Whales Gotta Swim with Whales
How to find someone the old fashioned way
(I)ndividuals don’t arise randomly out of vats, but are born and bred, come from long-established groups, with long established marriage patterns and long-established physical, intellectual, and behavioral traits.
I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them marry a stunning black girl from the ghetto(…) I’ve also never seen them marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia, or a beautiful farmer’s daughter from Modesto. I don’t even really see them marry a beautiful girl from the suburbs with a community college degree.
One of my sisters is an old maid. People used to call women like her spinsters, a term for women who remained unmarried, living out their lives spinning wool. Despite the fact that she is almost 70 years old, she has never really been able to hold down a job. In previous eras, her inability to maintain employment would have been masked by the fact that she may not have needed to punch her card at a factory. Although, in her particular case, they would have made her try since many of my family were garment workers who lived in tenements and did the whole Fievel Mousekewitz thing. While I don’t speak to any family who could verify this anymore, I always heard that my grandmother worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory before it burned down, a fact which is possible given that my father was not born until 1929. Because my sister was born midway through the 20th century, she missed the factory but also the office and, instead, can mostly do nothing. Occasionally doing so with Jeff, her best friend from high school–who is gay—which makes her a “fag hag,” in recently acceptable parlance.
One day, my sister and I visited Jeff whose tastes most approximate Freddy-Mercury-goes-to-Boca. Here and there sheets, paint, scaffolding were laid, making sure not to tarnish any sculptures, cherubs or statues. He was in the process of getting his house painted. By a woman. She also happened to live in the community, which was pretty small and not even dominated by, let alone, exclusive to gay people, for which, it turned out, she was also one–a lesbian.
When we got back to our father’s house later that day, we caught up with him and mentioned the painter. Who the hell finds a female house painter, let alone a lesbian who happens to live in the same gated community, I asked?
Our father said, “Fish gotta swim with fish and whales gotta swim with whales.”
My sister can’t swim but, decades after highschool, she and Jeff still glide around Miami singing about everyone else’s looks.
Firefighters marry nurses
Cops marry schoolteachers. Masculine men date feminine women, and more androgynous men date more androgynous women. Sugar babies like sugar daddies. Tops like bottoms and some guys date guys who look like their brother. I’ve known men with normal BMI who serially date women (or men) who are clinically obese because they just love ass. But each most likely prefers his own main squeeze to someone else’s, at least when it comes down to the business of marriage.
I’ve known short women who date tall guys, and short women who date short guys (some of whom seem tall to short girls). I’ve known white girls who only date black guys, white girls who never date white guys, and white girls who only date white guys. In fact, most people date within their race and no one thinks anything of it.
Turns out, the Bang Brothers pornography dynasty and its retinue of titles are largely predicated on these discrete categories and revealed preferences but people seem to think the dynamics presented in sportcumming are excluded from the halls of matrimony, career, and the trajectory of one’s life itself. But what are you, if not, the sperm of fortune who beat out the sperm of mediocrity in the Sea of Destiny? When you drunkenly crash your Civic Type R into a veteran—controlling traffic for public school students four grades below reading proficiency—on the way to watch the 1994 cult classic Clifford starring Martin Short, with your ex who still cuts, is this not really nature taking its course? The fault of your father who inseminated your mother, thinking no child like you could ever emanate from her loins? But does this culpability not extend to his forefathers and beyond? To ponder such questions is to ponder Ancient Problemz.
Deep in the group chat
Of
’s PAID subscriber feed (you should pay), some of us were discussing such issues when linked me to this article from The Post which shows that there are also many who marry within their profession, with physicians/surgeons landing the top spot. If you are standing in a room of ten of them, two of them should be married to each other. All can write prescriptions for drugs.The article also covers men whose wives hold it down at home. Many are tradesmen who work in highly lucrative (sometimes high risk) careers but many are less lucrative. The contrast between the single income of trade households versus the dual income of dentist households led
to conclude that some professions are clearly leading the rest of us in the game of property inflation.I don’t pretend to have secret knowledge. I am regularly interfacing with people (on the internet) who seem much smarter than me. And yet, I sense a disturbance in the field of human knowledge. I just thought people knew these things.
To legitimate my somewhat conservative stance, taking the lindy approach to mate-shopping, here is some background on how far I have come before deciding on its worth: I have lived in four international metropoles across the U.S. and have tried many things most never would. I was vegetarian for over 10 years and strict vegan for 3 years on top of that. I have dated women from all backgrounds and habitable continents and what I was looking for in these excursions was not something different in the sense of being new. I also wasn’t looking for something trad which mostly seems lame and unworkable (I don’t even know how cars work). What I was looking for was something lindy, something that is from the past but not a replica of it, something that feels natural and comfortable without also stripping every historical discomfort out of bonding. Finding something that isn’t trad but also doesn’t involve an NDA can be difficult to come by unless you have access to candidates who are sufficiently ethnic, insular, or disagreeable. I can say, they are definitely out there and it can be done. You don’t have to look for someone your race, nationality, or religion but you will want to look outside the walls of progressivism where more natural, longer lasting arrangements emanate.
Some notes on shopping
Wood, stone, gas-powered vehicles and steak are lindy. IKEA, halogen, and OnlyFans are not. Stanley thermoses are lindy but Stanley tumblers are not. Nurses, teachers, librarians, servers, and secretaries are lindy. Project managers, HR bureaucrats, compliance officers, NGO staff and pretty much all Masters of Public Health, DEI, and energy transition/green initiative jobs are not (sorry). Fistfights, arguments, tobacco and unprotected sex are lindy. Polyamory, Ozempic, and Tulum are not. To find yourself a lindy mate, you have to find someone who will last like rock.
Finding someone durable
Being born to two people who didn’t split is one of the greatest upper hands I have been fortunate enough to have in life. Last summer I was at a wedding with my wife. At the rehearsal dinner we were sat across from two women at a four-top. At some point divorce came up–not that anyone was referencing the bride and groom—we were just speaking broadly.
I said that I didn’t believe in divorce and one of the girls asked, “What do you mean, you don’t believe in it?” She was young. Fresh out of nursing school, about to start her first job, max 25 years old.
I told her it was what it sounded like, that I thought most people’s marriages were noncommittal jokes and that divorce should be illegal. The look on her face registered anger but her eyes looked teary. She asked, “What about in cases of abuse?”
I said, “I don’t think it should be legal to abuse your wife either.”
Wisdom of the ancientz
I don’t think it should be illegal to listen to your parents in matters of love but, what I am trying to say is that your parents and even your grandparents may not have been able to give you any good advice on finding a mate and, while I can’t prove it, I suspect every generation before that would have been able to guide you. They would tell people to find mates within their abilities and not try to mismatch people in incompatible ways. The moral of Beauty and the Beast is that the exact kind of guy who gets the Stacey is a big jacked r-slur with talking candelabra; not that it is actually strange for them to pair.
Real mismatches, ones that occur in real life, are terrible and lead to having stank, quarrelsome arguments with me when I am just trying to stay blessed up at my friend’s wedding. Take, for instance, a priest who once told me he married a couple despite his concerns that the wife was extremely attractive and the husband extremely ugly. She cheated on him and they divorced. Why did the priest know more about their fate than they did? How much human knowledge has been washed over by lack of confidence in sorting people according to their traits? How much better served would we be if we prevented people from marrying those they shouldn’t? The best thing you can do is recognize that your modern, lily white upbringing will leave you unqualified to figure out forever after. In 2024, you shouldn’t try to figure it out from your perspective; you should tell yourself all the fucked up, uncomfortable truths about yourself from the perspective of someone experienced. Arrange your own marriage and do what that priest should have done all along.
Correcting your posture
As I was saying, my parents stuck together until the end. My family is all kinds of fucked up but, if you hold certain poses long enough, they become your posture and a posture that has stuck with me is loyalty. The thing that makes loyalty easier is extending it to people who a) are likely to reciprocate and b) people you like. It is easier to forgive your wife for forgetting to pick something up from the store if her personality jives with yours. It is even easier to forgive her if she has been there for you when no one else was, when you know she helped you get through something difficult and you couldn’t have done it alone.
The question is, how do you find someone to love, who is loyal? I can’t write the how-to guide because each person is different. The right one is contingent on how you’re cut. While some qualities like loyalty are pretty much universally good, it is important to remember not to defer to a general ideal of what the perfect woman or man is supposed to look like. And while we are able to disaggregate certain traits that seem to draw a marriage together after the fact, there are certainly many more we cannot chart and others we wouldn’t know to look for. To put is less romantically, here’s
en on “dating hypercomplexity”:As far as I know, the strongest and most credible result in dating psychology is that partners are more similar in traits than what would be expected by chance. Notably, in age, political views, educational attainment, drug intake, and hobbies. Some of these probably have a component of mutual causation like political views or drug use, but most of the observed relationships are probably due to assortment.
The best advice I have for you is to go back in time to the land before divorce and give yourself the advice your grandparents or great grandparents would have–they were onto something.