So You’re Not Desirable
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When I was still young and at least somewhat cute, I remarked to a friend how depressing it was that women always go for rich and arrogant men. My friend's reply absolutely changed my perspective on this: by choosing socially well-accepted and successful men they actually place a lot more emphasis on the inner values than males do. In a very real sense, women love you for who you are (=rich and successful) as opposed to what you look like (=a characteristic you can't do much about).
Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important. Of course the article is correct, once you actually get to know people, this changes. But for getting the foot in the door so to speak, attractiveness and an aura of importance respectively are probably still the most important vectors.
I just want to mention for completeness' sake, and only because it would be taboo to express this in a magazine article: if you're really unhappy with the dating rat race, and it's genuinely not realistic for you to improve your chances by optimizing these superficials, it is possible to just opt out of everything. I know it's controversial and for some reason it upsets a lot of people when I tell them that I just stopped. Contrary to popular belief, this mating thing is not something which you absolutely must accomplish. I've crossed to this other side, and it's really really peaceful here. ;)
One could say that, 'in a very real sense, men love you for who you are (how is how you look not part of "who you are"?) and not for auxiliary things that have nothing to do with you as a person, such as money'. It's all just semantic quibbling, anyway.
Being successful is, and being rich is one of the markers for success. I had problems with this view as well until it was explained to me from a woman's perspective. The operating assumption being, as I said earlier, that men and women use different heuristics to do preliminary mate filtering. By and large, you get through the filter by being beautiful as a woman, and by projecting success as a man. The argument goes that beauty has absolutely nothing to do with inner values, while success does (false positives not withstanding).
Then again, there might be a huge cultural component to this. I come from Germany, which has the most unapologetically darwinistic dating scene I ever experienced. German girls are by and large no-nonsense, goal-oriented, and not prone to poetic whimsy.
> One could say that, 'in a very real sense, men love you for who you are (how is how you look not part of "who you are"?)
Hey, the darker part of my epiphany story is actually up to that conversation I had believed finding a mate was about finding a partner that matches your inner essence, finding someone who recognizes the "real you". So I had dismissed both success and beauty as meaningless, because they tell you nothing about that essence. Again, I was very young at that point and had a lot of misconceptions.
Women often look for men who can provide for their children, and who are capable of producing sexually successful offspring. In violent climates, physically strong men are valued more than financially strong men as that's what's required to protect offspring.
Men often look for women who are fertile and healthy.
In both cases, market value is simply a partner who's capable of carrying on one's genes.
It may seem that I am bringing up extreme cases, when procreating is seemingly benign. There are still considerations that one might have, though; even if it is beneficial for the propagation of the organism's DNA to have a certain amount of children - maybe for example 5 is the best in order to make sure they grow up relatively well - it isn't necessarily ethical. Maybe 3 children is the best for a happy and full childhood, with enough parental attention. Maybe bringing children into the world isn't something that a certain person should do, because of some terrible genetic disease (now we're straying into eugenics, and we probably know too little about DNA to be able to say that so-and-so should procreate and so-and-so should not). Propagating DNA shouldn't even be a goal in itself, ethically speaking. Humanity might have done more harm than good in becoming 7 billion people. And I don't just mean bad for each other, but in causing stress to ecosystems and the global climate which lead to natural disasters and other organisms struggling to adapt and survive.
So what if there is some evolutionary basis for some behavior? There has to be some reason. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should endorse or encourage that behavior (whatever behavior is being considered).
Why did he kill him? Elementary, my dear Watson; first, we have to go back approximately 20,000 years ...
Is this supposed to be novel concepts to me, things that I have "problems" with? I am questioning the assumption that being rich is wholly a matter of will and inner values, I am not questioning what women like or dislike.
"I had problems with this view as well until ..." - I don't have "issues" or hang-ups with this opinion, neither is it too hard for me to understand.
Maybe, but that's still more "inner value" that how big your breasts are etc.
How a woman looks decide who I [try to] talk to, but a good sense of humor, intelligence and cool personality will change my "target" quickly.
From what I've seen, this is not unusual for men. (And probably the same goes for women too, I wish I had anecdotal evidence that my "good" sense of humor worked wonders. :-) )
Edit: Other people below said similar things.
Edit 2: How large percentage of relationships (in small/big cities) starts with people you meet online, these days? Is the article relevant?
Edit 3: As a clarification [and answer to removed(/reinserted?) comment]. I reacted to "Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important.". It is too much of a simplification. Attraction to women can come from other things than eyes.
A couple of examples:
- I was crazy over a woman that was far from pretty while ignoring a cool woman. (She dumped me after a year, sigh.) Her (irritated) old time friends said she always had a tail of guys.
- I ended up weirdly on a date with a fat woman a while ago, which I realized that we had both misunderstood -- she was way out of my league in "mate value" (I realized that early in the dinner, so I spent the time asking about her really cool work and previous jobs).
This is not common (large "mate value" for women not based on looks but personality, intelligence and so on), but do exist. (And can also be quite obvious, not after knowing someone for months/years.)
Yes, I agree with everything you said. Of course the implication here is that it's different for women. Which may well be the case.
Anecdotal evidence on my part seems to suggest that men are prone to add exceptions to their filter in order to let people in, whereas women overwhelmingly tend to only restrict their results further. In the end, this all might be explainable by supply and demand concepts, the underlying theory being that women always have a higher mate value than men. This sounds mathematically absurd at first, but it seems to fit the behavior patterns observable in the wild.
Women also bear a higher cost and greater investment in sex. So once again they are more selective. This creates greater competition among males for females than the other way around. Sure, the top guys have women competing for them but a much greater percentage of women have men competing for THEIR sex.
So, she will try to optimize her time in long term relationship with the best marriage / long term love partner prospect. That's why she cares about more than looks.
I've switched to the gay side, out of equal (physical) interest for both genders. Dating criteria are much more "on demand" depending on the way you search for people, so it's hard to generalize. I can still say that in the gay subset, you can find people with balanced interests for who you are, how you look like, your experience, how much you earn and what you live for.
In comparison, girls I have found in my native country are unevenly balanced towards social validation and wage. Plus a big burden of cross-sex relationships is gender-equality-in-the-couple challenges, so I could really say that I've opted to the gay side for the peace of mind.
Quitting the maintstream race, and find your own balance of criteria, may do you good.
Besides, I suspect some of the same things that make me a prohibitive choice for women (and vice versa) would also apply to same sex partners -not all of them though.
But yeah, I can see how that can be worth pursuing.
Those women would still chase trust fund babies -- they chose to be born to those parents just as much as you chose to be cute.
Those women would still chase those that became rich out of pure luck (eg.: lottery).
Your financial success says nothing about your ability to succeed in interpersonal relationships. In fact, sometimes qualities between the two conflict with each other : being 'aggressive' in business is a sound plan to boost your competitive abilities, being 'aggressive' with your girlfriend just sounds abusive.
The whole reason the social consciousness regarding the idea of a "trophy wife" exists is to describe shallow women who emphatically don't "love you for who you are".
Also, there's a bit of philosophical conflict when it comes to the significance of "characteristics you can't do much about". The thing is, you often can't do much about any of your characteristics.
I think you're trying to argue that personal characteristics, like being smart, being funny, or being relatable, are somehow more of a choice than being pretty. But do you really have a "choice" in being smart or being funny? Isn't the grade schooler who opines after a girl who values these seemingly choose-able personal characteristics not trying his damn hardest to have those characteristics? If so, why does he fail when he does? Didn't he have a choice? No. He couldn't do anything about it, much like he couldn't do anything about his physical attractiveness. Yes, he can learn from his personal flaws and adapt his personal characteristics, but, first off : that relies on the meta-characteristic of being aware about your characteristics, which, again, not a choice or anything you can change about yourself.
Is having the characteristics to be rich or successful something you can "do much about"? Then why doesn't everyone do something about it to be rich or successful? If it's because they're lazy or aren't determined to work hard -- are those characteristics that they controlled? If it really came down to just working hard (which being rich/successful isn't, there's a lot of intuitive judgment that you either have in your instincts or don't, but that's a whole 'nother discussion), can you blame lazy people for being lazy? Did they sign up on being lazy? Do you think they chose to be lazy and undetermined? If not being lazy is so clearly better, did they ask to not be able to see that clarity?
We don't judge people based on how well they take advantage of their control, because ultimately no one has true control.
The series of actions required to become a multibillionaire with an amazing lifestyle and an absolutely lovable personality where everyone likes you is not some undefined series of actions that requires superhuman levels of magic. It's just that you don't know how or you are incapable of becoming said person; you don't know which human actions to take and decisions to make to become said person. So you become the best person your sense of control allows you to be, but did you really choose that control if it's given to you?
We judge people based on how well they suit our needs.
If one man's needs is someone who is funny and smart, so be it.
If another man's needs is someone who is physically pretty, so be it.
One might also argue the opposite: Men value women for who they are (looks included). Women value men for what they have (wealth and social status).
Our evolutionary instincts die hard :(
I recommend you broaden your understanding of science. Scientific hypotheses are always one iteration in a series of increasingly accurate models of the known universe. Evolution, being a very young science, is understandably very far behind Physics in its life cycle. This does not mean that all evolutionary theory is "nonsense" because it cannot be instantly falsified with a perfectly designed experiment in real time.
The beauty of evolution, just like any other law of the universe, is that it does not care much for one's disbelief.
You mean they're using their knowledge of humanity to make testable hypotheses to test and refine their implicit theories?
Say it ain't so!
Forgive the snark but armchair dismissal of evolutionary psychology from people who have never read an intro psychology textbook.
There's plenty of blame to go around for this effect, but science popularizers are probably the lead villains of the piece.
When people have sex, the woman is in a much more dangerous place than a man.
Having a baby for a woman is very costly. She needs someone to protect her while it happens and to help raise the child.
The cost for a man is very low. He only needs a couple minutes to do his part in making a baby, then he can leave at any time.
So with that in mind, lets say the scenario is like this:
If a man impregnates a woman and he stays, the chance the baby survives to reproduction is 90%.
If a man impregnates a woman and he leaves, the chance the baby survives to reproduction is 10%.
So with those statistics, the man is actually in a very advantageous position.
As long as he impregnates 10 or more women in his lifetime, he is ahead than if he had stayed with the same woman for all his life.
Of course, the more healthy the woman, the more likely the baby is to survive even if he leaves. Beauty = healthy in evolutionary terms. If the woman is pretty, maybe she can even get another guy to raise his kids for him! So men seek beauty primarily.
So for a man it is genetically superior to impregnate multiple women (which generally means not staying too close to any of them).
A female on the other hand, can only have children a few times in her life. And she only gets a few shots at it.
If the man leaves, her shot is very likely to end up in failure.
So the woman needs to be very picky about who she has children with. She needs to judge his character, to see if he will stay with her and raise the child. And defend her, fight off aggression, etc..
So to a woman, character is more important than beauty, because that's what determines if her genes survive or not.
Erotic fiction is a billion dollar industry and the vast majority of buyers are women. Manly man stories = porn for women.
UK has a generous protection for single mother and it completely messed up traditional marriage institution.
But your are pointing to a very interesting phenomena that is worth understanding.
I ideologically favor having a strong social safety net. But we do need to understand what are the unintended consequences.
Of course, in the long term this will also affect romantic relationships.
On the other hand, if she gets impregnated by a man who leaves, the chance of the baby reproducing are lower. However, if the father was very evolutionarily successful (great genes, exceptionally high mate value), even the low chance (5% for a male child that reproduces) can result in her genes being spread far and wide (assuming that the male child inherits his father's genes that make him very evolutionarily successful). Furthermore, the expected payoff of this strategy is further increased by the fact that (1) a woman can try this tactics multiple times in her life, and (2) she can cuckold a man that will stay with the child of the man that left.
The second strategy explains many this in our society, for example "why nice girls like bad boys", why "preselection" or "social proof" works for women, and why no sex before marriage was/is so strictly enforced in many societies.
The problem is it's hard (at least for me) to get the opportunity to be around members of the opposite sex long enough for them to see my "uniqueness"
Personal examples. My last job of 5 years had 100 people on my floor only 2 of which were women. My friends are generally all geeks who have no women friends to include in our activities.
I'm not whining. Only pointing out that telling me it's okay because my uniqueness will win over my consensus desirability is not helpful because no one gets the chance to learn my uniqueness
It was eye opening to me that it's in your complete control to show people (not only girls, really anybody) your uniqueness, and that you can literally meet dozens of people every week and must not rely on office environment or random coincidence.
I too was big into that whole PUA/game thing in a former life (more theory than practice though) and came to much the same realizations about it, particularly after listening to many of Barry Kirkey's radio shows (the very early ones) where he gave you the non-exaggerated, non-glorified view of what it was like to live in that house.
FWIW I also have a similar problem to the OP. Other things in life I'm sorting out right now but taking up classes again and going to meetups are on my radar for the near future.
> I too was big into that whole PUA/game thing in a former
> life (more theory than practice though)
If you want to bring more women in your life, the most important thing is: "find and talk to lots of them". Everything else is window dressing, which is why the whole "theory more than practice" thing is such a dead end.
Honestly, I'd recommend one of the big commercial workshops. The attendees skew 90% towards people who want to find a life partner, a coach will be able to point out any weird habits you have that are holding you back, and it'll normalize (through a lot of practice) the idea of starting friendly and normal conversations with women in your day-to-day life. The course material tend towards 40% self-improvement, 40% "how to sell", and 20% how to make small talk. Most of them also offer pretty robust money-back guarantees. Hard to over-estimate the benefit of a workshop over reading some ebook.
I have attended some of those bootcamps and the reality is that most of the instructors are not that successful with women themselves. They have spent lots of time perfecting the approach and interactions at bars and are great at this, but outside of it have nothing else. I think they have paid too high a price. They have no careers, and must earn a living by teaching other men how to pick up women. Fundamentally this makes you a very unattractive man. You may seduce hot chicks from bars but you will never attract or keep a quality woman. By day three she will realize what a shell of a man you are and take off! If you are in your twenties, I would strongly advise you against going this path. Work on improving yourself, becoming more interesting, advancing your career, making more friends while simultaneously learning pick up skills. It is not easy but ultimately leads to the most fulfilling life.
1. The theater of mind exercises where you visualize yourself as successful with women. You must make your visualization script really vivid for it to have any effect. And you must not lose focus while visualizing. This is actually quite hard and the reason why most people get no value out of it.
2. The mental rehearsal exercises before you go out and talk to women. You must design your life such that you are constantly interacting with women. The easiest way to do this is to sign up for dance lessons. Salsa is my preferred one. Other ideas: Hang out at coffee shops, in busy areas (malls, near college campuses etc)
email me at honeydoilookfat [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll send you more tips. For all intents and purposes I have solved the women problem although it took me six years. Now I am working on the wealth problem!
Also the book was utter garbage i've read around 30% of it and fell asleep.
Second, for your specific situation - you say you have a problem. But it's a very solvable one. Find places to hang out with members of the opposite sex. This can be anything from going to specific classes that have women in them and that you also enjoy (e.g. drawing? Pottery? I don't know, depends what you like).
You can also actively try to befriend people who hang out with women.
At the end, it's inevitable: even if just by mere chance, someone _has_ to be in the lower 5% of people who get the least successful interactions with the other gender.
(Anyhow, his problem seems very common to me, but obviously my POW is skewed, since I got to know most of my friends in one of these place with unbalanced gender ratio in the first place)
It's absolutely true that the skills to make yourself seem more desirable are "learnable" skills. They also happen to correlate pretty highly with plenty of other important skills, like making better friendships in general, succeeding more in business, succeeding more in other spheres of life, etc.
That's because most of the things you need to improve to be more desirable is: a) make yourself actually more desirable, usually by doing interesting things/etc., and b) make yourself a better marketer, who knows how to actually show that you're more desirable, in a way that doesn't turn people off.
I really recommend you and anyone else who has trouble "attracting" the opposite sex, read any of the Pick Up Artist material that's out there. Don't fall too in love with the "world of PUA", and don't take it too seriously, but do read it and practice it. It will really improve your life, and not just in dating.
> I've always thought that women didn't go to
> extracurricular activities to find dates, and only
> men do this
Go do extracurricular activities to find female friends, to get some experience talking to women, and you're more likely one of them will introduce you to a friend who is looking.
According to the article, if you feel you're lacking in immediate mate value and want to emphasize uniqueness instead, you shouldn't be trying to "find dates" but just to expand your social circle. That fits with my experience pretty well, actually. The idea isn't to meet a woman that you can ask out for coffee the next day; the idea is to start spending time with a wider range of folks, get them acquainted with your uniqueness, and increase the odds that one of them will either find your particular traits attractive or introduce you to someone who does.
As a side benefit, you'll also be meeting new friends and broadening your horizons.
My personal experiences with this: you'll find a good gender balance in groups for going trail hiking, especially with their dogs because everyone loves dogs and sometimes people have dogs because they are single. :) Wine tasting groups generally have more women. Movie watching groups have slightly more women. JQuery meetups have nearly no women. :)
Maybe it's time to look for a different job, with a more gender-balanced workforce? Five years is a long time to work in one place anyway.
I don't think changing jobs is going to fix that. Possibly changing careers but that's not really my desire.
1) There are personal attributes which are easily observable (mostly physical, also charismatic and possibly social status). This is basically what we can know about a person from appearance alone.
2) There are personal attributes which are less easily observable, and these include temperament, interests, response to various situations, behaviour outside of group situations. To know these things requires much greater time interacting with a person, possibly in smaller groups or one-on-one.
People's tastes in #1 are mostly uniform. Someone rated highly for #1 by one person is likely to be rated highly by any other person. The same is emphatically not true of #2, where ratings vary wildly.
As exposure to #2 increases, it increases in importance over #1. Let's say that #2 constitutes 80% of your overall "rating" of a person, and you really like them so they're a 9 despite scoring only a 5 on the initial assessment. Their total score is 8.2. Someone who scores a 10 for #1 but a 4 for #2 scores 6.2. These numbers might be off and they might vary between people but I think it's a pretty simple idea.
Most people are taking this as a suggestion about their own attractiveness, but the flip-side argument is possibly even more important - the person you're most likely to be really attracted to isn't necessarily the person who scores most highly on #1, and if you're using #1 as a filter then you're ruling good people out.
I'm curious if this is the cause of the so-called "friend zone". A guy and a girl meet and become friends. After getting to know each other, the guy still thinks the girl has mate value, whereas the girl doesn't think the guy has mate value.
So now it is the fault of the pursuer for not working hard enough or "screwing up" an initial encounter protocol and being pushed into the "friend zone". Which is like a terribly deep gravity well that the will require a tremendous amount of energy to get out of.
I sincerely hope this trend of reducing every male behaviour to sexism strangles itself.
Unfortunately this attitude is lionized in Hollywood and popular culture ... with the implication that if you dream hard enough, he/she will see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuNIsY6JdUw
Id written something long and rambly, but to kind of summarize my thoughts, "friendzone" is used in lot of different ways and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
It is essentially the same as "my essay was so good why cant teacher seeeee" or "my art is so good why cant people seee" or "I run so fast why coach can not pick me" or any other situation where person have a hard time to accept rejection.
You do not make any service to women by seeing sexism every time a guy does not reacts perfectly.
This places the person who would like to be more than just friends in an uneasy predicament: either keep their mouth shut and preserve their 'friend' title, or profess their true feelings and gamble away having that person in their life anymore.
I feel it's the exact opposite. The entire idea behind being friendzoned is that you can't get out of it and should cut your losses. It isn't considered heroic to "fight" the friendzone... it is considered stupid.
The problem with the friendzone is the power imbalance. If there is no imbalance it is just simple friendship. A few women love the power and take advantage of it just like a few bosses love the power and take advantage of their employees.
If the cool "jock" takes advantage of the nerd who desperately wants to be cool we (society) think the jock is being an asshole. But if an attractive woman does the same thing it is suddenly the nerd who is at fault.
I guess other people see it as the guy being too clingy and not getting the message.
These are two entirely different concepts which both carry the term "friend zone".
It does not mean friendship can not turn into relationship. It can and all my relationships were like that. I would not date somebody I did not knew. I have also seen couples that originally disliked each other and became attracted only after they knew each other. However, it never went to one-sided "he follows her and help her too much" friend zone.
(This is a snarky way of saying that friendship is its own reward.)
In both cases, though, in practice, you're likely to find one side is getting exactly what they want out of the relationship, where the other is holding out for more.
Ironically, it is when men aren't one-dimensional (which I think is must of us) that leads to these kind of situations, which leads to people thinking that they were just out after sex to begin with.
Mentioning the age of the participants: it seems to be a set of unhelpful behaviours that the guys eventually grow out of.
http://deepfriedcalamari.tumblr.com/post/10839417292/homosoc...
In particular:
> Homosocial bonding is different between men and women, and this causes a lot of confusion and why it’s assumed that men and women cannot be friends.
> Men see their friendships as camaraderie, hanging out, occasional complaining, and chilling. There’s plenty of support mechanisms in place, but they’re not intimate, per se.
> Women on the other hand are intimate, affectionate, they talk more about how they feel than how things happened. The support mechanisms are explicitly intimate.
> So, men who are not used to intimate physical contact and discourse have to translate a person of the opposite sex being physically and emotionally intimate beyond the boundaries of relationships he is used to.
Again, I don't want to generalize the linked text, but it was very accurate when I reflected on my own 'friend zone' experiences, and those my male friends have had.
Or increase your mate value. In traits like conscientiousness or intelligence 40-60% of variance is genetic. There is no reason to think that somehow charisma is a weird outlier with which you're stuck. She thinks anyone can act much more charismatically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMu_md_5PQ4 Feels a little newagey but otherwise completely reasonable.
It's the same with meeting people. You probably live in a large city with millions of them. Even with strict selection there are at least a few thousands of potential mates. Why wait until you end up in a small group with one of them?
It also means that you have as many attempts as you want. Blowing out with one person will not haunt you through that social group forever.
This is one of those articles that is supposed to make people feel good about themselves, and maybe it does, but at the cost of bringing counter-productive advice.
Liking interesting things can act as a repellent because it becomes so much harder to find others who have worked a lot on their interestingness or who can appreciate your differences, knowledge and tastes.
Now in my 30s, I've let it go (due to a realization that I don't need to try so hard) and it feels as if a lot of it just disappeared. Like a great meal, I loved it while I was eating it but afterwards there's just an empty plate and the memory of the meal.
The concept of "value" in dating is absurd. Everyone judges value differently. Being attracted to another person has so many variables it can't bit factored in.
Are there some "universal traits" that make people physically attractive? Yes, but that doesn't mean the dating world is a hierarchy with the beautiful people at the top.
And having a super beautiful girlfriend isn't always great. I know models who are insanely insecure about their bodies and are just a pain to be around because they are constantly worried about how they look.
I think I generally date cute girls, but I once dated a that was definitely physically more attractive than most of the rest. She would get tons of attention when we went out. Guys would constantly check her out or give me "Great job man!" looks and comments. I knew she was constantly getting invited to social events, parties and probably dates as well.
This amount of attention can really be unhealthy to a relationship. If she is constantly being tempted by tons of guys and opportunities every day, then its just a matter of time when she starts to think, "You know he is nice, but that other guy was really cute."
And thats really how it ended. She just stopped returning my texts and phone calls one day, so I am pretty sure she just moved on to something else. It wasn't too bad for me, she had a lot of flaws even though she was gorgeous.
> the more men as a group disagree about a woman's look, the more they end up liking her
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/
If everyone agree you're ugly, that's bad. But if some people lilke you a lot and some people dislike you a lot, that's much better than if everyone agree you're "okay", or "cute".
However, the OP has a rather floating concept of uniqueness that they seem to conflate with intimacy or friendship; of course once you become friends with someone they're unique to you, but that doesn't mean much about their "uniqueness" as a property of their being.
And a different career than engineering, so you can find more time and possibility of meeting possible mates at work.
Mixing work and dating is often a recipe for disaster.
Though the better alternative is to have a life outside of work. Do yoga. Go for group hikes. Go to non-tech meetups, or street fairs, or concerts. Join a dance class. If you really, really need tech to solve all your problems, use Grouper to get a chance to grab drinks with strangers, while still hanging out with your own friends.
> It seems most likely that it is the consensually desirable people who pull off the rare feat of quickly leveraging an initial positive impression into romance, while a vast majority of us get to know our romantic partners slowly, gradually, over time.
I think anyone can learn how to do this.
Most primate societies are focused on mating and survival, without much surplus effort remaining for any other tasks. Humans, by virtue of technology and social engineering, have gained a rare ability to dedicate an incredible amount of time to creating heretofore unfathomable works of the imagination such as science, engineering, art, music and literature.
Though many believe this was natural progression, there still exist a few human societies that are effectively hunter gatherers, and expend little energy in advancing their societies technologically. The trillion dollar question is this: what role do mating paradigms play in determining societal structure?
My own hypothesis, and one shared by a surprising number of old scholars, is that mating paradigms are a fundamental determinant of societal structure.
There is a very strong correlation in history between societies that practised very strict mating policies and those that are considered successful. In fact, it seems increasingly likely that the purpose of strict religious practices was to tightly control the mating marketplace in order to prevent the devastating opportunity costs associated with a no holds barred mating market.
As such, I'm interested where the increasingly liberal sexual marketplace will lead societies. Men who spend too much of their time creating wonderful works of art, but fail to reproduce, will be unsuccessful in the long run. Many born in this day and age believe modern civilization has always existed, and will always continue. However, as many countries around the world demonstrate, advanced civilization is an extremely unstable equilibrium. A perturbation of even one pillar can have disastrous, irreversible consequences.
We live in interesting times.
What I'm saying is that I'm not so sure reaching a higher population is hindered by a liberal approach to sex (pre-contraception).
On the other hand, people believe that people can be objectively measured and that they can be assigned a dating market 'value'. Then people have to assess their own value in order to be realistic about who they can date, lest they (gasp) overshoot and try to be with someone who is out of their league.
These two viewpoints are polar opposites. Yet it seems that people seem to either concern themselves with one or the other, at some point in time.
There is nothing like this league-stuff for friendships (perhaps except for in high school) or any other human relationships. Why? Perhaps it's because of the seemingly almost universally accepted concept of monogamy.
There is, and it's the same league: social status. It's just not as rigid because we typically have multiple friends, so the effect of one lower status friend is diluted. In general though, we try to maximise the average status of our friends (or at least try and match our own self-perceived status) just as with our mates.
Why should we try and scientificaly explain the only things that keeps us human? Then come out with a pattern and become robots?
Also in the other hand of the article, my attractivness is medium to low, and I don't attract women easily (my looks are ok, but I got that weird mindset that drives them away). I've had a relationship with a woman that was hot 9/10 very very smart studied in ivy league with scolarship and she was very attractive to the point that we had guys coming after her when we were going out... My life experiences proves that article jibberish ...
For example, if you asked a group of men to rate women they did not know on a scale of 1-10, you would get largely the same answers from all of them about each particular female. However, since each of these men is "unique," if you asked them that same question after they had just all spent 3 months together (the men and women), the numbers will now be more muddled.
Put another way, I'd be surprised if this finding still held true if you took a a random hundred people from the general populace and put them in a dome. I predict you'd see "mate value" very clearly delineated in the pairings up that resulted.
I'm not arguing that uniqueness isn't a factor. Maybe I am just nitpicking here -- it's unclear whether the author intended to convey that uniqueness was one factor among many, or an overriding factor. If the former, then my posts here have probably not been useful, but if the latter, I doubt it.