What’s interesting about all this is that as men grow older, the process becomes a lot quicker—mostly, it should be said, because younger men can put up with almost anything if they’re getting laid. As men get older and sex becomes less important, however, the “bullshit” factor and the tolerance thereof become more important.

True for women as well. In my view, this is the single biggest argument against late marriage. Marriage is largely about accommodation, and it can take a great deal of time to learn to accommodate even some of the most meaningless foibles of a partner. To use the ledger analogy again, we depreciate certain behaviors over time so that they don't have a significant impact on the balance. We we are young, we depreciate behavior far more quickly than when we get older. I find I become aware of this when my kids come home for a visit or I have guests for a few days--they mess up our routine, which seems to annoy me a lot more than it used to.

At ages 19 to about 27, men are at their most vulnerable for marriage, because the nice thing about married sex is not that it’s necessarily great, but that it’s pretty much always available, without too much work involved.

But if during those early years women don’t get their hooks into a man soon enough, the job becomes progressively harder as the man ages. So if women spend those early adult years building themselves a career and “fulfilling themselves” at the expense of getting married, they will find that when they do finally want to settle down and get married, men are no longer as welcoming as they were before.

And the foundations of all that were put down when women tried to stop men from being like men. Even with sex involved, men will always apply “The Ledger” to a relationship. Without sex, men are, quite simply, unwilling to put up with all the sh*t that a woman brings to the party. And when men feel that the dice are constantly loaded against them, they’ll simply refuse to play the game, at all.

Brilliant analysis, particular in light about what I said in an earlier post about culture.

I'd say, looking at an outlier like Utah, Idaho or Wyoming, that marriage is the result of culture. In this part of the world, not being married at say, 26, is a very lonely proposition, not only because you have no wife (husband), but because all of your peers are married and most of the women (men) one meets are married. The culture simply isn't very singles-friendly much beyond one's early twenties.

Culture is always a kind of unexamined collective logic, a self-reinforcing solution for environmental problems. Du Toit makes a good case for how a new environmental variable--the easy availability of sex, has rippled through the population to create a new culture of isolation and a reproductive dead end. The mind boggles at the implication--freely available sex resulting in fewer marriages and fewer offspring.

In contrast, the traditional culture of marriage has been preserved through large parts of the intermountain west because of essentially a religious proscription against pre-marital sex. Young men must get married to obtain regular access to sex, which means that both men and women get married younger, thus reducing the pool of available potential sexual partners the older someone gets, again reinforcing the social forces producing marriages among young people. To bookend the my previous observation--scarce sexual opportunity results in more marriages and more offspring (Utah has the highest birthrate in the nation...).

Not surprisingly, this pattern is clearly evident around the world. Where the culture, usually strongly affected by a dominant religion, disapproves of pre-marital sex, marriage and birthrates are high. Where pre-marital sex is accepted and common, birthrates are low--below replacement levels.

Apparently the chaste will inherit the earth.