"Why don't men pursue women anymore?"

A question someone Googled, which brought them to this old blog post of mine, which links to a 2006 NYT Magazine article that I remember very well. Coincidentally, I had reread that post a couple days ago and had been wanting to re-blog it.  My post title is a quote from the article: "Men don’t marry because women like myself don't need to rely on them." I'd said:

The article is very much like the kind of article that is often written about women: profiles of wistful, sympathetic individuals who can't quite get what they want in life and make a valiant, poignant effort to say it's not that terrible. Then there is an undercurrent that seems to imply that we need liberal economic policies to boost men so that women will be able to accept them. And there's a big overtone suggesting that for all the loneliness, marriage really isn't all that appealing to people. Now that we don't march lockstep into marriage anymore and now that women don't require men for economic support, the reasons for marrying -- for a lot of people -- are never going to mount up to the point where they justify giving up the status quo of singlehood.

The comments thread there is excellent, including some memorable commenters who were long gone by The Last Days of Commenting — comments ended on July 7, 2013 — and including Meade — whom I did not encounter in person before 2009, the year we married. Someone in that thread asks me to marry him... but it's not Meade. Good old Meade says:

... I can't blame anyone for not marrying. Have you ever sat in on a divorce trial? It should be a requirement, before being issued a marriage license, for every couple to do so -- a blood test, a background check, and three days as captive audience in the misery of someone else's divorce trial. I assure you, most couples drunk on love would sober right up and vow to remain just friends. And the world would be a happier place. Forget men being statistically marginally happier when married. Puh. Except for the lawyers who make an often times lucrative income from it, divorce is a ring of hell unto itself and the only guaranteed way of never experiencing that hell is to never get married in the first place.