> To go to your analogy, person A and B have had about the same number of failed past relationships. Taking that in isolation there's no reason to think that either of them is going to be less inclined than the other to offer support or help work through rough patches in the relationship
Agreed. One of the critical bits in my comment was:
> as long as they expect to be held to the same standards themselves by their SO
Which I cannot stress enough.
> "how special should I feel that I'm her 23rd"
That, to me, could equally read as a failing to realise one's value comes from oneself (intrinsic), not others (neither in comparison to other men nor because someone else values you) (extrinsic). If anything, if after a streak of failed relationships, when someone commits to spending the rest of their life with you, then clearly it means that you are special to them in a way that all the others before weren't, but it takes time to make that jump, and some never even make it because they keep getting caught in man-man comparisons that have nothing to do with (and therefore no judgement of) the woman involved.
It also could possibly mean that they're buying into the myth that there's a "special one" that is meant to be just the right for you (and conversely, that you are the special one for the other), which is highly destructive and self-devaluating when you're not finding it however hard you try.
Since the poster has too suffered from failed relationships, it may very well be that they've been hurt repeatedly, and thus now have a hard time building trust, and lacking confidence in themselves, so they (mistakenly) look for extrinsic validation as a form of criteria to artificially bolster that confidence and trust when it should be intrinsic.
So under these hypotheses, the whole picture would be not that they devalue women (a.k.a misogyny) but that they devalue themselves and have an idealised view of women, which purported feminine partners fail to match (which is only normal because they are just human)
> even if we allow for the notion that having more partners is a negative there.
Agreed, that notion of it being negative per se is absurd as it's highly contextual in ways a simple number cannot carry any of that information.
And that's the thing here, we HN commenters don't know the first thing about all the contexts at play. Therefore my personal stance is to consider that there may be many things at play here, and not ascribe a value to "I'm a straight man and I'm stuck in a conundrum with my relationships with women" too soon because it appeared to be in conflict with my values from a superficial reading as "things said sound odd, and a straight man said them, therefore this is a misogynistic statement", which would be projecting my own prejudice upon someone else, in total contrast with the values I would be trying to uphold.
> for sticking with and supporting this woman from 40-70, when she was giving it up easily at 18-30
Rephrased the way I understood it to mean:
"I'd like to be in a relationship where we can be supportive of each other, and the other person's track record of bailing out in face of hardship would hint at the latter phase of life would be me being supportive but not the other way around"
Which felt to me as reflecting pain and fear and projecting anxiety in the future, not hate and disdain and projecting judgement on the other (which is what misogyny is). It struck me as such because at no point it is said that they would not be held in the same regard.
This seems corroborated by GP's desire to be:
> Can I find someone that doesn't just say "wtf am I doing here" if times get tough for health or financial or just plain old age? I'm not sure.
Which is questioning I think could be answered with: people are met once, relationships are built, continuously, endlessly; if there's a fear, a doubt, an issue, talk about it openly together; if it's not possible to talk openly then talk about why it appears to not be possible to talk openly; and if either person refuses to talk and work it out then that person is not open to building the relationship anymore (and they are completely entitled to that at any point in time, nothing is binding anyone irrevocably forever as described in fairy tales), so it's game over, and you can't do shit about that, you can only try your best that it does not reach that point. But if you do it early and practice it regularly for both the easy things and the hard things, so that you can see where there's agreement and where there's disagreement, and find common ground and balance, then the odds of that happening are low. But they're non-nil so you gotta trust that it works out, and trust is built, but it's also a leap of faith (otherwise it's not trust, it's guarantees).
All of that to say, if I may, that the elicited "wow this is a gross and misogynistic statement" reaction would IMHO be better approached as "careful, your statement X sounded judgemental in this or that way (and if so, it kinda hurt) and some may receive it as misogynistic, but I may have misunderstood, would you care to elaborate with more context?"