Correct. And to put up with the abuse and treachery that is reported here? My god!
HM, do you have any insight as to why men deal with this? Who wants to “hang out” with a woman?
I'll put forward a dissenting opinion, if I may (yes, wall-of-text alert). I enjoy hanging out with certain women. My closest friends are male, but I'd argue that men can be more annoying. They tend to be more boastful and insecure – I can't be assed listening to their crap. With my female friends, they offer different and sometimes interesting opinions on topics, and they're often equally as amusing. It's a nice balance and I think there's a general point there about just having good friends.
However, I realize in writing this that I am likely biased from the opposite perspective: I've never really been emotionally invested in any woman I dated, and I've never, to my mind, demeaned myself or chased after them. Still, humans are amalgams of good and bad, and there are plenty of terrible people out there – male and female. If you're emotionally invested in a woman and she screws you over, that's going to cause some lingering resentment and negatively affect your way of thinking, I guess. Add into that porn/social media constantly relaying examples of depravity to us and I understand some of these views, though I think one should be aware of just how much the internet can really cloud one's judgment. Unless you have a brain like Goodrum, you'd quickly kill yourself if you watched nothing but WorldStar all day and took it as an accurate representation of humanity.
Regarding marriage, my thoughts and behaviors have changed naturally as I've grown older, and I now view marriage as a positive marker of adulthood and generally a good thing. It's far too risky to make that commitment to someone unless you're as sure as you possibly can be that they're the right person and it's not going to end in an emotional and financial disaster for you both, though. Unless there's an appeal to something beyond it (e.g. individual religious convictions or a strong desire to have kids) I think one could just as fairly argue that a man should not get married.
