Rob Henderson
speaker
881 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 Aug
Rob Henderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think this was 2013, 2014. But this woman who I think was in her 40s, Susan Patton, I want to say she wrote this letter.
uh op-ed in the princeton student newspaper basically imploring the young women at this college like hey you're surrounded by very smart ambitious bright young boys you should start thinking about marriage like you should start searching for a husband now and then in response she got all of these criticisms from like big name mainstream media outlets calling her anti-feminist and calling her a traitor to the movement and all these kinds of things and what she said was perfectly reasonable that you know she had a couple of interesting lines in there one was um
You're never going to be surrounded by so many men who are worthy of you. And then the other line was something like, if you are with a man who's less intelligent than you, you're never really going to be fully satisfied. And she was kind of pointing out- Generally, that's true. Women do tend to want men who are bright and ambitious and intelligent and all those kinds of things.
And your mating prospects change dramatically after college. I mean, I've had so many conversations now, and I'm sure you have too, with young people in their early mid-20s, and they're like, I didn't know how good I had it when I was at college, when I was at university.
And it's like, you know, especially if you're a man and 60% of the campus is women and they're all, you know, young and bright and ambitious and interesting and whatever. And then you enter the workforce and it's like all your coworkers are older than you and they're married and they have their own separate adult lives.
And it's just, you know, your mating prospects transform and become generally less promising. And no one tells young people about this.
Yeah, I've seen this this kind of framework. I think it was called, you know, two approaches to a marriage. One is the startup marriage and the other is the capstone marriage.
And so the startup marriage is you're sort of entering together to build this thing, this life together that, you know, if you're in your early mid 20s or something, you're young, you're just starting out, but you find someone that you care about and that you love and you get married and you're sort of. building the life together.
And then the capstone marriage is, well, I've succeeded in my education and my career and my income and everything else. And now the final milestone is, you know, now I'm going to get married and, and bring this person in. Um, and I think, I think both of those can work in different ways, but that's, that's an, I like the analogy from, from Louise there that, um,
yeah i you get sort of older you get set in your ways you find it harder to you know introduce someone into your life when you're young you're just more flexible and you're probably more willing to relocate you're probably more willing to maybe change up careers there's so many other things you can do when you're young that becomes harder when you're old um or older anyway but on the other hand i could imagine the argument going going the the opposite way where
you know, when you look at there was there was this interesting thing from the Institute for Family Studies about sort of the optimal age for marriage to reduce likelihood of divorce, that it was the case that if you get married very young, divorce rates are higher than average, maybe because you're immature, because maybe financially strapped, those kinds of things.
But then at a certain point, it starts to sort of this what is it sort of a U shaped curve here where around
30 or 31 that was kind of the ideal as far as like the lowest likelihood of getting divorced and then once you sort of reach your mid late 30s it starts to creep up again and so i do wonder yeah what's what's um it could also be the case though that like for most people if you haven't found a partner by your mid late 30s that um you know maybe there's something going on with you um that uh that makes it difficult to to find a partner
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is this all for that kind of thing? Like, you know, eventually, you're going to want family, you're going to want kids and grandkids and all those kinds of things. And yeah, I think it's, I wonder if like the reason for that for Gen Z, like, where are they looking to as far as sort of role models and guidance?
And, you know, you mentioned sort of you and me, like, I think that You know, this sort of path of, you know, prioritizing, if you have a kind of an unusual career that requires a lot of time and a lot of commitment, a lot of hours, and you also derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction for it, then that's great. That can work for a lot of people, but that's not going to work for everyone.
Jordan Peterson points this out, that for most people, living a conventional life is actually your best shot at happiness. That for most people, getting married, settling down, having kids, having a family, all those kinds of things, that for most people is a good path. Unless there's some extraordinary reason why that isn't the right path.
Maybe you have some extremely lucrative or unusual ability or talent or skill set or something else. But we get these interesting messages because those people who tend to...
have the spotlight um who did sort of delay marriage and career and so on often they will attempt to justify their own lives and say well it worked for me this is a great life you should prioritize your career this is how you get to where i am that kind of thing and most people aren't like that though you know like by definition if you do have a platform and you do have an audience and those kinds of things you're you're very atypical you're an unusual weird person so you're selecting for the advice of people who are weird like most people exactly
Yeah, yeah. Because if you're an ordinary person who's achieved happiness and success, chances are you don't have this huge megaphone and you don't have a large following. You're raising your kids and you're raising your family and you're that's where you're getting your life satisfaction and your meaning from. And I'm not even saying like one way of life is better than the other.
But for most people, you know, the type of life that would lead to happiness, those messages aren't as salient. because of the very fact that those people aren't sort of out in the world, the way that, um, you know, peculiar, psychologically atypical people are.
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