To young men, I have a few words of advice. If you’re buying a house and your wife or girlfriend is officially a joint applicant for the mortgage, you should take it to the next level: She should get to wear a strapon and peg you in your arse every once in a while too. They say you never quite live up to your old man. Economically I can almost live up to my dad at this point, in the sense that I can buy a house without needing a partner to jointly apply for the mortgage. This entire essay is obviously a poor excuse to brag about that, everything from this point on is just filler material. But most young Dutch people today who want to buy a house will end up having to cement their relationship with a ritual that requires a sense of stability: A mortgage contract with two names on it. In our modern world, that stability doesn’t exist, so chances are within a few years your relationship breaks down and you end up forced out of your own house, because you coborrow with a wife or girlfriend who doesn’t want to live with you anymore. How humiliating is it to be kicked out of your own house, because your girlfriend wants to screw someone else? Don’t say it doesn’t happen to you, because that’s what all guys who coborrow say. About half of marriages end in a divorce, most of those divorces are initiated by the woman.

“Oh come on, are you really going to do this, are you really going to write an essay in defense of LARPing the 1950’s?” You’re right, that would be very lame indeed. The problem is that human psychology is just human psychology, we have to work with it, whether we like it or not. Relationships come into existence because we fall in love. Love is a bonding instinct in our brain, that makes us feel irrationally infatuated with a person. It lasts for a few years, then it dies. The man can handle not really being in love with his partner anymore, the woman generally can’t, she grows upset. Once you fall in love, get married, buy a house and start “adulting”, she’s going to feel a sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction. You can sometimes kick the can down the hall for a few years by having a child, but then you also set that child up for the disaster that is about to occur.

You won’t know what it is. She will start arguments about bullshit. She will ask you questions where any answer you give makes her mad. “If you could change something about me, what would you change?” If you’re socially incompetent like me, you’ll probably tell her the truth. “I think you’ve gained weight a bit.” Congrats, your life is now over. If you’re really clever, you’ll tell her you liked her old haircut better and she’ll leave you at peace for a while. But obviously this is just where it starts. Eventually the bomb drops. “I don’t feel in love anymore.” You’ll have no clue what it is, she doesn’t really have a clue either. The two of you try to solve it, you go on some city trip to London and stay at some expensive hotel but you’ll have arguments the whole time and you’ll realize it’s over.

Love lasts for a few years. Scrap that. It lasts for a few months if you’re lucky. This is what your life looks like, if you’re a normie: Around age 15 you have your first “real” relationship. You’re convinced it lasts forever. You’re convinced about that with the next person too. You laugh about how terrible your life would have looked with your first partner. You eventually figure out your second partner has all sorts of flaws too, so you turn to the third, who is a real relief, someone who is genuinely kind and nice. This must be “the one”! But you grow bored, it seems like they have nothing new to tell you anymore. Eventually you’re in your late twenties and you’re growing upset with what you notice in your mirror, so you decide that this is the one and now it’s time to start adulting.

If you have a stable relationship, there’s something else that replaces love. Mutual dependence can be one. Traditionally, love was replaced by awe for women and loyalty for men. The woman has zero autonomy and power in society, she is chained to her house and if she loses her husband and becomes an abandoned woman, her social status drops even further. Whereas the man goes on adventures with his peers and has power in the outside world, she is confined to the family sphere and so he has exciting stories to tell her that make her look up to him, whereas she has smelly diapers. In today’s society, a woman often has more exciting adventures than a man. A woman who is genuinely empowered finds herself growing bored with men, because masculinity is fundamentally the pursuit of power. What could an empowered woman possibly still need a man for?

When liberals talk about “empowering women” or “educating women” to reduce birth rates in Africa, they’re not wrong. It genuinely works. Whether life genuinely becomes happier for people under such circumstances is the next question. If you encourage every woman to go to college until her ovaries start shriveling up you can reduce the birth rate, but do I like living in a society where you need a Master’s degree for petty paper-pushing jobs? Not really. A society like that ends up like Amsterdam, where Phd students in their late twenties rent apartments from high-school dropouts who launder their drug money through real estate.

My own suggestion would be that society should simply step away from monogamy altogether, but human beings are not ready for that. The alt-right wants to go back to the 50’s, when a woman was utterly dependent on a man. Liberals think that “gay marriage” and “female empowerment” are like bug fixes for a dysfunctional phenomenon that is fundamentally a good idea according to them, the lifelong relationship between two people uniquely made for each other. The proper realization would be that human beings are individuals, who are not somehow “perfectly made” to spend their entirely lives with one single other person out there.

Relationships with your own gender are more fun and less dramatic than those with the opposite gender (at least for men, for women there’s the stereotype of the battered lesbian I have to point out). When gay guys grow bored of each other they don’t start throwing bottles at each other, like Johnny Depp’s girlfriend did with him. Men don’t have time to play petty mind-games with their significant other, we have other stuff going on in our lives. Same-gender relationships are however not an option for everyone, because around 80% of men seem to be genuinely heterosexual, 2% are blessed with being gay and the other 18% or so who are bisexual are generally morbidly afraid of what women might think of them. Similarly, you yourself might have figured out that monogamy is a disaster, but what are the odds that the person you love understands that problem too? Unfortunately, the odds are not in your favor. So, even though you might see monogamy as a mistake yourself, you’re forced to play along because you love someone who genuinely believes in that bullshit.

While we’re at it, I need to point out one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern society. In our society, women are emancipated and able to occupy prestigious jobs. What do emancipated feminist women with prestigious jobs do? Do they fall in love with good-looking plumbers, do they seek out starving artists? Of course not. An emancipated feminist woman with a high-paying corporate job, pursues men who have even higher paying corporate jobs. That’s the fundamental paradox we’re dealing with in our society: Everyone believes a woman should earn the same money for a job as a man does. The problem is that this means that some women will inevitably have to end up settling for men who earn less than them. We’re noticing that most women don’t look forward to that.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Here’s an article from the NYPost: “Broke men are hurting American women’s marriage prospects.” This article seems to take it for granted that a woman doesn’t want to marry a man who is incapable of financially providing for her. But that’s not particularly feminist, is it? The epitome of feminism is a female coal miner married to a stay at home dad. But ironically, the only ladies I know who are happily married to a stay at home-dad wouldn’t think of themselves as feminists. Women I know who think of themselves as feminists tend to be ruthlessly mean towards men who don’t have their shit together. So what’s really going on there? My explanation is as following: A feminist woman is not a woman with an abstract intellectual devotion to gender equality. A feminist woman is a woman who has a desire for power and upward social mobility that we would traditionally associate with men. The only men these women can imagine themselves in a relationship with are men who are even more vicious and power-hungry.

What happens as a consequence is that men in today’s society are becoming eager to marry women who are dumber and less successful than them. I’m sorry ladies, I don’t like it either, but this is simply what’s happening. I really like the idea of men and women who live out long and happy relationships as intellectual equals, but that’s not what happens in the real world, what worked for Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir doesn’t work for most of us. In the real world, men increasingly start marrying down. This guarantees that their lives are filled with less drama. In addition, there’s a kind of ego boost you get from a woman who admires your intelligence that you won’t find elsewhere. After 5 PM, men don’t want to come home to women clever enough to see through their bullshit.

A woman who worked a zero-hour contract in a supermarket before she met you is a woman who isn’t going to start asking you the kind of questions to which every answer you give makes her upset. She knows that means she can go back to stocking shelves. Marrying a woman who is as smart and accomplished as you sounds nice on paper, but what happens in reality is that you end up stuck in a power struggle with her, a power struggle you will find yourself losing. Look at the situation of Johnny Depp with his ex-girlfriend, to see what I mean. For most men, the concept of being engaged in a power struggle with someone you love is alien. Men go into that battle ill prepared. When men notice themselves in a power struggle with their wife, they will initially deny to themselves what’s going on. But for this woman Johnny Depp was dating, it seemed self-evident. That’s how she managed to ruin Johnny’s career until he finally started publicly releasing the audiotapes that reveal her to be a sociopath.

Why are relationships between men and women so difficult? Why does it cause so much suffering? Radical lesbian feminists are correct, we’re not really designed to mingle, it’s something relatively recent in our evolutionary history. In nature, most mammals live gender-segregated lives. Male elephants who enter puberty are forced out of the herd. Female mammals live together with their dependent young, the females only hang out with the males when it’s time to mate. For humans this changed because of the neolithic revolution, when we became farmers. Men claimed the world as property and wanted to make sure that the children were their offspring, so they turned women effectively into their slaves. It’s an arrangement that doesn’t work that well for either gender and it broke down once it became clear that men now spend their days sitting in an office doing petty nonsense that women can easily do too.

The Romans understood a few things that we don’t. Consider how they treated homosexuality. They took it for granted that men are bisexual. What they considered shameful is for an adult Roman citizen to be the passive partner. That’s something that exists deep in our mammal psyche. Female hyena’s have pseudopenises, that came into existence solely for their dominance games between female hyena’s. A heterosexual relationship is only going to work well if the male feels in a dominant position and if the woman feels content with the thought of submitting to him. If a woman looks at her spouse and thinks “I can’t look up to this guy”, then it simply won’t work out. The problem that women encounter today is that they look at the men around them and realize that they’re doing much better. She has a Master’s degree, he’s working a dead end job. She has fifteen different guys on Facebook eager to talk to her, he has some dudes he plays video games with. She’s going to be believed if she says he hits her, he won’t be (right Amber Heard?). She’s in control. How is she going to feel attracted to a man who has zero control over her? Look at women’s main sexual fetishes and you’ll find that the number one fetish is male dominance. If this male dominance is entirely reduced to a simulation, a game played in the bedroom between two consenting adults, how will she feel attracted to him?

So, if you really really really insist on pursuing a long-term, stable heterosexual relationship, my advice to ladies is as following: If you ever want to feel content in your love life, don’t graduate college. Make sure you leave a big pool of men you can look up to. Even if he earns a much better salary than you do (the odds of that are higher than you think), you’re still going to be upset if your guy didn’t graduate because you’re taught to derive your entire sense of self-worth from your education. That’s eventually going to change when it’s widely acknowledged that your soft science degree merely sets you up with debt and doesn’t get you anything real in life, but I don’t think you want to wait that long. Start working in retail ladies, make sure that you have no enviable future of your own ahead for yourself. Then, once your guy comes swooping in, his boring office job will make you think of him like a prince on a white horse who saves you from the drudgery and humiliation of your daily existence.

For gentlemen, I have the following advice: Do not put her name on the mortgage contract.