I was reading through some advice columns again and came across this nugget. It’s your typical story, a decent, young guy likes a girl and gets in a relationship. She’s not feeling it, so he piles on the beta-provider behaviours, so she ends it. The guy is such a great bloke that the ex’s mom loves him enough to invite him to a family day at Six Flags as a friend (probably with the ulterior motive that her daughter will date the guy again). The kid asks whether he should go and if he can get her back. The story’s not particularly interesting, but the columnist’s response is.

You are right not to go to Six Flags with your ex and her family. You are right to give her space. And though I wish I could tell you that time and absence will make her heart grow fonder, the truth is it probably won’t. Because the thing with 20-year-old girls is that 80% of the time, they don’t go for the guy who takes a bus six hours so they don’t have to drive home alone and they don’t go for the guy who sends them rice pilaf in the mail or the guy whom their moms are crazy about. They go for the guys who ignore them and cheat on them and break their hearts. Not always, of course, but a lot of the time. And for a while, it seems like no one is happy because guys like you are pining away for girls like your ex and those kinds of girls are pining away for someone else and everyone is sad and a little lonely and wishing they could just love the people who already love them back. The good news is that eventually the 20-year-old girls turn into 25-, 30-, 35-year-old women and they’re tired of longing for the guys who don’t treat them well. And they long for the kind of guy who will go on a family vacation with them and help them move and bring them their favorite food. And you’re going to be in luck when that happens because you’re going to have your pick of the litter. In about 5 years or so, the kind of girl you like is going to be looking for someone exactly like YOU. And then it’s all just going to be a matter of timing to find the right match. I know that doesn’t help you much now. It doesn’t do much to soothe your broken heart and make you feel less alone. And the only thing I can say to that is that it WILL get better. As long as you remain the sweet, thoughtful guy you are — the kind of guy moms love and girls want as their “friend,” it won’t be too long before they’re going to want so much more than that. And who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll find the rare breed of young woman who has no interest in dumb games and already understands the value of a guy who wants nothing more than to be a great boyfriend.

This has been said a thousand times around these parts, but I’m pointing it out again:

If you are decent guy, most everybody expects you to get shit on romantically and just take the lumps for a decade, then get the used-up, washed-out, emotionally-wrecked left-overs of the assholes’ pillaging.

Wendy just dismisses this, like it’s just the way it is. There’s no condemnation of the attitude, no real thought as to how thoroughly poisonous this is.

Does nobody else think there’s something disastrously wrong with this attitude?

Does nobody realize what a destructive message this sends to young men?

Does anybody even care?

How can we just casually accept that anti-social assholes get the prize, while the decent, honest builders and maintainers of civilization get the dregs, if they’re lucky?

This is how civilization dies, tiny cut, by tiny cut.

****

A commenter illustrates this perfectly:

this reminds me a lot of my own relationship as i left for college. my boyfriend was a wonderful person, and i just… didnt want to do it anymore.

…

above all, dont do what my exboyfriend did: he became a total douche. i dont know what happened, if his heart was broken so much, or if he would have turned that way regardless, but when he went off to college the year after me, he could give a shit about studying and almost failed out his first year after being top in his class, he started dating my good friend and then cheated on her all the time (and continues to, i think? yikes), after never wavering with me ever… i mean, at my joint birthday dinner, he was talking about how this random girl just started having sex with him on the lawn in front of some house at a college party. he was not that person when i knew him. so, just be you. dont get jaded, dont intentionally change just to become something you believe that girls want or whatever- just be you, and you will find someone who genuinely wants to be with you.

He’s the douche?!?

He’s just a normal guy who realized the score, being a good guy gets you rejected and your heart destroyed for no real reason at all.

Being a “douche” gets you you easy sex with strangers at a party; it gets you a loyal woman who sticks with you while you jam your cock into all varieties of foreign vagina.

She’s the one who torched a perfectly good relationship with a wonderful man so she could get her holes plugged by assholes in college. Yet, somehow he’s the douche for wanting to be one of the assholes doing the plugging rather than the loser on the outside watching the girl he loved get plugged?

You get what you incentivize.

If you learn nothing else of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology but this one fact, you have more understanding than most of the fools with doctorates and fancy titles. If you never get anything else from this blog, remember that phrase:

You get what you incentivize.

If you incentivize douchebaggery, you get douches. If you incentivize decency, you get decency. If being a decent fellow gets you a broken heart and being a douche gets you blown by young co-eds, any rational man is going to be douche.

So, we have more douches who fail to do do anything useful for civilization because who cares? when being an ass is enough to get you sex. We have fewer decent guys willing to pick up the burden of civilization because all it gets you is heartache and loneliness.

Thus, civilization dies as parasitism becomes the norm.

****

What’s especially, ironically funny is that a good portion of the letters at Wendy’s site are some variation of “how do I get my boyfriend to commit to me?”

These short-sighted women don’t even realize they’re destroying their own chances of commitment by rejecting the commitment-minded types in their youth and chasing the douches.

So, to men here’s the warning: if you’re a decent, commitment-minded man, don’t ever commit to a woman over 30, and be wary of committing to a woman over 25. She had her chance when she was young; she chose some asshole over you (or some other decent fellow like you) to give her youth to, why should you waste yourself on her now that its gone and she’s desperate.

No matter how much your girlfriend begs for commitment, no matter how much your mother pesters you for grandchildren, no matter how much shaming older women heap upon you, no matter how much your pastor demands you man-up, do not marry an older woman. They are simply not worth it.

If you want commitment go for those young women who are decent enough, smart enough, and love civilization enough to find a decent guy and marry young.

Demand more for yourself; demand better for yourself than the leftovers of assholes.

Demand better of the girl you want than someone who will let herself be the leftovers of the assholes.

To women, here’s the warning: if you love civilization, if you want to marry a decent, commitment-minded man, find him while you are young and don’t waste your youth on assholes. If you do, you could be one of those women in her mid-30s scheming over how to get their confirmed bachelor boyfriend to commit.

Demand better for yourselves than drunkenly blowing some cheating jackass on the lawn or being the cheated-on girlfriend.

****

I know this post and this story are not particularly insightful or novel.

It’s just another brick in the wall, just another condom in the landfill.

Just another decent young man whose heart was broken being told to suck it for a decade so he might have a shot at the leftovers.

Just another overlooked story of a once-great civilization dying, tiny, unnoticed piece by tiny, unnoticed piece.

When the last, violent, death throes of whatever is left of our civilization come, I’m going to revel in their suffering, for it will be well-deserved.

Let it burn.