Yes.
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Matthew Effect, Pareto Principle, and Polygyny
- Thread starter NS4Liberty
- Start date
I thought the comment sounded like him. I should go listen to some more of his work.
I guess people underestimate how fast things can go. I met the sweet gal that is my sister wife less then two years ago.
In the little over a year that she has been working with us I visited with her about all kinds of things....including my interest in a two wife family.
She spent many Saturdays with our family and decided over time she liked the idea. Once the man got brave enough to stick his proverbial neck out....pretty much expecting rejection.....things fell into place fast.
Not scary....but really fast.
He never expected this....but he's not complaining!
Me? This is exactly what I have wished for these many years.
Me thinks I hit the jackpot....twice!
I got a really great man....and he got a perfectly wonderful second wife that I wouldn't change if I could.
God does a great job of ordering our lives....if we let Him.
It's been just over two months since their first date.
Kids are all happy. Adult daughter who hoped to be gone before and if her dad ever married again is happy....and looking forward to more babies too. New daughter in law that struggled with our son's acceptance of poly....even though he can't imagine living it? She is okay with this too andsupportive!
And this wonderful girl just spent a day putting away food from the garden, churning butter, helping with dishes etc.
I'm so counting my blessings....thankful that God gives us more then we deserve.
Let me just say to any wife.
1. Your happines in marriage is not dependant upon anyone but you.
2. There are blessings in this I never expected. (And I was very positive before)
3. Truly loving others is where you find real joy.
So don't be afraid.
Edited to add that YHWH is still in the business of miracles....so faith and hope are still a very reasonable approach to take.
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I'm certainly not peddling fear, Jolene, and I would never twist anyone's arm to abandon a chosen strategy of relying on hope, faith or miracles -- in fact, I'm one of the most open promoters of polygyny you could find, and that tangentially includes pushing against defeatism and covert sabotage from within one's own family -- but I'm also not going to abandon encouraging pragmatism. As I hope (there's that word again) I've adequately conveyed, I jumped for joy learning of your new sister wife. I know how you've yearned for this, and I so admire and respect your family that I can't help but feel like it couldn't have happened to a more deserving tribe.So don't be afraid.
Edited to add that YHWH is still in the business of miracles....so faith and hope are still a very reasonable approach to take.
And, yes, this means that y'all are indeed an inspiration to the rest of us. However . . . you are one story among very many, and, while no one should abandon hope or faith or the potential for miracles, I would assert rather strongly that neither should anyone abandon cold hard facts. Statistics, when treated objectively rather than manipulated to suit a narrative, can be very useful guidestones. For example, you countered my suggestion that the length of time to accomplish everything necessary to start making babies would be closer to 10 years than 0 years. I could certainly be wrong about the process taking more than 5 years, but, again, you're not comparing apples to oranges, and you leave out two very relevant factors in the process, both of which relate to your gender, which changes the perspective from the vast majority of those who are truly seeking polygyny (men): (1) you therefore get to skip the step of ensuring that your wife won't sabotage the process; and (2) the issue of you getting older by the year isn't anywhere near as much in play, because your increasing age is irrelevant in the realm of attracting women who are still within the reasonable bounds of being able to produce offspring, which is the concern of the men I've been addressing in this thread. Your husband can entirely skip the whole sections of the how-long-will-it-take-from-meeting-the-potential-wife-to-impregnation (or even just marriage), because he doesn't have to either obtain your acceptance/approval or work through any sabotage efforts on your part -- and I will continue to assert that those are even bigger obstacles for most of the men in Biblical Families than are those associated with persuading women to be 2nd wives, so therefore that's a not-insignificant chunk of that timeline from meeting to conceiving.
What you're also leaving out is the length of time prior to what you experienced as a 2-year process from meet to heat. Even for you, with your eagerness, it was many years between when desire to have a plural family and meeting your sister wife occurred. That is an integral part of the calculus in regard to whether one relies on hope or becomes more pragmatic and faces up to things like the Pareto Principle. For you, the wait is over. For the men open to being plural husbands but who haven't found a reasonable prospective 2nd wife, my guess is that the average time they've been available for this is easily in excess of 5 years without success -- and probably closer to ten years. In addition, waiting will continue, and the length of that future waiting cannot be predicted, so, at, for example, 45 years of age, with 5 or 10 years of already yearning for polygyny behind him, hoping for a miracle is perfectly fine, as long as he is entirely comfortable with living the rest of his life with the interpretation that the only approach required is to rely on Yah dropping a woman in his lap (as He obviously does from time to time), coupled with, in the inevitable-in-most cases, considering himself entirely blessed by Yah's choice not to do so in his case, but if he isn't oriented toward that kind of passive approach (and either frequenting dating sites or chatting up women with the hope of sparking a flame is evidence that he isn't content to rely on passivity), then hoping for another wife and more children is a very high-risk strategy: extremely low likelihood of success and therefore extremely high likelihood of failure.
I'm going to continue to encourage men to take full stock of their approaches, because what I want for them is success. I want for them, if they also truly want it, to experience plural marriage and/or additional children, and I want for them to experience those things for longer rather than shorter. We all applaud and rejoice and heap blessings on you and yours for what you're experiencing -- you've stood tall for what you wanted, what you wanted was righteous, and you are now blessed with that righteousness and joy -- but all we have to do is look around to see that it's very rare -- a true miracle -- and, by definition, unlikely to happen to most of the rest of us. Therefore, I'll risk being thought pessimistic to promote the likelihood that we'll have an increase in more optimistic outcomes.
Here's my parting thought for the moment: men, if, down the line you're inevitably going to either mourn ultimate defeat or cry uncle and settle for less than the ideal you've been shooting for all along, wouldn't it make more sense to settle (to make necessary compromises) now rather than later? Wouldn't it bless both your life and the life of the woman you will ultimately settle for to settle now and thus have far more years together? What if the lesson most of us are meant to learn is that it won't even really be settling after all, when it comes down to it?
The statistics shared by @NS4Liberty clearly stated that 53% of women in two specific countries were in polygamous marriages. 53% of the women, NOT 53% of the marriages. I have been using that figure.
The 53% is of course a snapshot in time. Obviously, things change. In future, some who are unmarried now will marry - and some who are married now will later be divorced or widowed. These changes however balance out at a population level. I am not tracking the life story of an individual, I am looking at population-level statistics. At any one point in time, that is the statistic.
I have been helping the reader visualise this by using a highly simplified model of the population - 100 men, all marrying in a single year. I appreciate that you find this simplified model confusing @Keith Martin. I don't have further time to invest in explaining it for you, so just ignore the simplified model if it is still confusing.
Actually, thank you for clearing up that you also agree with me that the only useful model relies on population-scale statistics and (b) a snapshot in time as opposed to
I'm glad to know that we also agree on that as well. It would appear that, generally speaking, we're on the same page, notwithstanding your poorly-justified snark: as long as we don't assume that anywhere near to everyone could possibly be married if 53% of married women are in polygynous households, the potential to reach 53% or higher is certainly possible. But, then again, given that that's already a known statistic in Guinea, the consensus we've already reached doesn't really advance anyone's understanding of the matter. My concern also remains that understanding the Pareto Principle or anything else in regard to polygyny only has true usefulness if that understanding has the potential to inspire a significant increase in the number of women who are covered.
Therefore, I'm left with a tangential question, @FollowingHim, one that, further tangentially also argues for the supremacy of in-person face-to-face Biblical Families gatherings: what is it about your gut biome that makes it so intent on conquering my gut biome in regard to issues like this one? Leaving you out of it, I'm wondering in a parallel way why the gut biomes of @The Revolting Man and myself are clearly determined to keep us convinced that sex is something we should treat so seriously that we believe in our gut, no pun intended, that it is entirely sufficient to define the bond created as TTWCM -- as opposed to those who follow in Hillel's footsteps and are committed to discovering any escape hatch possible to skate away from the ramifications of one-flesh engagement? I was musing on this earlier and wondered as well if this dichotomy doesn't also fall prey to the Pareto Principle, and, if so, which belief system is destined to be the 80% and which the 20.
Again you're missing my point. With a suitable age gap, then everyone of that culture's marriageable age CAN be married even with that level of polygamy. There will be some unmarried young men for sure, but they're below the normal marriage age for men, so don't count. Once they reach the normal male marriage age in that culture, they too can marry - and many can marry multiple women. That is how an expanding population works.
I'm not missing your point; I'm just looking through a different kaleidoscope and thus come to a different conclusion.
Here, I honestly think you just haven't understood my point yet, and I can't figure out why, so I keep trying to explain myself. Not trying to "conquer" your viewpoint, we can't even debate viewpoints until we both understand what each other are saying, and you keep saying things that suggest you still misunderstand me. I suspect there must be a word we're using that we both interpret differently, or something like that. It's frustrating, hence my wording possibly being less diplomatic than usual. But it's not important enough to spend more time on.