Women are more comfortable with free riding and with charity, and men are extremely conservative about resources. Women happily sacrifice for their children. Men cautiously sacrifice for their tribe. Women advocate for their children regardless of their merits, while men are more parsimonious because they desire the strongest tribe. For men, a woman and his children are just the smallest possible tribe that he can lead. For a woman, it is very risky, especially in the ignorance of youth, to choose just one man upon which to risk her future.
While men cannot articulate this set of intuitions and strategies, women often confuse the difference in evolutionary strategies between men and women. And particularly the difference between a woman’s offspring, and a man’s tribe.
I’ve seen so many marriages where the woman expects the man to have the same interest toward her and the children, as she has. And there are some men who approach a woman’s sacrifice. But for the majority of us, it is a very bad investment. And with the state making it impossible for us to save for retirement, given our shorter productive life spans, and greater specialization, and greater variation – it’s now an extremely bad idea to engage in marriage.
Marriage is an artificial construct. For a man, he is best off if he trades productivity (no longer protection) and affection for as many women as he can get attention from. And a woman’s best interest is to form a group with other women and select from different men what she wants and needs. This is how we evolved: everyone having sex with everyone else – some of which was for bond building, and some of which was for the purpose of reproduction.
Any society that does not maintain at least the nuclear family will be dominated an exterminated by those that do.