[Paracelsus]

I'm going to put one element that seems to be getting forgotten here. Let me insert the relevant meme here so those of you who feel so inclined can get the snark out of the way ahead of time:



Let's leave aside that The Simpsons, like all mainstream media, has been a pretty potent delivery system for the cultural destruction we've been dealing with and which we are fighting against right now.

A marriage that's gone bad which doesn't have any children in it is one thing. But when you add conscious human beings who did not ask to be born and who rely completely on you for support and a bulwark against the poisonous culture we are living in, it becomes something else entirely.

As at the current date, roughly 1 in 4 children are being raised without a father. Try and understand that number in real terms, take four kids off the street and one of them will have no father in his life.

Now combine that demographic fact with the simple truth that children of single parent households fare worse on school achievement, their social and emotional development, their health and their success in the labor market. They are at greater risk of parental abuse and neglect (especially from live-in boyfriends who are not their biological fathers), more likely to become teen parents and less likely to graduate from high school or college. Making it worse is that single parents also generally have very weak parenting skills to begin with (the article I've linked to points it out.)

Added to that, the statistic is so well-established that leftie outlets keep trying to break it down: children of divorces tend to wind up getting divorced themselves. The cycle is self-perpetuating.

"It's better that the kids grow up in a low conflict separated house than a high conflict married house." Kids judge you on your actions, not your words, as any teenager can tell you. If you stay together even when there's conflict you teach kids the same lesson that Jordan Peterson is currently trying to hammer into a generation of young, listless men's heads: that life isn't all about your own happiness above all, it involves suffering, it involves acceptance of responsibility, and it sometimes involves functioning as an example for people who have to be taught how to hold society together.

If you break up and both parties seem happier for it, you teach a kid precisely the opposite - and you also teach them the same listlessness that Peterson is trying to overcome, you teach them that they need not commit to anything, that nothing matters other than their own, momentary happiness.

You also teach them - at least for a while until they hit 18, because hey, you can always undo childhood programming later on, people do it all the time, right? - that you, their father, don't want them, that you, their father, placed your needs and your happiness above theirs. Which is great and Nietzschean and all, but if you still have this attitude after about a decade or so of being a parent, there is something wrong with you.

"But I still get them 3 times per week, I'm an involved Dad then." Shit employers convince themselves that people doing part-time jobs can be as productive, efficient, present, and available as fulltime employees can. Every divorced kid knows that Dads are for playgrounds and ice creams that their mothers won't get them.

"But my wife won't fuck me! She's not fulfilling her end of the bargain!" Your kids will not think to ask: so?

"She should be putting in as much as I am into the relationship." So relationships are transactional. Thanks, Dad, I'll quote you fondly on that when I hit my first million likes on Instagram. That aside: so your wife is an asshole. She's presenting a bad example, and when you're separated from her, that bad example will be present all the time. What's your countervailing force to that bad example going to be? Playgrounds and extra ice creams?

"But my wife won't find out that I'm cheating on her." Probably not, but you'll know you have, and that'll be half the problem, because from that point on you will be rationalising your behaviour rather than feeling expungable guilt over it. Cheating happens because you are either emotionally disconnected from your wife or because you have lost some of the connection you had with her. Which, I'm sure, is a common thing in all the marriages of the past, but look around you: all those disconnected people, that's what past practice has brought us to.

"Fuck you, I still think my happiness is going to be better for the kids as an example than staying in a sexless marriage." Okay, but you had better be prepared to do twice the work in cleaning up the mess you make, and be prepared for it to fail utterly against the law of large numbers ... not that the law of large numbers matters, because you're an individual, you can choose how your kids react to a life-destroying event like divorce, right?

Your actions have a blast radius, and it includes your kids. Maybe you think your crossed-legs wife deserves it, but you'd have to question the sanity of a man who thinks his kids deserve it too.

Point being: cheating or breaking up with your wife when there are kids involved is not a choice between your happiness and that of your wife, it's choosing between your kids and you. We've had roughly forty years of men and women who chose themselves when presented with those two options, and when you look around you the result of that mass of choices is plain to see.