There is an ancient bargain between the sexes — primeval, perhaps. The husband gives up “all my worldly goods” to the wife: the entire product of all his labour becomes hers. He feeds, clothes, houses, and protects her. In return, the product of the wife’s labour, he children, take his name and become his.
That’s the crux, the pivot on which it all turns. Archetypically speaking, aman does not marry a woman for sex or companionship — those things can be had elsewhere. He does not marry for a domestic slave — that too can be had elsewhere, and anyway men will happilly live in a shed. Its women who want homes.
Archetypically speaking, there is only one thing that a man can get from a wife that he can get in no other way: legitimate children, of his own body, to raise into adults and carry on after he has died. Not someone else’s kid to pretend is his own. Not some child that he is permitted to see with supervision for an hour on alternate weekends. His own son or daughter. Perferably a son, of course. To raise into manhood, to teach his trade to, to leave behind a legacy for the ongoing support of society.
Give us back our sons.
If you want men to wear the yoke of civilisation, to spend a life’s work down the mines so that a wife can have her centrally heated home, there is one and only one price that will purchase a lifetime of labour. Nothing else will suffice. Nothing else will do.
Leave no-fault divorce as it is. Women get bored of a man after a couple of years, we get this. But grant presumptive custody to fathers. And grant that no man shall be under obligation to raise a child that is not actually his. We don’t need adultery laws anymore, now that we have paternity testing.
Do that, and men will queue up to get married, to meekly hand over his paycheque to his personal Xanthippe once again. Don’t do that, and more and more men will be opting out of a deal that one party no longer honours.