MARRIAGE
Why Grouchy Guys Dread Marriage
BLOGGER: LAWRENCE JOSEPHS, PHD
Here is a list of men’s worst fears and how marriage or any long-term committed relationship arouses those fears:
1) Wimp: Any man who is too frightened to stand up to his wife or to other men.
2) Pussy whipped: Any man who is shamefully submissive in relation to his wife because he is afraid of antagonizing her.
3) Mama’s Boy: A man who is shamefully dependent on his wife because he would be lost without her.
4) Limp Dick: An impotent man, psychologically as well as physically, who can’t get it up, who can’t satisfy his wife sexually or otherwise.
5) Cuckold: A man whose wife cheats on him or flirts in front of him with other men and he let’s her get away with it.
Committed relationships unconsciously expose men to men’s worst fears of being emasculated. Therefore falling in love is dangerous for men. Men think marriage can be an emasculating trap because a castrating wife can turn a husband into a wimpy, limp dick, and pussy whipped mama’s boy who is cuckolded. This is a straight man’s worst nightmare, almost as bad as getting fucked up the ass by a thug in prison who is going to use him as his personal bitch. Yet many men will face these dangers because they are also hopeless romantics and fools for love who will do anything to win the woman of their dreams. So men do enter the lion’s den of marriage but they do so self-protectively to play it safe. Men enter marriage in a self-protective way that hedges their bets. Men go into marriage with a certain type of protective armor on. They will maintain as much of their independence, self-sufficiency, personal space, and freedom as their wives will let them get away with. They keep their feelings and their thoughts to themselves, not really letting their wives into their inner sanctum. They become grouchy when wives threaten that protective armor because they don’t want their hidden vulnerabilities exposed.
Men are secretly ashamed of their monogamous tendencies because privately they think that only an emotionally needy mama’s boy would choose monogamy for the sake of emotional intimacy over a life spent playing the field and making sexual conquests. A real man like James Bond or Hugh Hefner spends his entire life enjoying the pleasures of being a playboy having sex with an endless variety of young beautiful women. Men secretly believe that only wimpy men (i.e. losers) submit to having sex with just one woman for the rest of their lives. Grouchy guys look around and see that the alpha males in our culture don’t seem to be particularly monogamous. They see Hollywood superstars who never get married and instead spend their entire lives having sex with new starlets, siring and supporting children out of wedlock. Or they see captains of industry who engage in serial monogamy. These rich men, like Donald Trump, can easily afford to trade in their middle-aged wives for younger models. And closer to home are all the guys at the office who seem to be getting away with having extra-marital affairs and even have the audacity to brag about it.
Monogamous guys begin to feel envious and sexually inadequate in relation to guys who remain free to enjoy playing the field. That’s why they are so grouchy. They take out their frustration with themselves on their girlfriends and wives. It doesn’t do anything for their male egos to remind themselves what loyal and devoted husbands they are when they are beginning to feel like first class shmucks who are missing out on all the fun.
There has been great controversy in the social sciences as to whether or not men are biologically predisposed to form monogamous relationships. Yet what is not widely appreciated is most contemporary evolutionary psychologists now assume that strong but not exclusive monogamous tendencies are now thought to be biologically based. Humans are one of the few monogamously inclined primates. Chimpanzees are promiscuous and gorillas have harems. Humans are thought to have evolved towards monogamy as females started needing help raising their helpless big-brained babies who take almost two decades to reach full maturity. Monogamy evolved as children with both a mother and a father survived and reproduced more successfully than children did with only a mother to take care of them. Humans, men included, possess an instinctive tendency to pursue a quality over quantity reproductive strategy. Wanting to have sex with just one woman for the rest of one’s life in order to sire children with just one woman is a completely natural and in fact powerful tendency within the hearts of men. All men have a sense of what it means to be a “good Dad.” It means putting all your resources into raising a handful of children who will be given every advantage in life. All men intuitively appreciate that what is best for children is for them to be raised by two loving parents who function well as a team together who will funnel all their joint resources towards enhancing their children’s long-term prospects.
Men feel guilty when they fail to live up to this “gold standard” and this guilt isn’t simply imposed by society. Men know that their children are getting less than they deserve when their family life is characterized by ugly bickering, infidelity, and/or contentious divorce. Pursuing a quantity over quality reproductive strategy by siring children with different women means that none of those children will reap either the emotional or the economic benefits of a full-time devoted father. In a study I conducted at Adelphi University where I teach I discovered that over 20% of undergraduates were aware of parental cheating and those undergraduates were significantly more likely to cheat or be cheated on themselves. Thus it may be natural for men to want to cheat but cheating is not only devastating for the betrayed spouse but has real long-term effects on the future love lives of their children, independent of the impact of parental separation or divorce. What kind of example is a philandering Dad setting for his son and what is he conveying to his daughter about how a devoted woman in a long-term relationship can expect to be treated by the man she loves?
Human males invest more in raising their children than do any other primates (i.e. apes and monkey’s, human’s closest animal relatives). Even though women tend to remain the primary caretakers of children in comparison to men, in comparison to males of most other species most human fathers seem like Mr. Mom. Thus not only have human males evolved towards monogamous arrangements with women but they have also evolved to have a strong paternal caretaking instinct. Thus what men are born with is a deep-seated inner conflict, a potentially overwhelming conflict between love and lust. On the one hand, men lust for endless sexual variety with young beautiful healthy women at the height of their fertility. On the other hand, men have a deep yearning to mate for life with a soulmate with whom they will become dedicated fathers who will provide for, protect, play with, and nurture a brood of children and grandchildren. What’s a man to do?
Click here to find out more about Dr. Josephs on the About Us Page.
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