I think this is the best analogy I can come up with to explain why as a 33 year old male with an attraction to women, I will not bother forming any type of relationship with them. I don't even really have female friends or want any. To me they are like mythical walnuts with five shells, I don't want to do the work required to flirt, ask them out, have relationships with them, then sex. There are also issues like the fact that I hate subterfuge and modern flirting is based mostly on that, low self-confidence, body image issues, the fact that I am in the hole so bad I may as well stay a virgin, etc. Also I don't like to meet people in general, the more people I meet the less hope I find I can have for the future. Further I feel like sex is way over-hyped and even if tomorrow I could bed as many women as Gene Simmons, it wouldn't be worth it. The sexual pleasure is mitigated by emotional attachment, emotional conflict, feelings of guilt, etc.
Right now I am in the bordello nation of Greece visiting family. So many young couples are like the type you can see sometimes in American malls who cannot keep their hands off each other, but it is obvious they are conforming to culturally imposed patterns of behavior. Greeks tend to choke or drown many of their close social connections. If they are young and single they seem to be out with the same friends day after day, after day. If they have kids they drown them with constant nagging, phone calls and contact allowing no space to develop. Young couples here seem to follow the same pattern. But even if a couple cannot keep their hands off each genuinely, out of a fidelity to the social construct called love imagine five years down the road. Everyone that knows them would be sickened if they still could not walk without holding hands, if they constantly kissed and whispered to each other, etc. That is because deep down everyone knows that alot of the imagery associated with eternal love as a social construct in our society is bullshit, echoing previous views when Western society was more mature on this issue and cultural memes portrayed love as something that comes and goes or something that cannot be requited like in Romeo and Juliet. They died before they could pass the blind passion phase of youth and their newfound acquitanceship.
The way I look at marriage and children is that it is alot like juggling. I have a job I hate, but stay at it for the pay and benefits. That is one ball. But supposed I did look at women differently and was married. That wife would be the second ball. Then maybe we want a kid. That is a third ball. Then a house. A fourth ball! Now the juggling is getting difficult. Another kid? The fifth ball! I often joke that what if I get good at bobsledding and want to join the Jamaican bobsled team(a reference to the film Cool Runnings). Now with my current life situation, I could do that if I really wanted to. If I was juggling the five balls, I almost definitely could not, it would mean abandoning my family, my wife, my home on a lark with a low success rate, especially since Jamaica cannot have a world class bobsled team.
There is actually much going against the traditional family structure. For one according to an American retirement magazine:
http://www.aarp.org/personal-growth/tra ... eople.html
Shocking no one, married people are less lonely than those who are divorced, separated, or never married. But that wedding band doesn't have magical powers: 29 percent of married people reported being lonely. "There's nothing worse than being half of a couple that's not getting along," says Ironside, the London Independent advice columnist. "There are lots of difficult things about living alone, but at least no one is actively ignoring you."
Btw, that is just stats for how many are married but still feel lonely. That doesn't meant they are actually happy in their marriage. According to statistics this is how many divorce:
https://www.truthorfiction.com/divorce
One of the latest reports about divorce was released this year by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). It is based on a 1995 federal study of nearly 11,000 women ages 15-44. It predicted that one-third of new marriages among younger people will end in divorce within 10 years and 43 percent within 15 years. That is not a death sentence, however; it’s a forecast. Martha Farnsworth Riche, former head of the Census Bureau, told USA Today, “This is what is going to happen unless we want to change it.”
But again that just tells how many marriages outright fail in the USA, about 43% within 15 years a shocking number. In addition we must also realize that alot of people are staying unhappily married because they don't want all the juggling balls they are constantly throwing up to fall.
What about kids?
http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/
From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, housework.) This result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children invariably reducing marital satisfaction. The economist Andrew Oswald, who’s compared tens of thousands of Britons with children to those without, is at least inclined to view his data in a more positive light: “The broad message is not that children make you less happy; it’s just that children don’t make youmore happy.” That is, he tells me, unless you have more than one. “Then the studies show a more negative impact.” As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.
The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”
Yet one can see why people were rooting for that paper. The results of almost all the others violate a parent’s deepest intuition. Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist and host of This Emotional Life on PBS, wrote fewer than three pages about compromised parental well-being in Stumbling on Happiness. But whenever he goes on the lecture circuit, skeptical questions about those pages come up more frequently than anything else. “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t argue with me about this,” he says. “Even people who believe the data say they feel sorry for those for whom it’s true.”
I remember two of my married co-workers with children conversing. One was saying how great it was for him that a school bus took 40 minutes to take his child to and from school even though he lived about 10 minutes away by car due to the structure of the route. Even though it sucked for the kid, he loved the situation. The other unlucky one complained that between work, acting as the kids taxi to school, watching the kids, he had no real significant down time to unwind.
I could go on but I think I made my point. Unlike most people I am more cerebral, inward focused, live in my own head more; I analyze to death every small decision. I cannot just go with the herd. The walnut of sex is probably not worth the effort of much more people to open, they just can never know it because they live a simple life of imitating their peers, conforming to parental and societal expectations. They are too intellectually incurious and invested in distracted and pursuing entertainment industry to come across or ponder the type of sources I cited why in atomized capitalist society, sex, marriage and kids, is as they say perhaps obsolete or a bad deal for the adults involved. Africans wisely say that it takes a village to raise a child and in modernized societies there is no village or social support, everything burdens your shoulders. When I was a kid in the 1980's as soon as I was old enough, I was outside frequently. Now in the 2016 that is not the case where I live, the kids rarely go outside. There is no respite. Is the walnut of sex even worth opening even for people who don't consider themselves asexual? It seems our predicament has its virtues in some instances.
