Cataloging Voting (part 1 of 7)
Cataloging Voting
Use the following summary as a cheat sheet when constructing an organization:
- How to Vote
- One Unit, One Vote: In this system, an individual or unit gets a single vote for one choice.
- Limited Voting: In this system an individual with a limited number of votes but more than one vote, votes for a few measures/people
- Weighted Voting: In this system some individuals’ votes carry more weight but still go into the same “pool” instead of being lensed through a higher order system and a secondary vote (as might happen if you had something like different states of various populations vote on a one state one vote rule).
- Functionally, this is how U.S. presidential elections currently work but technically they are happening through a secondary lens.
- Weighted voting is vastly underused and can be used to drive desired behavior patterns—we will discuss this more in our section on building better governance structures.
- Liquid democracy, in which individuals can choose to transfer their vote on a per issue basis to a more informed representative, acts as a form of weighted voting but is really more of a compromise between representative and direct democracy. (Note: There are a few types of liquid democracy which can sometimes be more like a version of ranked voting as opposed to generic weighted voting like the single transferable vote system.)
- Ranked Voting: Preferences are listed in a ranked fashion by each voter. One’s secondary preferences can then be taken into account in a number of ways such as: in a tie, if it is clear one’s primary preference will not win, and through the numerical weighting of one’s preferences.
- If you are interested in creating a governance structure that uses ranked voting we encourage you to explore some of its more mathematically complex implementations such as the Schulze method, implicit utilitarian voting, Borda Count, Bucklin Voting, instant-runoff voting, and the Minimax Condorcet method. While you can spend ages trying to create the “fairest,” most “representative” voting system and really dig in on this stuff—governments created in this way don’t seem to function any better or have less corruption / wasted effort, so we really don’t see the point.
- Single Transferable Vote: In this system subordinate voting bodies (i.e., states) elect multiple candidates who are chosen once they pass a pre-set threshold—winning candidates give the votes they did not “need” to pass the threshold to the voters’ other choices and candidates with no hope of winning also give their votes to other candidates. (And while this sounds complicated it can be made yet more so using systems like Schulze STV.)
- Encouraged voting (whether it be mandatory or rewarded in some way) works terribly with ranked choice voting systems as some people will act as “donkey voters” just counting down 1, 2, 3, 4 on the ballet. This can be ameliorated by randomizing choices but still—as ranked choice systems place a higher cognitive load on the voter this is not good.
- Score Voting: Scores are given to each candidate or issue and then added up. Typically, the participant with the highest total score wins but the system can be utilized in different ways (e.g., STAR voting uses score voting to decide between the top two candidates which themselves are chosen by a simple majority vote).
- While this may sound obscure it is actually very common. Some uses of this you have likely encountered are when judges of an athletic competition lift placards with a number on them or when someone asks a crowd to cheer for their favorite candidate, a method of candidate selection that goes back to ancient Sparta.
- For more complicated iterations of this system see majority voting methodology, STAR voting, and reweighted range voting (basically modifies score voting to work more like single transferable vote voting).
- Also known as utilitarian voting
- Approval Method: Instead of choosing between candidates/issues, voters write “approve” or “disapprove” for each. Basically, the same thing as Score voting but with a binary choice in score.
- This system can be modified for multiple candidates using “sequential proportional approval voting”
- Cumulative Voting: In this system individuals can split their vote giving a portion of it to different candidates (1/3rd to one candidate, 2/3rds to another). This splitting is typically done either by giving each person multiple individual votes to cast but allowing them to cast them all for the same candidate or by splitting the vote of individuals who choose to mark multiple candidates on a ballot sheet. (This system is common in corporate governance and is mandated for that role in seven U.S. states.)
- Condorcet method: This can be achieved through a number of different voting methodologies but in general the idea is to do a round robin of all the issues at play against all the other issues at play and see who wins. There are some less complicated variants and some more complicated methods. It is worth noting, as a variant of it is the procedure used for determining motions given in Robert’s Rules of Order, the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the United States.
- Some more specialist variants of this are the Kemeny–Young method and the Bucklin Method.
- Mixed Member Electoral Systems: In these systems individuals vote both for a local rep and a party. There are many regional variants such as Scorporo.
- Multi Round: In this system multiple elections are held in a sequence. The most common variant chooses top candidates with the first vote and among the top candidates with a second vote
- Spit Voting: In these systems the type of voting done is split depending on the stage or purpose of the vote. Our favorite example is Futarchy which uses a vote to set success metrics for the government but a decision market to determine how they are accomplished.
- Win Condition
- First Past the Post / Plurality: Essentially just the majority vote but given a fancy name because the choice with the most votes may only have 30% of the votes making it technically just a “relative majority.”
- Threshold Vote: Implementation occurs when one gets over some predetermined threshold (people often refer to these as supermajority votes but we don’t like the term as “supermajority” specifically refers to thresholds of over 50% but one could theoretically have a threshold of 30% in a system with seven parties).
- Consensus: 100% consensus is required by all parties with voting power before implementation can be achieved.
- Proportional implementation: In this system an issue is decided in half measures based on the proportion of the electorate that voted on it. This could translate into anything from the number of seats in a congress (if 60% of the electorate voted Republican than 60% of the congress is made republican) to how much funding something gets (if half the town wants a school to get $0 funding and half wants it to get $100,000, it will get $50,000)
- How to Count
- Multi-Majority: This what we saw in the Swiss system, votes are counted for different entity types (e.g., all citizens, all members of a specific ethnic demographic, all land owners, all states, all companies, etc.). Each sub-governance structure votes with that vote’s outcome counting as a vote in a second round with its own win condition.
- Note: This win condition defaults to consensus like in the Swiss system when one is only counting votes coming from two entity types but other systems can be used when more entity types are taken into account.
- Random Ballet: A random ballot is chosen out of those placed. This ballot is the winner, making an issue or candidate’s possibility of winning proportional to how many people voted on it/them.
- While this may seem stupid it does have some real uses. For example, if you are choosing 100 members for an assembly and use this system, the outcome may be cheaper than total ballot counting and will end with approximately the same amount of assembly body control per party as one would get with a more traditional voting system.
- Coalition: When they lose, parties that voted for different outcomes can combine their vote
- General Ticket and Representative Voting: In these systems individuals vote for a party or representative that then makes a secondary, presumably more informed, vote on original voters’ behalf.
- This is how the U.S. presidential vote was supposed to work but representative voting systems often break down when some representatives begin to just pledge to vote for a single specific final candidate.
- Majority Bonus System: This is a party-based system in which the winning party is given additional seats in a judicial body, presumably to enhance government stability.
The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships
Ruthlessly optimized strategies for dating, sex, and marriage
Simone & Malcolm Collins
Copyright © 2020
Simone & Malcolm Collins
All rights reserved.
As with our last book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, you can get a free audio version of this book by visiting our website: Pragmatist.Guide/RelationshipsAudio
Our first crack at writing this book turned out to be so extensive that we ultimately divided our work into two separate volumes. This volume, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, outlines strategies for securing relationships, sex, and marriage and introduces methods for maintaining positive relationships. The other volume, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, focuses on how our brains process sexually arousing stimuli and how pair-bonding behavior systems (aka love) can be gamed. As with all products of the Pragmatist Foundation, the proceeds from sales will go to nonprofits.
To be notified when the next Pragmatist Guide goes live, submit your email to Pragmatist.Guide/Notifications
Contents
How the Marketplace Affects Relationship Stability 13
Other Marketplace Considerations 17
Misjudgments of Aggregate Desirability 17
Know What You Bring To The Table 21
Relationship Lures And Their Resulting Relationship Dynamics 23
The Sexual Exploration Lure 39
Sneaky Copulation and Female Mimicry 55
The Damsel in Distress Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure 77
The Admiration Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure 80
The Friend with Benefits Lure 83
The Long-Term Relationship Lure 86
Implied Contract Escalation 105
Clauses to Avoid in Marriage Contracts 110
Clauses Making Impossible Demands 110
Clauses Leading to Asset Depreciation 111
Constructing a Marriage Contract 118
Altering Marriage Contracts to Manage Individual Desirability 121
Varying Levels of Contract Clause Risk 125
Conflict Resolution Clauses 128
On Resolving Conflict with Compromise 129
On Resolving Conflict with Hierarchy 131
On Resolving Conflict with a Third-Party Arbitrator 135
On Resolving Conflict with Votes 136
Addressing Finance Clauses in Marriage Contracts 137
Other Financial Strategy Considerations 140
Mismatched Expected Lifestyles 141
Common Financial Configurations in Relationships 145
Complete Financial Separation with Agreed-Upon Individual or Shared Payments 145
Shared Pool with Discretionary Income Allowances 148
Single Pool With Pocket Money 150
Addressing Marriage Contract Violations 152
Hurt Feelings and Lost Respect 154
Reversal or Correction of Violation 155
Relationship Renegotiation 159
Cognitive Integration in Marriage and Long-Term Relationships 162
The Economics of Relationships 182
Economic Trends to Exploit 183
Exploiting Differences in Standards 190
Instinctual Life Stage Behavioral Impulses 195
The Profound Effects of Fertility and Childbirth 205
The Wall & How Dating Dynamics Change at Age 30 211
Choosing Not to Have a Partner 230
The Most Important Skill in Dating: Avoiding the Local Optimum Trap 239
Escaping the Local Optimum Trap in Long-Term Relationships 242
Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Dating 244
Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Looking for Sex 247
Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Single 250
Predicting When Your Partner Will Determine Your Relationship to Be “Bad” 252
The Funny Ways We React to Testosterone 258
Monitoring Personal Hormonal States 267
The Cognitive Effects of Birth Control Pills 276
Avoid Partners Who Want to Be Happy 278
The Effects of Chastity on Pair-Bonding 279
Why is Non-Monogamy Not the Norm? 290
What Monogamous People Should Learn from Poly Culture 299
The Myth of Our Poly or Monogamous Past 305
Marry Someone Who Will Work to Make You Better 311
Dealing With An Ex’s Training 318
Maintaining a Positive Relationship 324
Signaling That The Partner Got the Better End of the Deal 325
Making the Relationship Feel Exciting and Special 326
Making Partners Feel Like Good People 328
Making Partners Feel Desired (by a Desirable Person) 329
Reassuring Partners That The Relationship Helps Them Achieve Their Goals 331
Effective Transference of Information 339
Self-Narratives and Communication 347
Accidental Training of Proto-Abusive Behavior 365
Love Does Not Equal Caring 374
Attractiveness Strategies and Research 378
Less Practical (But Immensely Fun) Tidbits on Attractiveness 384
The Tradeoff Between Attractiveness and Competence 387
Intelligence Differentials 395
Personality Traits Tied to Looks 397
Use of Metaphoric Language 401
Waist-to-Hip and Chest-To-Waist Ratios 402
Realistic Expectation Setting 404
Leveraging Point-Based Motivational Systems 407
Leveraging Social Reinforcement 409
Getting Back On the Market 410
High Taxation Breakup Methods 414
Low-Taxation Breakup Methods 417
Appendix
How to “Get Laid” as a Young Adult 428
Engaging and Talking to People 438
Broaching the Topic of Sex or a Relationship 449
But I Hate Being Rejected! 461
Securing a Long-Term Relationship 463
Female Template Strategies 471
Age Considerations in Husband Searches 478
Helpful Husband Hunting Tactics 480
Consider Moving On After 22 Months And No Engagement 481
Sex and Dating in a World with Social Distancing 483
But Whatever I Do, Nothing Works! 493
People Who Just Don’t Have a Chance 494
People Who Fail Because of Who They Are 496
Defining Human Relationships 498
Factors Affecting Desirability 501
Contractual Perks or Downsides 505
Emotional, Hormonal, and Instinctual Factors 508
Children from Previous Partners 518
The Long-Term Relationship Market 537
Why People Cheat Rather Than Leave a Relationship 543
What to Do When a Partner Cheats 544
Other Factors Contributing to Cheating 549
Sex in a Long-Term Relationship 552
Common Marriage Contract Themes 563
How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Sexual Partners 572
People who associate their identity with their sexuality 573
People Who Are Visibly Unstable 576
People Addicted to Hard, Highly Addictive Drugs 576
People Out of Your League Who Make The First Move 577
People Who Clearly Do Not Like You Or Your Kind 578
Emotionally Manipulative People 579
How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Long-Term Partners 579
Partners Who Demand Money or Gifts 580
Partners Who Would Be Vindictive in a Divorce 582
Partners Who Keep Score and Hold Grudges 583
Partners Who Are Inherently Suspicious 584
Partners With Significantly Different Worldviews / Values / Objective Functions 586
Partners Who Do Not Value Emotional Control 588
Partners Who Make Threats or Impose Ultimatums 589
Partners Who Seek Constant Sexual Validation from Strangers and Acquaintances 589
Partners Who Incorporate Negative Character Traits into Their Core Identities 591
Partners Suffering from Mental Illness 593
Partners Suffering from Addictions 594
Partners with Controlling Behavior 595
Partners Who Do Not Conform to Societal Ideals 596
Relationships in Which One Partner Voluntarily Surrenders Power to Another Partner 598
Partners with Strange Kinks 601
Hurting People in Relationships 603
How To Avoid Hurting Relationship Partners 603
How To Avoid Hurting Sexual Partners 605
Abuse as a Relationship Strategy 614
Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Perceived Market Value 615
Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Actual Market Value 615
Attempts to Introduce an Externality to a Breakup 616
Attempts to Emotionally Drain a Partner 617
Attempts to Block a Partner from Meeting or Socializing With Others 618
Intentional Misrepresentation in Relationships 620
Misrepresentation Because You Are Primarily Looking For Sex 621
Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Tell Your Partner Later 622
Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Maintain The Lie Indefinitely 623
Misrepresentation of Intended Relationship Lifespan 624
Unintentional Misrepresentation in Relationships Due to Unanticipated Changes 625
Defense Against Misrepresentation 628
A More Effective Way to Approach Attachment Styles 636
Why Read This Book
P
eople hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will.
People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life.
We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually.
Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate).
This book presents our mental library of information on how relationships function and thus can be your guide to systematically developing a mating strategy that will optimize your ability to achieve your goals, even if those goals happen to be as straightforward as happiness and personal fulfillment.
The Pragmatic Model
Just as our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, shows readers how to use The Pragmatic Thought Framework to build a system for making their own decisions about how the world works, this guide uses the same framework to help our audience take a ruthless, practical, and unsentimental approach to sex, dating, and marriage.
The Pragmatic Thought Framework used in our guides is straightforward:
- Decide what you want to achieve and why.
- Create a plan to achieve that thing based on the type of evidence you decide has value to you.
- Execute that plan while constantly testing it, validating it, and adjusting it as you obtain better information.
You might imagine this framework is uncontroversial. This is not the case. In a society obsessed with forming teams, identifying and labeling “bad guys,” and discouraging thoughts that might hurt someone’s feelings or cause distress, this model for thinking is quite iconoclastic.
All that is a rather ostentatious way for us to say that some ideas in this book will be offensive. We did not set out to write a book that won’t offend people.
Offense is an emotion people feel when something credibly challenges their worldview. When an idea that challenges one’s worldview is not credible, one may find it worrying, threatening, and maybe even rage-inducing, but one will not feel the emotion of “offense.” If we have succeeded in writing a book that challenges societal norms surrounding relationships, we will have created a book that most readers will find at least a little offensive.
We personally love ideas that offend us. To us, offense is like the burn you get in your muscles during an intense workout; a burn that in part results from all the microtears in our muscles that ultimately lead to new growth (well that and lactic acid buildup, but that confuses the analogy, so we will ignore it). The discomfort caused by the creation of those microtears is quite literally a direct sign that ultimately we will become stronger, better people.
All that said, if any of our theories are so disagreeable to you that you feel compelled to challenge our view on the subject, we invite you to engage us in a way that leverages the types of evidence we value: Unbiased, well-designed scientific/anthropological studies and common cultural tropes. You can reach us at Hello@Pragmatist.Guide
How to Use the Appendix
T
hroughout this book, we will reference the appendix, which serves as a repository for content that will likely only be relevant to a niche audience.
Some appendix resources to get you started (these sections should be read before diving into the rest of the book if they are relevant to you):
- How to “Get Laid” as a Young Adult, page 428: If you are inexperienced and still trying to figure out how to easily secure a partner, we encourage you to read this section of the appendix before moving forward in this book. We wrote this section in an attempt to stifle the proliferation of techniques optimized by thirty-year-old pick-up artists for use in bars, which are hardly appropriate for safe and effective use by younger audiences (i.e. a seventeen-year-old with no experience dating). When a person is inexperienced, a dangerous cocktail of hormones and social norms can make getting laid feel like the only thing that matters, leading them to make life-altering decisions out of desperation without a source of level-headed, logical advice. We imagine a portion of the people who picked up this book fall into this demographic, so we wrote this section to help them safely and reliably date and secure a partner. If you are older than twenty-five and trying to learn how to secure a partner, even if you are inexperienced, the advice in our chapter on lures will be more applicable to you.
- Securing a Long-Term Relationship, page 463:This is a crash course for those looking to find and secure a long-term partner at any stage of life.
- Securing a Husband, page 478: This section is an exploration of the data surrounding who is most likely to propose and when.
- Sex and Dating in a World with Social Distancing, page 483: This appendix chapter details adaptations that may be made to dating and sexual strategy when in-person interaction becomes limited or more dangerous—such was the case with the COVID-19 pandemic that arose during the final stages of the book’s editing. This particular event can be seen as a case study revealing insights into optimal ways people might modify partner acquisition strategies as the world and technology change.
- But Whatever I Do, Nothing Works!, page 493: This chapter explores possible causes if all of your relationships fail or you have been totally unable to secure a partner no matter what you try. It will also help you troubleshoot your situation.
- Defining Human Relationships, page 498: This is a short section that can help you think through how to define the concept of a relationship and how the various aspects of the concept interact with each other. This is not a section we would recommend for the casual reader. This philosophical odyssey is intended for those trying to get a more holistic understanding of our perspective on the topic and how that perspective may color our advice.
- The Four Core Markets, page 524:Here we discuss the differences between “The Sex Market,” “The Dating Market,” “The Long-Term Relationship Market,” and “The Non-Monogamy Market.” The key takeaway is this: One’s value on the various markets differs dramatically, with women typically having a statistical advantage in markets oriented around short-term relationships and men having an advantage in markets oriented around long-term relationships. Do not assume that because you perform well in one market (like the sex market), you will perform well in another (like the long-term relationship market) or that the skills/public image you build to appeal to people on short-term markets will transfer to long-term markets. In other words, learning how to secure high-quality sex partners is not a skill set that will necessarily increase your odds of securing a spouse.
- On Citations and Studies, page 541: This chapter addresses our stylistic choice to only occasionally cite studies, the short answer being that we think citations lend false weight to tenuous claims and promote dangerous mental shortcuts. Cases in which we do not cite sources will nevertheless contain sufficient information enabling you to open a search engine, search for, find, and explore the research in question personally (which is our strong preference).
Other appendix chapters will be referenced at relevant locations throughout The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships; they offer a deeper dive on subjects only lightly addressed in the main body of the book.
The Marketplace
T
he realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives.
As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed.
In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are:
- Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person.
- Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual.
Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish:
- Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day
- Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish
Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy’s an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves.
The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.
When trying to make an arbitrage play, do not be confused by what society implies that people want and by what people actually want. For example, society pretends that both nerdy males and females have low value in most markets, when in reality, once you are out of high school (and sometimes well before), the nerdy archetype has one of the highest values on the marketplace, meaning that targeting otherwise traditionally attractive nerds is a terrible arbitrage play for someone who is indifferent about the archetype.
How the Marketplace Affects Relationship Stability
Individual Desirability / Aggregate Desirability = Your Desirability Ratio
The higher a relationship’s Desirability Ratio, the more stable a relationship will be. If a relationship’s Desirability Ratio drops below one for either partner, the relationship becomes very likely to dissolve.
To put that in other words: When your partner is much more desirable to you than their “league” would suggest, and when this dynamic is mutual (i.e., each partner values the other more than society on average values that other partner), your relationship will be uniquely stable. However, if either partner values the other less than that person would be valued on an open market, the relationship becomes unstable.
Imagine a famous video game streamer who has little interest in the outdoors in a relationship with a world-class competitive fly fisher who has little interest in gaming. Each partner in this relationship has extremely high aggregate desirability in certain markets (essentially being gods in the gaming/fly fishing worlds), but perhaps only middling individual desirability (you can imagine the fly fisher being occasionally fed up with how much time the gamer spends “behind that goddamn computer screen” and vice versa). Intuitively, you will see this relationship as not particularly strong, but perhaps not contextualize that instability as resulting from an unfavorable Desirability Ratio.
While keeping a close eye on Desirability Ratios seems like common sense to us, we have never heard anyone in the relationship industry highlight this dynamic. This is odd because the effects of this on the dating and marriage markets are extreme. This is one of the many reasons why celebrity relationships are so short-lived and fraught with conflict—celebrities essentially have maxed-out aggregate desirability, making it virtually impossible for their individual desirability to their partner to stably stay above their aggregate desirability.
Desirability Ratio also has enormous value as a concept to the average person. If you are looking for a uniquely stable relationship, seek targets who have more value to you than to the average person, and look for those who see value in you that the average person would overlook.
The great thing about one’s relationship stability rating is it is not something that requires much effort to maintain so long as their relationship is stable.
Our biology and culture naturally strengthen relationships over time. The longer we are in a (good) relationship, the more we find ourselves emotionally attracted to the individual with whom we are in that relationship, which raises each partner’s desirability to the other partner.[[36]](#_ftn36) Individual desirability of each partner also increases over time, due to genuine social, financial, and logistical entanglement as well as due to the sunk cost fallacy[[37]](#_ftn37). This increase in individual desirability over time in a relationship is not a small or insignificant effect. Even just the social stigma of leaving someone you have been dating for ten years is quite high—to the extent that social pressure alone could cause you to stay with a long-term, ungrateful partner who physically let themselves go instead of going after the kind, supportive, and attractive person you see on your commute who keeps making passes at you. The individual desirability of a partner isn’t just a conglomeration of positive pressures pushing you into a relationship with them but negative pressures pushing you away from leaving them.
Note for Context:
- There are many choices an individual can make that will alter their desirability on the market to specific sub-populations. For example, dressing like a hipster is going to increase your attractiveness to a specific profile of a partner and could be a useful strategy to filter for partners with specific characteristics you are looking for. In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we broke down a number of factors and looked at how they correlated with arousal patterns. One of the most interesting associations from the perspective of this topic was related to cat and dog ownership. For example, when compared to men who prefer a partner with a cat, those who prefer a partner with a dog were significantly more likely to be turned on by acting dominant during sex—thus if your goal is to attract a dominant guy, you could better filter for them by choosing to own a dog instead of a cat. This is probably not the best way to determine what kind of pet you choose—but hey, it’s interesting. For a more detailed breakdown of this, see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.
Appendix: To gain a full understanding of how various factors affect your desirability, seeFactors Affecting Desirability on page 501 in the appendix. This section will be particularly useful in helping you build strategies around arbitrage opportunities for yourself in the dating, marriage, or sex markets. In this section, we explore factors affecting individual and aggregate desirability, such as how kink preference or a preference for monogamous vs. polyamorous lifestyles may affect one’s desirability across markets and how such preferences can be effectively signaled. We also address concepts related to the fluctuations of aggregate desirability between subcultures and discuss how these fluctuations can be leveraged to one’s advantage (e.g., the aggregate desirability of a naturally pale person will be higher within the goth subculture than within Western society in general, even though that subculture is contained within Western society).
Other Marketplace Considerations
Misjudgments of Aggregate Desirability
An individual who misjudges their own aggregate desirability in a marketplace is often doomed to an unhappy life while any partner they have is doomed to a less-than-ideal relationship. A person with an inaccurate understanding of their market value will have a difficult time finding a partner who is willing to date them, concede to their desires, and meet their expectations. Once in a relationship, this misguided individual will be more likely to not appreciate what they have.
Poor assessments of market value present a serious problem in a society that seems to actively encourage people to develop inflated perceptions of their aggregate desirability. It is ultimately quite harmful to tell someone: “Guuuurl—you are a goddess; you are perfect just the way you are, and you deserve a great guy!”
You, like all people, are not perfect. There is plenty of work you could do to raise your value on the open market. Those who allow themselves to have friends who discourage them from improving themselves are less likely to improve themselves enough to secure a “great girl” or “great guy.”
Another glaring issue associated with aggregate desirability misjudgments stems from a failure to understand that aggregate desirability on one market does not equal aggregate desirability on another market. For example, a person can have a very high value on the sex market, but a very low value on the long-term relationship market. We talk about this in detail within the appendix section titled The Four Core Marketplaces on page 524, so we will not elucidate this point further here.
Aggregate desirability evolves over time. A young man who was captain of his high school football team may fail to internalize that even though he was in the top 1% of his market in high school, his aggregate desirability will plummet to the bottom 5% if he puts on weight in college and/or fails to secure a well-paying or prestigious job upon graduation. A young woman may not internalize that, while she may have an easy time finding male partners willing to commit to a long-term relationship with her when she is in her early and mid-twenties, a period of peak attractiveness and minimal attachments, she will have a much harder time finding a high-quality, long-term partner once she is in her thirties and especially if she has a child from a previous partner. If either of these individuals still conceptualizes their aggregate desirability as being what it was at the highest point in their lives, relationships with them will be . . . unpleasant.
Your Value Off the Market
A measure of increasing relevance in many societies is “individual off-market value.” This is the value a person gains from not being in any relationship at all.
A number of factors can drive off-market value very high:
- The feeling of freedom and independence some gain from not being in a relationship.
- The value an individual places on their own time; this is uniquely true during career-building periods of life given the heavy time investment required for dating.
- An individual may positively modify their off-market value as part of their self-image—in other words, when an individual thinks being single makes them a better person.
- A strong negative association with those to whom an individual is most attracted, such as a heterosexual woman who looks down on men, a heterosexual man who looks down on women, or a gay person who looks down on gay people.
Off-market value becomes uniquely important when it rises above the value of a relationship with someone in one’s league. This dynamic may result from someone having very high off-market value or relatively low value in their chosen relationship markets. For example, someone may love the freedom of being single so much a relationship with anyone isn’t worth it, or someone may be very unattractive and not value a relationship enough to be in one with the type of person who would be willing to date them. In such cases, an individual will put no effort into dating and have their views on the subject of relationships continually reinforced by not being in one.
Uneven Relationships
While rare, there is one type of relationship in which both partners value each other more than they would be valued in the open market, and despite this, the relationship is still systematically unstable. These are uneven relationships: Relationships in which one partner has a way higher individual desirability to the other than the other does to them (i.e., one party in a relationship may be absolutely infatuated with the other, but this infatuation is not shared).
How this affects a relationship can vary widely, as some individuals actually prefer to be in a relationship in which they have less to lose by leaving than their partner, while others strongly prefer to be in a relationship in which each partner benefits equally.
Generally, the “best” inequality in a relationship is one in which both partners believe they have secured the better deal. These relationships are far more common than you may believe and typically exist whenever individuals each see the other through “rose-tinted glasses.” Relationships in which both partners believe they are getting the better deal are extremely stable.
Know What You Bring To The Table
In the context of all the things that a person might look for in a partner, it is critical to know what you bring to the table. What differentiates you on the open market? What makes you uniquely worth attention? What value do you present?
Knowing your worth on the market plays a key role in not falling prey to exploitative partners. It is almost unheard of for someone leagues above another to pursue them. In fact, if someone who is obviously much higher value than you expresses interest in you, it means one of two things:
- Something about you fulfills a niche desire of theirs. You may, for example, remind them of someone important to them. Or perhaps you unknowingly activate one of their kinks. For more detail on how that works, see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.
- The high-value person does not intend to have a monogamous relationship with you (this gets more complicated if you are polyamorous). It doesn’t really matter to them if a partner is far below them in value if that partner does not preclude them from continuing to search for someone who is of equal value to them. Low-value partners can make for splendid placeholders for those still looking for a long-term match.
Relationship Lures And Their Resulting Relationship Dynamics
A
lure is a type of value proposition presented to a potential partner. The type of lure used to establish a relationship will set the tone for that relationship going forward, meaning your choice of lures has significant short and long-term consequences.
The types of lures fishermen choose to use can heavily influence the types of fish they catch. Two fishermen fishing from the same spot may find themselves catching entirely different types of fish if they are using different lures. Similarly, when you are “fishing” for a relationship, the lure that you use can completely alter the type of relationship you “catch.” In fact, one lure used to attract a target may yield a relationship dynamic that is entirely different from the relationship dynamic that would have emerged were a different lure used on that same target.
If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy).
One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns.
Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what’s your point?”
To attract long-term partners in a manner that yields a relationship dynamic that will work over the long term, it helps to be aware of common lures used, the manner in which they may affect relationships, and appropriate times to leverage each.
These common lures include:
- The Dominance Lure
- The Nice Lure
- The Sexual Exploration Lure
- The Easy Lure
- The Love Lure
- The Sneaky Lure
- The Pygmalion Lure
- The Status Lure
- The Self-Identity Lure
- The Friend With Benefits Lure
- The Long-Term Relationship Lure
- The Social Construct Lure
Before you dig in, please note:
- Most partner acquisition strategies involve the use of multiple lures simultaneously. While this is the case, it is also the case that, in most of these, one lure is used predominantly and is “flavored” by others. Regardless, use your best judgment to attempt to predict how the combination of lures you choose to use will determine which types of relationships you are able to “catch.”
- When discussing lures, we refer to the person being attracted by a lure as the “target” and the person utilizing a lure as the “pursuer.” This is only for convenience, as we had to find some way to linguistically separate the two positions when describing how a specific lure is implemented. Nevertheless, every relationship is a two-way street. Just as one person will use one of these lures to secure a partner, that partner is using a lure to secure that person. Each lure used will heavily color the resulting relationship. There is no such thing as a relationship with only one pursuer and only one target—no matter how active one party is compared to another.
The Dominance Lure
The Dominance Lure is the default human mating lure. It can almost be thought of as the “traditional human mating display.” It entails asserting physical and mental dominance in a very “traditional way“ to attract those who are looking to surrender and/or indulge in that aspect of the human condition.
To get an idea of what the Dominance Lure looks like, consider the protective bad boy from a campy romance novel. This character is likely a muscular, confident man who unflinchingly sets rules and dictates how things will be in a way that borderline suspends a target’s agency.
The Dominance Lure is extremely common among pick up artist communities (groups that develop concerted strategies designed to secure sex), but it can also be learned from one’s childhood family dynamics. Dominance is typically thought of as a male-only lure; however, it can also work for females.
Dominance Lures are so effective because they involve the pursuer taking initiative and granting the targeted party the luxury of doing very little. Humans, being the inherently lazy creatures they are, adore not having to think. The proposition of just “going along for the ride” with someone who seems to know what they are doing can be immensely attractive.
Dominance Lures have extra appeal to targets with low social intelligence, low confidence, or a strong desire to be submissive in a relationship. The Dominance Lure is also significantly more effective on targets who are inexperienced in the BDSM scene or too traditional to be comfortable exploring the BDSM scene. Relationships with intentionally constructed, consensually agreed-upon power imbalances put in place for sexual gratification are not “Dominance Lure” relationships and instead are “Sexual Exploration Lure” relationships, as they have very little in common with relationships founded through subconscious implementation of dominance displays (in other words, dom-sub relationships are not Dominance Lure relationships).
Dominance can work on almost any target except those who have a self-image that would punish them severely for submitting to another human (these individuals include some of the following: people in the polyamorous scene, doms, Red Pillers, MGTOWers, those who ascribe to certain schools of feminism, etc.). Various studies back up the broad effectiveness of the Dominance Lure—including a 2018 study out of the University of Göttingen, which demonstrated that dominance predicted mating success for males even more than physical attractiveness.
Dominance displays can be easily amplified through behavior and posture changes. Studies have found women on average find men who smile less and strike brooding or swaggering poses more attractive, perhaps because smiling is a sign of submission in primates. Conversely, men in the aggregate prefer women who smile and find women less attractive when they look proud or confident—more on why dominance displays are effective for women in spite of this later. In addition, more dominant individuals make decisions faster. This is one of the reasons it is considered “unattractive” when a man takes a long time deciding at a restaurant.
One of the more frustrating aspects of dominance displays is that they are usually associated with communicating with one’s target as . . . well, kind of a dick. Frustratingly, ample research suggests that this technique is objectively effective at getting replies from women on dating websites. Studies have even shown that not only do women respond less to positively worded messages on dating platforms but also that the more desirable a woman is, the fewer positively worded messages she will receive (See: “Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets” in the journal Science Advances—we are citing our source here, as we expect a lot of our readers to be uniquely surprised by this and it would be hard to Google).
Relationships founded using a Dominance Lure require a constant assertion of dominance by the dominant party (communities that use this strategy often call this “maintaining frame”). This can be prohibitively exhausting in long-term relationships and is one of the core drawbacks of this lure.
Relationships founded through this strategy also fail to build a unique attachment among partners over time (at least not as much as other types of relationships), and thus they engender less fidelity. In other words, in the case of most relationship dynamics, partners like each other more as they spend more time together. This is less common among relationships established around a Dominance Lure. This is the critical difference between Dominance Lure relationships and intentional power exchange relationships, like dom-sub relationships, in which fondness and fidelity typically do appreciate over time.
Why does dominance build trust and fondness in intentional power exchange relationships but not Dominance Lure relationships? This building of fondness happens in intentional power exchange relationships because dominance is exercised as a “gift” to the submissive partner to elicit an emotional reaction in them that they have requested. Both partners in intentional power exchange relationships are aware of this often-taxing gift exchange. To put it in other words, in an intentional power exchange relationship, confidently giving humiliating instructions to a partner that are tailored to their arousal pathways is the same as taking time to wake someone up with breakfast in bed in a traditional relationship. Dominance in intentional power exchange relationships takes time and effort to organize and is obviously meant as a gesture of care whereas in a Dominance Lure relationship, the act would not be a gift exchange but instead one primarily motivated to maintain an imposed perception of the dominant partner.
There are other reasons why Dominance Lure relationships do not increase in quality over time like almost all other relationship types: The cognitive dissonance and social cost associated with leaving a Dominance Lure relationship do not increase over time due to the negative stigma society associates with these arrangements. The social cost of cheating is also much lower within Dominance Lure Relationships—among both parties. Dominant partners in relationships built around a Dominance Lure are less likely to feel guilt upon cheating, due to an inherent lack of respect for and emotional attachment to the target (a perspective often cultivated by practitioners of the Dominance Lure to make it easier to maintain dominance). Submissive partners in Dominance Lure relationships feel little guilt upon cheating because the relationship’s primary value to them involves a specific emotional set elicited by the dominant partner—not the dominant partner themselves.
A fascinating aspect of the Dominance Lure involves routine boundary tests initiated by the target, which are commonly referred to online as “shit tests.” In a shit test, the target challenges the prospective partner’s dominance to ensure it is still high. Essentially, if someone attracts a target by displaying dominance, their value to the target is those displays, thus the target will regularly trigger dominance displays by testing the dominance of their partner and pushing boundaries.
While some common relationship-related questions asked by a target of their pursuer, such as “How many girls have you slept with?” are potential drama-riddled bombs in the context of a Dominance Lure relationship, they are completely innocuous in other types of relationships. For example, if a question regarding sexual partner count came up within the context of a Sexual Experimentation Lure-based relationship, the target is likely just attempting to determine if you need to share your papers proving your STD status and in such a context, you should be perfectly open and honest. On the other hand, if a target in a Dominance Lure-based relationship asks this, they really want an indication of the pursuer’s sexual prowess and dominance. A target may even be testing whether or not the dominant pursuer will deign to answer. After all, if a target can force their supposedly dominant pursuer to answer them, this would signal that they hold some control over the pursuer, making the pursuer less dominant, and therefore less attractive.
That “shit tests” are not universal may sound questionable to those who have only used dominance-based or power exchange lures to secure their partners, but shit tests are not normal adult behavior. When Malcolm was looking for a wife, he had a quota of five dates a week for years, and on those hundreds of dates, he only experienced something that could be counted as a shit test six to eight times—though before that, when he experimented with Dominance Lures for low effort sex, he received shit tests constantly. Shit tests are a specific and rational reaction to the value proposition of a Dominance Lure. If someone is selling you a car, you’ll want to make sure it operates and handles well. If someone is selling you dominance, you’ll want to make sure they can properly dominate.
We have little information on how Dominance Lure strategies work for females, as females who prefer to maintain a constantly dominant position in a relationship are already a little sexually atypical, and thus it is usually easiest for these women to express their dominance through BDSM communities and relationships ignited under complementary BDSM interests (which, as we have noted, operate with totally different dynamics than those of Dominance Lure relationships). That said, we can hypothesize that a female employing a Dominance Lure would be even more effective than a male employing it, as this rare occurrence would make them high-value market commodities (even if demand is low, the supply of this type of woman is even lower). Contrary to conventional wisdom, some studies have found that men, on average, have a slight preference for being submissive, whereas women have a strong preference for being submissive, statistically speaking. In a study on arousal pathways and sexual preferences we ran through the Pragmatist Foundation, we found that while 75% of women get at least somewhat aroused by seeing a partner act dominant, a hearty 49% of men are aroused by partners acting dominant as well. While fewer men than women are aroused by dominant partners, this does not negate the finding that almost half of men are aroused by dominance. Should a non-trivial proportion of men really somewhat prefer submission, women who prefer (or are even just OK with) dominance will have a distinct advantage, as our stats show the majority of women on various dating markets are simply not comfortable being anything but the submissive partner.
See The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more statistics and analysis related to dominance and submission preferences—it is full of fascinating data. One of our findings relevant to this discussion is that while 45% of women responding to a survey we conducted reported finding the naked male form to be very arousing and 48% reported finding the sight of a penis to be very arousing, a heftier 53% reported finding a partner acting dominant in a sexual context to be very arousing. Dominance is literally more likely to be “very arousing” to the average female than naked men or penises and thus the average woman has more of a “dominance-focused” sexuality than a “male-focused” sexuality.
Another interesting tidbit that emerged from The Pragmatist Foundation’s study on sexuality was a correlation in women between (1) arousal from being dominant and (2) perceiving oneself as being attractive. In other words, if a female survey respondent reported herself as being attractive, she was much more likely to also report that she felt turned on by acting dominant. This likely means attractive, confident women are less likely to be lured into a relationship by dominance.
Males who leverage Dominance Lures often find success at securing sexual partners and sometimes can even leverage this lure to secure a partner for a socially traditional (sometimes known as TradCon-style) marriage, in which their spouse’s core contributions are sex, home-keeping, and child-rearing. That said, this strategy is only of optimal utility (i.e., the best of all available lures to use) among middle-aged males with little sexual experience who are primarily looking for sex or young men who lack the social intelligence to leverage other lures. Despite its limited utility and the low quality of relationships it generates, the Dominance Lure is of genuine value to those two groups. In fact, among lower-value males in those groups with low social intelligence, the Dominance Lure may genuinely present their only real shot at experiencing sex they don’t pay for.
Of all the lures we have investigated, the Dominance Lure is the only one that people specifically train themselves to look out for in potential partners and avoid. Unfortunately, people unfamiliar with how the lure actually is meant to work just memorize a few classic Dominance Lure strategies like “negging” and then look for them as red flags on dates. Negging, for the uninitiated, involves an individual belittling or lightly insulting a target in an attempt to establish dominance and manipulate the target into wanting to impress them.
By categorizing negging as a red flag and sign to end a date, many filter out otherwise strong candidates who were not actually implementing a Dominance Lure strategy. Do not confuse all challenges to your logic, your lifestyle, and your opinions, with negging. Also, do not conflate negging with statements that make you uncomfortable. A number of the other lures use challenging questions as a legitimate filter or expectation-setting tool. A statement like: “Do you like X political figure? Because I won’t date you if you do” is not a neg; it is a useful question for filtering out potentially bad matches.
A personal anecdote here might help: On our first date, Malcolm told me: “I am not looking to date; I am looking for a wife and expect to find her in a few months at Stanford, due to its large pool of pre-vetted candidates.” This could have been a neg if he were employing a Dominance Lure strategy, but within the strategy he was employing, this blunt statement was simply a courtesy expectation setter to prevent me from wasting time on a lead that may not fit what I was looking for in a relationship. A good rule of thumb for sorting out an intentionally employed “neg” from a normal challenging question or statement is to look for such challenging statements being deployed in a flirtatious voice (as they are deployed with a Dominance Lure) instead of a matter-of-fact tone (as they would be when implementing the Pygmalion Lure) or conscientious tone (common in normal human conversation).
The Nice Lure
The Nice Lure is almost completely ineffective at actually securing what people want in a relationship, but it is so commonly used that we would be remiss not to describe it. Those deploying the Nice Lure offer submission—signaled through niceness—and accommodation in hopes that they might receive either sex or a relationship in return. It is the standard “nice guy/good girl” strategy—also known in some circles as “beta” behavior. The core idea of this strategy is that if the pursuer is really, really “nice” to someone and does everything the target asks, the target may be willing to date and might even have sex with them. Those who proclaim in frustration: “Why can’t I get a date/sex??? I am such a nice guy/girl…” are using the Nice Lure.
While we call this the Nice Lure, there is nothing particularly nice about it. We refer to this lure as “nice” because displays of submission can easily be misinterpreted as niceness both by the pursuer and the target. What is really happening in these displays is an individual is subconsciously signaling to their target that they are willing to be a submissive partner and give their target power over them in exchange for sexual access. Since submission displays—such as offering to do someone’s homework for them, smiling (a submission display in most primates), giving them your stuff, politeness, or carrying things for them—can look like “just being nice” and can be played off that way, it is often hard for a target to identify the intended payout the pursuer expects from these displays. This can cause significant consternation to the pursuer when the target constantly accepts their submission displays but still denies sexual access. In some cases, repeatedly rejected pursuers leveraging the Nice Lure become aggressively submissive, a signal to any potential partner that their genes are hot garbage and a hard turn off for both most men and women.
To be clear here—the Nice Lure is almost always performed subconsciously. A person does not actively think, “how do I get X target to breed with me? Oh, I know: Be oppressively obsequious all the time!” A deeply primitive part of their brain only sees two paths to sex, dominance, or submission, and it has determined they are not dominant enough to take a dominance display path. (We should take a moment here to also draw attention to the fact that, historically speaking, the Dominance Lure was also a primarily subconscious pathway, but one that was eventually co-opted by individuals who saw how effective it was, codified it, and trained themselves in it. It is still a pathway that occurs naturally, just at a very low frequency when contrasted with its artificial variant.)
While a Nice Lure is almost never effective at igniting sexual interest in a target, it can be successful at securing a relationship when a target feels that they can exploit the submissive nature of their pursuer. In such cases, the pursuer may even be granted sexual access in exchange for continued submission. In this sense, the Nice Lure and Dominance Lure are the only lures that involve “shit tests.” In a Dominance Lure relationship, shit tests exist to ensure the partner is still dominant, whereas in Nice Lure relationships, shit tests are of utility to ensure the prospective partner is still submissive and thus can still be used as an informal servant.
The Nice Lure does not work for any gender at securing healthy long-term relationships. While the Nice Lure can be used to obtain sex, it is not even very effective at that. The core reason this strategy is so ineffective is it signals to targets that the pursuer has nothing to exchange for a relationship except their dignity, which apparently has little value anyway. Having to resort to the Nice Lure proves an individual’s lack of value on the wider marketplace.
The Sexual Exploration Lure
We outlined the use of Sexual Exploration Lures in the appendix section of this book as a viable strategy for young people just looking for sex. Sex feels good and the vast majority of the population wants to have it. There are many people out there who want to explore new and interesting ways of experiencing sex with someone just like you (well . . . maybe—more on that soon).
The Sexual Exploration Lure is peculiar in that it manifests very differently in youth than it does in adults. Amid teenagers, this lure can be effective on pretty much anyone and is generically implementable in the sense that sexual experimentation for someone who is inexperienced can just be kissing, holding hands, or sex. In youth, fooling around in any capacity can be experimental and exciting. However, once a person becomes an adult and sex is no longer interesting or difficult to secure, this lure typically requires becoming involved with one of two categories of adult communities interested in sexual exploitation.
These categories are, roughly:
- Communities oriented around openly sexually exploring a number of new partners (e.g., the branch of the polyamorous community that is big into sexual exploration, swingers, etc.): For those whose sexual tastes are vanilla in nature, there are lots of communities out there that merely revolve around having sex.
- Kink communities (e.g., BDSM, hot wifers, Gor, Kinbaku, TPE, etc.): Should you genuinely be interested in sexual exploration from the perspective of someone who would like to explore new ways of having sex, there is a vibrant rainbow of kink communities at your disposal. Involvement in these communities may require a significant investment of time (e.g., a four-week course on safe bondage practices) and money (e.g., thousands of dollars on specific outfits or equipment). A good way to meet these communities is to look for local “munches.” (If you are interested in getting an entertaining, sweet introduction to lifestyles in which kink hobbies play a key role, we heartily recommend Sunstone: A free and beautifully illustrated comic series by Stjepan Sejic available online.) IMPORTANT: The first time you approach one of these communities, do so non-sexually and without pretense. DO NOT walk up to one of these communities for the first time saying that you are a “master” or something like that.
Should you decide to leverage the sexual exploration lure as an adult, especially if you become intimate with a large number of sexual partners, build a habit of being regularly tested for STDs, keep your latest test results handy (scans on your phone that you can quickly send to a prospective partner are a must), study your local sex/kink community’s consent rules in great detail, resign yourself to always maxing out the protection you are using, and put earnest and genuine effort into skillfully pleasing your partners. Word gets around in these communities rapidly, seeing as so many of their members are sleeping together. If you act like an asshole or refuse to play by the rules, you will be expelled.
The biggest downside to utilizing sexual exploration communities for sex is that many (but not all) will expel members who neglect to submit their worldviews to the group’s chosen ideology (usually some form of sex-positive liberal feminist perspective, though conservative iterations of the groups do exist). Surprisingly, the Sexual Exploration Lure tends to form strong long-term relationships and may be the single strongest lure available to the majority of females over thirty hunting for a committed relationship (not that it’s uniquely great for women in this demographic; women over thirty just have so few other options available to them due in large part to high-quality men leaving relationships and returning to the dating market at lower rates than high-quality women).[[38]](#_ftn38)
With regard to this lure’s perhaps counterintuitive tendency to generate long-term relationships, we hypothesize that five factors are at play:
- Survivorship bias: Sex and kink communities are pretty quick to kick out jerks and police the relationships within them in said relationships’ early stages. This policing is not ironclad, but as with many tight-knit communities composed of groups of people who share a common interest, members usually have a non-trivial amount of emotional investment in other members, have more-efficient-than-average means to learn about problems, and have more motivation to intervene when they see a toxic relationship forming.
- Selection bias: To interact effectively with these communities, a person probably has a stronger idea of who they are and what they want than an average person off the street. Accurate awareness of one’s self and one’s actual desires are astoundingly low in most dating/relationship/sex markets, which leads to many poor matches.
- Lower risk of making illogical, hormone-based decisions: If the studies indicating that promiscuous individuals experience lower levels of oxytocin release are correct, those in this community may be less likely to enter a long-term relationship with someone just because a wash of hormones have made them feel deeply in love and bonded to their partner. Those who maintain a lower sexual partner count experience significant exposure to the risk of blinding love. (We talk about this phenomenon and the associated studies later in the book, see page 258.)
- Maturity: Individuals in this community have often intentionally chosen to stay single until a later age (this puts them in stark contrast to adults who are single because they have failed to secure or maintain a healthy long-term relationship). Thus, these individuals on average are often more emotionally stable than those still single available in the general mid-life dating market.
- Clear intention and communication: Relationships formed as a product of this lure are more likely to have super specific relationship contracts (especially around definitions of things like infidelity and consent), which decreases conflict.
Common Mistakes to Avoid:
- Keep in mind that the Sexual Exploration Lure is not the “I am Great at Sex” lure. The “I Am Great at Sex” approach to seduction is completely ineffective at securing high-value partners. Sure, a person may be able to secure sex with someone a few leagues below them because they signaled their availability and desperation, but this strategy is ineffective for people in the same league. Why? Because the “I am Great at Sex” lure comes off as desperate and makes a person seem emotionally unstable, leading many targets to conclude that the person is not worth the risky lay. This is true for both men and women.
- Also, remember that sexual exploration is just sexual exploration—it is not about imposing one’s sexuality on someone else. A person randomly emailing someone with what they want to do to them sexually is not sexual exploration; that’s just non-consensual cybersex. Think of it this way: If you are putting together a game of baseball, you need to first get to know people, understand the rules, determine what you want the specific rules to be for that game, schedule a day and time to meet up and play, etc. Baseball does not really come up as the core of the interaction until the game itself begins. Emailing someone with how hot you think they are is like running up to them while flailing a baseball bat and screaming “baseball now,” then bemoaning the fact that everyone runs from you screaming and calls the cops when you try to play baseball with them.
The Easy Lure
The Easy Lure entails signaling that one would gladly have sex with, date, or get married to a specific individual for next to no cost (in terms of time or money). This is not a lure that a huge number of people consciously choose; however, it is often accidentally adopted as a habit that does, admittedly, enable one to secure sex and can lead to the ignition of relationships.
This strategy is much more effective for females than it is for males. We have to wrack our brains to come up with even hypothetical situations in which The Easy Lure is an effective strategy for males if their targets are under thirty.
In the 1980s, some experiments were conducted in which both men and women approached strangers and invited these strangers to sleep with them or come back to their apartment. While men agreed to these propositions over half the time, not a single woman took a strange male up on his offer (it should be noted that only attractive men and women were presenting these propositions). Even in instances in which researchers controlled for fear of violence by asking women if they would sleep with their best friend if given such a proposal, women still said yes at much lower rates than men (though if you torturously massage the data, it is possible to make the numbers just about even . . . But that is the case with almost any data set). However you look at it, a woman can realistically—though not safely—approach strangers on the street, ask for sex, and frequently secure it whereas a male cannot. Should you want to read more about these studies and the follow-up work in more detail, refer to the section on Sexual Marketplaces in the appendix on page 524.
A person not realizing that they are attracting prospective partners with an Easy Lure can be dangerous. It is common for some young women to not recognize that the attention they are getting stems from the fact that they are inadvertently signaling that sex with them will be low cost. It is difficult not to get hooked on the positive emotions the attention makes a person feel—especially if they are blithely unaware that said attention is being hurled their way because those giving it think they are a low investment target for sex or dating. Such attention can easily subconsciously train some young women to signal that they are sexually available when doing so is far from their intention.
While any young woman will have some susceptibility to this, those with histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and in manic stages of bipolar disorder, are uniquely susceptible to this subconscious conditioning, and it affects them more severely.
When I (Simone) was younger, I fell prey to this to an extent until Malcolm pointed out what was happening. I was incredibly friendly and wore a lot of wacky and somewhat revealing clothing that caused people to look down on me—but also shower me with compliments. Those who looked down on me did not mention or clearly indicate their condescension, but those giving me compliments were very vocal.
The damaging effects of this subconscious training can extend to behavioral patterns much more damaging than mere revealing clothing. Specifically, a woman acting a little mentally unstable or not very bright can signal to guys that sex with her will involve low investment, which may cause this behavior to be positively reinforced. This is highly damaging at a societal level.
Humans are remarkably easy to subconsciously train by consistently verbally rewarding a specific behavior or rewarding it through attention.
While we discuss this lure in the context of its subconscious negative effects on some young women, this lure is also sometimes intentionally implemented—even by adults. One study found that 23% of adults still ask their friends to signal to a target that they would be willing to romantically engage them if the target made a pass (i.e., that it will be a low investment, low-risk effort to obtain sex and/or a relationship with them).
While Easy Lures can hypothetically enable one to secure easy sex, they have few (ethical) real-world uses and expose one to non-trivial danger. Specifically, some people interpret Easy Lure signaling (especially when combined with a request to spend time alone with them) as a tacit consent to sex. These individuals can become angry and belligerent upon discovering this isn’t the case. Thus, even if a person is just looking for sex, the Sexual Experimentation Lure is unflinchingly superior to the Easy Lure: It requires almost as little effort, is just as effective, works for all genders, and doesn’t carry as much additional risk (although, every sexual encounter carries some risk).
The Love Lure
The Love Lure mirrors the Easy Lure in many respects; however, instead of offering sex with low investment from the target, the pursuer offers love (i.e., “You should sleep with / choose / marry me because I will love you more than he / she does”). This is probably the single least effective lure we will discuss, but for some reason, it is one of the lures people most actively attempt to deploy. People think because they feel love towards someone, they are doing that person a favor. Perhaps more bizarrely, many are under the impression that love alone can be traded for a relationship.
The love you feel is a feeling inside you. This love is not a feeling within your target. Your target cannot profit from or be sustained by your love. By loving someone, you are using them or the idea of them to masturbate the aspect of your cognition that produces the positive feelings that come from love. Thinking that someone will want to be with you because “you love them” is like thinking that someone will want to be with you because you masturbate while looking at a picture of them.
People’s beliefs about the value and power of love disgust and horrify your gentle authors. Our society sees love as magical fairy dust instead of an emotion that is activated by specific environmental stimuli. If a genuinely lucid person just wanted something to love them, they would get a dog and not waste time, money, and heartache on a pathetic hairless ape.
People only value the love they feel for you. The love you have for others is only valuable to them if it helps them in some way, such as your affection making it easier for them to extract resources from you (and we assume that is not the type of relationship you want), or your affection indicating broadly to them that they “are loved,” which may reinforce an important part of their desired self-identities.
You may think to yourself: “I get it, but I am super lovable!” We find that almost every human who thinks this about themselves has really only become good at loving themselves. These people are completely useless to others from a relationship standpoint.
The only way to become actually “lovable” in a way that allows a person to secure relationships with new partners is to practice making people fall in love with them and study the science associated with the topic. Love can be systematically and reliably induced. We discuss methods for inducing the emotion of love in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.
The Sneaky Lure
The Sneaky Lure is the last of the ineffective lures we will discuss at length.
While we find it dumb, the Sneaky Lure strategy is remarkably common among adolescent males. This strategy entails progressing towards a sexual interaction with a target while doing everything one can to prevent rejection by attempting to occlude the fact that the goal is sex.
Deployment of the Sneaky Lure commonly proceeds along lines like:
- Come back to my place, I don’t want you to risk going home drunk.
- Let’s just sit next to each other and watch shows together.
- Let’s wrestle a bit!
When questioned as to whether the pursuer thinks their actions are leading to sex, sneaky strategists will strongly imply they don’t. Either they don’t really have a plan for when they reveal their true intentions or their plan is to have their target conclude: “Well, we have gone this far, let’s just get this over with.”
This strategy can also be utilized over a period of time in which the prospective partner tries to get as close to dating their target as they can while avoiding anything that makes the relationship official because doing so would give their target a chance to concretely reject them. Essentially, the pursuer prefers the imprisonment of a “Schrodinger’s Relationship” to even a chance of rejection.
The worst-case scenario with this strategy involves investing an enormous amount of time and energy in befriending a target with the expectation that this will lower the barriers that must be overcome for one’s target to agree to sex or a relationship, only to be turned down in the end. When this happens, implementers of this strategy often have the gall to actually get angry at their targets. This is one of the many origin points of the “nice guy” cliché—pursuers who get angry at their targets for their own poorly thought-through strategies involving enormous upfront investment without a guaranteed payout.
Why do people adopt this strategy if it is both ineffective and likely to lead to a terrible outcome? Simply put, because being rejected hurts.
Those who make some initial forays into the dating world quickly learn that in the majority of cases, when they make their intentions clear, they get rejected. They may also notice that rejection does not arise when they do not make their intentions clear. These individuals may come to be subconsciously trained to believe that strategies involving a direct approach simply do not work, whereas strategies involving an indirect—sneaky—approach might work. They may even delude themselves into thinking that various “subtle cues,” such as body language, hints dropped in jokes, and innuendo act as sufficient notice of their intentions to their targets. (For the record, they do not).
The Sneaky Lure strategy is also sometimes used by individuals on the casual dating market, leading to the classic “friend zone” failure scenario in which prospective partners waste months or even years building a friendship with targets they really only wanted to date.
Recognizing when you are implementing the Sneaky Lure strategy is as easy as thinking through your romantic and sexual interests and asking yourself if you have explicitly shared them with your target(s). If not, why not? Are you obscuring your intentions because you think your target won’t be friends with you if they know? Do you not share your intentions because you believe they will be met with rejection? Make sure you actually have evidence substantiating your fears, as it is likely that you merely fear rejection and not a loss of your target’s friendship. It is fairly easy to remain friends with someone after clearly stating there is no sexual interest as long as said someone does not keep pushing for escalation . . . well, ish—when a person turns another down, they often lose respect for them.
Sneaky Copulation and Female Mimicry
A specific method of utilizing The Sneaky Lure reflects a set of behavior patterns similar to those observed in other species, known as sneaky copulation and female mimicry. Among some species that exhibit sexual dimorphism, a certain percentage of males may transform themselves to look like females. For example, among bluehead wrasses, a species of fish featuring territorial males that are typically much larger and differently colored than females, some males “choose” to be smaller and colored like a female, then use this disguise to slip under the nose of the more masculine males and get close to females who wouldn’t have anything to do with them were they privy to their ultimate goal—breeding with them.
Sexual mimicry most often occurs among species whose females, when given a choice, will choose larger, ultra-masculine males. Among such species, only the largest, most masculine men will get to breed and pass on their genes—unless, of course, some males figure out how to disguise themselves as females, infiltrate female groups, and occasionally covertly inseminate (rape or pressure into sex) their female compatriots.
Some human males attempt to exploit a similar strategy. These men typically adopt “white knight” personalities and loudly yet submissively signal how pro-woman they are in a subconscious attempt to infiltrate protected spaces where they feel they will face less competition from other men.
Now let’s be clear, we are not saying all men who exhibit “white knight” behavior are leveraging a sneaky copulation strategy. Most white knight types are genuinely trying to help people. What we assert instead is that a certain small portion of white knight types are indeed leveraging this strategy. We know of some women who were victims of this strategy personally, so we can say for a fact that it does happen.
Fortunately, these individuals are often easy to spot. When a person believes something because of a logical thought process, they will likely have a number of areas in which their view deviates from the party line. When someone is using their ideology as a sexual strategy, they will almost always adhere to the party line to the letter and change their views to match group consensus as said consensus evolves. This is because they aren’t really fighting for their own beliefs—rather, they are making an effort to signal beliefs they think will gain them sexual access to a community that would otherwise expel individuals like them.
The Pygmalion Lure
The desirability of a pursuer who leverages a Pygmalion Lure stems less from who they are and more from their capacity to transform their target. We have a strong bias in favor of this lure, as it is the one that initiated our relationship.
Targets choose pursuers utilizing the Pygmalion Lure because the target believes that they can become better people themselves (or people more closely aligned with their ideal selves) through a relationship with said pursuers. Because the Pygmalion Lure offers, quite literally, a shot at one’s greatest ambitions, this is arguably the best lure for creating an effective long-term relationship.
Pygmalion Lures typically yield one of two types of relationships:
- One-Way Pygmalion Relationships: In these relationships, one partner leverages the Pygmalion Lure while the other presents the Power Surrender Lure. The surrendering partner is drawn to the relationship because the Pygmalion partner made them / is making them into someone they want to be, while the Pygmalion partner has affection for the surrendering partner because the Pygmalion partner is able to craft their perfect mate. These relationships are less stable than Two-Way Pygmalion Relationships because if the partner improving the other fails to actively improve themselves at the same time, they may reach a point at which they have improved their partner as much as they can (it is hard for you to craft someone better than yourself). Should this point be reached, the relationship loses value to the individual looking to improve.
- Two-Way Pygmalion Relationships: These are relationships in which both partners use the Pygmalion Lure to secure each other. Both parties believe the primary value of the other individual is that that person improves them. One-Way Pygmalion Relationships can smoothly evolve into Two-Way Pygmalion relationships so long as the person shaping the other has their ego in check enough to realize when their creation has surpassed them. In other words, it is entirely possible to transform someone far weaker than you into someone even stronger than you, who is capable of helping you, in turn, become even better. Two-Way Pygmalion Relationships are one of the most stable relationship structures for long-term, fulfilling, and beneficial relationships.
While relationships based on a Pygmalion Lure require significantly more maintenance than relationships created through most other lures (in the sense that one is acting not only as a romantic partner, but also a life coach, career coach, image consultant, and advisor) that maintenance typically benefits both parties’ careers, personalities, and identities. We would argue the results make the effort well worth the hassle. Pygmalion Relationships only lose their stability if one partner decides that they no longer need to improve or when partners come to disagree about who they ought to become (a partner trying to transform a person into someone they do not want to be is not only of no value, but it is also something most people would want to avoid—no matter how amazing they are, the target would be better off staying single than being with them).
The core downside of the Pygmalion lure is that to use it, the pursuer must simultaneously be a genuinely accomplished person—at least accomplished enough to command the respect of their targets—and capable of providing genuinely good counsel. If I (Simone) did not desperately want to be more like Malcolm from the moment I first met him, his offer to help transform me into my ideal self would have lacked allure. If his initial advice to me hadn’t made a huge positive impact on my life, I would not have continued our relationship.
Another large downside to the Pygmalion Lure is that while it creates good relationships when a person finds a target who is genuinely compelled by the idea, finding such a target requires a huge throughput of potential candidates, as few people are looking for a relationship in which constant self-improvement is an expectation and most are uncomfortable with the idea of a partner who wants them to be better than they are right now. Those using the Pygmalion Lure should expect to be turned down far more often than those only looking for companionship and sex.
In addition, Pygmalion relationships require partners to disregard many classic relationship red flags. When Malcolm told me he was excited to work with me to rewrite my personality, overhaul my wardrobe, change my accent, pick new friends, change my habits down to what I ate/drank, and transform every aspect of who I was, I became excited by the vision we had for my potential and was flattered to learn he believed I had the cognitive capacity and work ethic to become the person both he and I dreamed I might become.
Today’s prevailing wisdom marks such propositions as hostile and possibly even abusive. It is considered inappropriate to tell someone you love they can improve themselves through hard work and personal sacrifice, to not accept one’s partner “for who they are,” and to actively encourage them to change significant aspects of themselves. When I met Malcolm, I was a social media manager living with crippling social anxiety that prevented me from interacting with the outside world, I couldn’t even leave my house to eat at restaurants. Within a few years of meeting Malcolm, I had become the CEO of a portfolio of international businesses that do over a hundred million dollars in sales a year, I was traveling between countries/continents every month, I regularly lectured at top universities (including Stanford, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon), and I had picked up a graduate degree from Cambridge along the way—not to mention levels of calm, self-confidence, and contentedness that before I could not have fathomed possible. Without Malcolm’s intervention, and without transforming myself into someone I wanted to be, I would have plateaued and lived as I did for the rest of my adult life. To many, the key sacrifice of a Pygmalion-Lure-generated relationship is that, by definition, your partner does not love you “for who you are,” but rather for the potential of who you have the capacity to become.
How to Use the Pygmalion Lure
The steps necessary to seduce someone using the Pygmalion Lure are neither as self-evident as many of the other lures nor delineated in other books, so we believe they warrant a walkthrough.
To use the Pygmalion Lure, engage the target in questions about who they want to be and why, then talk them through the process of developing a strategy and goals that will get them where they want to be. If interested, the target will implement the strategies they crafted over the course of discussions you had with them on dates. If the strategy is working, on their own time, you will see them individually, refining even more ideas and bringing them to you for discussion. If your target finds these conversations help them improve—and they are the type of person who craves continued improvement—they will naturally move toward a closer relationship with you.
Deployment of the Pygmalion Lure does not start around questions of self-betterment like cliché self-help systems do. Instead, the first few dates should be entirely focused around discovering the target’s values and working with them to parse out how those values tie to their long-term goals. If the target says something vague or generic that indicates they have never really thought through what they value (common responses indicating this include proclaimed desires to be happy, fulfilled, or “make the world a better place”), encourage them to dig deeper. If the target desires happiness or fulfillment, for example, ask them how they came to conclude that their entire life should be devoted to optimizing a particular emotional state. In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, we call this value, the thing(s) one is trying to maximize with one’s life, a person’s “objective function.”
Once an objective function has been established, help the target develop a plan for maximizing that objective function, focusing on both granular, immediate tasks, and a larger game plan. At no point is it necessary to tell a target: “I will help you realize your goals.” The very nature of these interactions should make that apparent. In fact, at no point should a pursuer using the Pygmalion Lure even be telling their partner what to strive for or how to see their objective function realized. Pygmalion relationships are not about you imposing your values and goals on another person. Instead, your primary purpose when deploying a Pygmalion Lure should be to help the target think through their own values and goals—and to stick to plans they independently develop.
While this process can be difficult to execute, our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, provides a step-by-step walkthrough, featuring the tools necessary to holistically discuss all the things a potential partner might choose to establish as core values and reasons to live. Refer to The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life if you are having trouble developing a framework that allows you to talk through questions of values and goals in a way that doesn’t just push a target toward your own belief set. Pushing a partner toward your own goals or belief set instead of helping them unfurl their own will backfire on those hoping to deploy the Pygmalion Lure; the moment a target feels like their pursuer, rather than they themselves, are dictating who they become, the pursuer has lost any chance at a successful relationship.
The Dangers of False Pygmalion Relationships
Two categories of relationship can look very similar to a Pygmalion Lure relationship but are not. In one False Pygmalion Relationship type, a Damsel in Distress Lure is used to attract a target who, through “saving” this prospective partner, is able to fulfill a certain desired sense of self (which we will talk about shortly). In this relationship type, the core value of the relationship to the pursuer is getting to feel like a hero, not unlocking the target’s raw potential. In another False Pygmalion Relationship type, one partner essentially acts as the other’s service submissive and emotional support, a form of the Love Lure in which a prospective partner does whatever is asked in service to their target’s goals while supporting them in moments of emotional weakness. These False Pygmalion Relationship categories are worth noting as they are quite different in the dynamics and the risks they create when contrasted with true Pygmalion Lure generated relationships.
In both of the above relationship types, a target “trading up” for a better partner once they achieve the toe hold in life they were searching for is common, whereas when the Pygmalion Lure is used, trading up is a rare occurrence. Essentially, targets in the above scenarios are more likely to see the pursuer as a disposable source of free labor, resources, and emotional support while they move toward their goals, as opposed to seeing their pursuer as the architect of their identities and success.
The easiest way to tell these two types of relationships apart is the specific type of self-improvement being attempted. In these False Pygmalion Relationships, the pursued partner is often attempting to either pull themselves up from rock bottom (get out of a bad situation, get off drugs, etc.) or they are using their partner to achieve a specific goal (get into and through grad school, get a specific promotion, etc.). This is critically different from a Pygmalion Lure Relationship in which similar goals may very well exist but are ultimately secondary to rewriting one’s core identity.
A good example of this difference would be what is expected when Partner A comes home crying after failing to achieve some aspect of A’s goal for themselves. In a False Pygmalion Relationship, Partner B will be expected to give emotional support and remind Partner A they are still loved. On the other hand, in a Pygmalion Lure Relationship, such a reaction would be seen as enabling weakness and a major violation of trust. Instead, Partner A would expect Partner B to gently ask them what they gain from their current emotional state and to refocus them on the correct next steps without rewarding negative emotional reactions with attention, which will only make such unproductive emotional reactions harder to control in the future. In a Pygmalion Relationship, the thing a pursuer’s partner loves about them is their ideal selves. Indulging an emotional outburst from one’s current, less-than-ideal self is more likely than not going to hamper the emergence of one’s ideal self, of the person one’s partner actually loves and cares about.
Subconsciously, people want attention more than they want happiness, so by rewarding negative emotional states with attention, you can actually train a person to be more unhappy in the long run or enter states of unhappiness with a smaller triggering event—especially when in the presence of their partner. One key difference in Pygmalion Relationships involves valuing your partner’s long-term mental wellbeing over the immediate catharsis and support of consoling them—and more importantly, having your partner recognize and appreciate those decisions.
This sort of behavior pattern would only be seen as a positive reaction to one’s partner being emotionally distressed in a Pygmalion Relationship and would be a negative behavior pattern in constructive relationships formed by other lures (hence you should not expect the above response in all positive relationships—just this one type). If your partner expects you to recognize and appreciate your long-term wellbeing over your short-term emotional caprices, you know what type of relationship you are in. In other relationship types, one would be better off comforting one’s partner. In this moment, one has a choice between being a source of emotional support for a partner and strengthening one’s relationship with them, but at the cost of subtly conditioning them to associate negative emotional states with a positive outcome (attention). The optimal reaction depends on one’s desired relationship type.
It is not unheard of for people to “trade up” from even Two-Way Pygmalion relationships. People trade up from Pygmalion relationships in very specific circumstances, which are easy to avoid. In False Pygmalion Relationships, an individual may trade up for someone who is more arousing, more prestigious, or more successful. In a Pygmalion relationship, trade-ups really only happen consistently when there is a perception that one party has stopped trying to improve themselves/their partner, or that the goals each party is striving have shifted or might never have been the same to begin with. For example, one partner may decide to become a stay-at-home dad and this decision does not align with his partner’s perception of his potential. This can be avoided so long as partners take time to ensure the alignment of their goals and values.
The stability in Pygmalion Relationships stems from the belief that one has attached themselves to an appreciating asset. From the perspective of a Pygmalion Lure relationship, the concept of people leaving their current relationships in the name of hypergamy is preposterous (hypergamy is the act of choosing to leave one’s current partner for another of superior status). This is because even if Pygmalion-bonded partners were to meet better prospective partners, they could not trust that those partners would continue to improve, whereas they have already proven to each other that both of them are committed to constant improvement. Hypergamy is only a threat to partners who are stagnant, which is why it presents such a threat to individuals who lean on Dominance Lure tactics.
All that said, Pygmalion Lures have some glaring downsides, many of which we have already addressed, but which should be highlighted again.
Specifically, Pygmalion Relationships:
- Require more effort to maintain than other relationships.
- Are only accessible to people who have their shit together to a degree that others find enviable, as that envy fuels the early stages of the relationship.
- Require more confidence to effectively execute than any other relationship type
- Require a huge throughput of potential candidates to find a person who may genuinely be interested.
- May lead to more damage if terminated (vis a vis typical relationship termination), especially if one or more partner begins to see another as critical to their self-improvement.
The Status Lure
The Status Lure is the closest thing that exists to a “Happiness Lure.” Desire for happiness is not a strong enough drive in humans to make it effective as a lure on its own. People talk up happiness, but consistently fail to make the hard choices necessary to chase it, because at the end of the day, our instinctual laziness is stronger, and happiness just doesn’t feel as good as we pretend it does. You cannot convince a person to date you just by saying that they will be happier through doing so. On the other hand, even just a shot at increased status is something over which people would gladly bludgeon their happiness with a lead candlestick and bury it in the backyard.
To leverage the Status Lure, signal to your target that you will increase their status in exchange for a relationship.
This lure can be utilized by a huge range of people: Celebrities, individuals from notable families, extremely attractive people, wealthy people, drummers in local rock bands, proud Bugatti owners, award-winning competitive archers, accomplished academics, or even just average Joes who made a cameo appearance in the latest trendy movie or TV series. What matters is what the target believes has value. The only thing necessary is that the prospective partner is able to sell to the target that, through a romantic or sexual interaction with them, some of their “status magic” will rub off on the target. Perceived status is the prospective partners’ primary value.
This dating strategy is not very effective at securing sex—or at least a lot less effective than you may think (even many famous and super-wealthy individuals struggle to get laid). Even when executed by a local celebrity, Dominance Lures crush Status Lures in their effectiveness at securing sex.
That said, Status Lures can be helpful in casual dating markets and with securing long-term relationships. Unfortunately, after thoroughly assimilating into whatever status you offer, your partner may eventually climb high enough in status themselves to leave you for someone with even higher status—unless you have done something to significantly increase the value you provide to your partner that is unique to you, perhaps by having kids with your target, providing them with some other lure, or increasing your status at a rate faster than that of your target. Be especially wary of if the status that is attracting the target is tied to an intrinsically decreasing asset. This scenario tragically comes into play among individuals who were married for the status associated with their looks. These individuals ultimately get left by their targets for younger, better models as soon as they age and lose that aesthetic value.
Remember: Everyone is both a pursuer and the target, so in the above scenario, both parties may have been using the Status Lure. Problems result when one partner’s status depreciates in value over time (athletic prowess, looks, fertility) while the other partner’s status appreciates (wealth, job title). A relationship in which one partner is primarily valued for their looks and the other is primarily valued for their wealth is almost guaranteed to fail in the long term because looks decrease over time while wealth typically increases.
The Self-Identity Lure
The Self-Identity Lure revolves around convincing the target that not dating or having sex with the pursuer will somehow violate their self-identity or otherwise give rise to cognitive dissonance (e.g., “If you will not sleep with me, everything you believe to be true about yourself and your character is a lie—you are not the X that you claim to be”). It is depressing how effective this lure can be when executed competently.
This is not to say that someone with low social intelligence attempting this lure will not comically crash and burn. Failed deployment of the Self-Identity Lure classically features a jilted prospective partner wailing at their target: “What—are you gay/racist/homophobic or something???” in hopes that some deep-seated insecurity will lead the target to conclude their only recourse is to sleep with their accuser.
The Self-Identity Lure has nevertheless been effectively used by particularly cunning individuals for centuries. For example, there are recorded incidents in the courts of famous European royals where pious and chaste young women were convinced to sleep with high-status individuals out of wedlock through being convinced it was the most pious thing to do and that to not have sex would be an act of impropriety and self-indulgence (with the pursuer arguing family fealty stands above social conventions).
There are two approaches one might take to deploying this lure:
- Attacking the Target’s Identity
- Cultivating Cognitive Dissonance in the Target
Attacking the Target’s Identity
The pursuer identifies something incredibly important to the way the target sees themselves, then builds a compelling argument that not sleeping with or dating them would violate that treasured element of the target’s identity. These days this often manifests as responding to rejection from a self-identified “good, tolerant, open-minded person” with an accusation of racism, sizeism, transphobia, misogyny, or some other form of bigotry and intolerance. Many people who want to see themselves as socially conscious operate on autopilot and would rather date or have sex with someone they found repulsive than genuinely see themselves as a racist/sexist/transphobic bigot.
There are a number of other paths that follow this same basic strategy. For example, if a target sees themselves as rebellious or as the type of person who breaks societal conventions, a pursuer can leverage that aspect of their identity subtly to push past points on a date at which the target might otherwise turn them down—in this case, by implying that continuing past the target’s comfort zone is the “rebellious choice,” meaning that playing it safe would clash with the target’s identity.
Cultivating Cognitive Dissonance in the Target
Rather than looking for something important to the target’s identity, a pursuer may encourage them to clarify things they believe about the world, then leverage those beliefs to create cognitive dissonance.
The Pursuer may, for example, get a target to agree to a statement like: “Any action that makes all parties involved feel good is a good action.” Next, they would escalate that logical pathway by getting the target to admit that they would find sex with the pursuer pleasurable—or at least that it would be very unlikely to be unpleasant. After clarifying these two statements (things that make people feel good = good, and sex makes people feel good), a decision to not have sex with the pursuer will likely create cognitive dissonance in the target. Most people would rather sleep with someone, even someone they are not attracted to, than experience cognitive dissonance. If the target still does not want to sleep with or date the pursuer, the pursuer gets them to list explicitly why not, then attempts to create cognitive dissonance against each of these pillars using a similar strategy.
Once you accept that most humans are just blindly stumbling through life trying to fulfill some vision of who they are, you will begin to notice how easy it is to manipulate this vision to get them to do what you want. After you gain a clear understanding of what this vision is for one of these autopilot humans, you can lead them around like a dog on a leash. This is doubly true if you are confident, non-hideous, non-threatening, not desperate, and comfortable being you. Unfortunately, failing at any of these things can set off an internal warning system in people’s brains, telling them to be suspicious of your intentions and to look down on you.
While these strategies are unnervingly effective against people living on autopilot, they are completely ineffective against people who have a deep philosophical framework behind what they want from their lives (see: The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life). These tactics are also only effective on people who are less intelligent than you, though not so stupid that they are below autopilot level. People at below autopilot levels of intelligence cannot hold a train of thought and are more influenced by biological impulses than their autopilot, which is trying to maximize a certain image of who they are. This method is completely ineffective on people in this category, though dominance-based strategies should work extremely well.
Essentially, the pursuer is looking for targets with strongly held, complex convictions—but convictions they adopted not because of the logic behind them, but because of the way these convictions make them feel about themselves.
Self-Identity Lure strategies are great for short-term dating and sex (they completely smoke dominance-based lures in terms of effectiveness when applied to higher-value targets), but are not very useful in securing high-quality, long-term relationships unless you want a pet more than a partner—and if you do, you are probably on autopilot trying to make yourself feel powerful or earn the admiration of others and thus will be unable to effectively execute this strategy. To say it another way, most people using this strategy have learned to use it through subtle subconscious training (e.g., “I notice that if I claim people are transphobic/fatphobic/racist when they turn me down, I am more likely to get laid; I like getting laid, so I shall increase the behavior that leads to the reward.”).
The Damsel in Distress Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure
The Damsel in Distress Lure is a passive form of the Self-Identity Lure. Essentially, the prospective partner exhibits (or feigns) a need for the target. This need thereby attracts the target, as it presents an opportunity to reinforce a “heroic” part of that target’s self-identity (“I am a good person / I help those in need”).
The most common manifestation of this dynamic involves a stable individual dating a distressed individual because doing so reinforces their own magnanimous and heroic self-image: Visualize the stable, rich guy who dates the poor, unstable gal because giving her stability and helping her get her life on track reinforces his image of himself as a good person. That said, you can frame yourself as the necessary yin to whatever yang your target may need to “complete” their self-identity. Is your target an academic? Be the acolyte who desperately wants and needs their guidance as you work to continue their legacy. Is your target the Magician? Be the Lovely Assistant.
Relationships of this nature can be powerful for casual daters as both parties typically benefit greatly—at least when the prospective partner’s need for the target is real. Specifically, the hero gets to feel great about helping someone and the damsel (gender-neutral in this case) gets to be helped and get through a rough time in his or her life.
However, relationships originating from Damsel-in-Distress lures do not make for good long-term relationships because either:
- The hero (the target) successfully and resoundingly saves the damsel (the prospective partner), and now that there is nothing to fix, the hero no longer gains much value from a continued relationship (or the damsel, being saved, moves on). In this case, the hero often moves on to focus their attention on other partners or projects.
- The hero repeatedly fails at helping the damsel due to persistent relapses on the part of the damsel, causing the hero to lose any cognitive reward gained from helping the prospective partner and ends the relationship—or perhaps worse still, the couple falls into a stable but toxic codependent relationship.
These relationships are fine for someone just learning to date and can be beneficial to both parties in scenarios in which one appreciates their partner for what they do to help them while the other appreciates their partner for helping them reinforce a desired self-image.
As we mentioned before, these relationships are easy to mistake for Pygmalion Lure relationships and are critically different.
If you are unsure whether you are just someone’s “hero” or the pursuer in a Pygmalion Lure relationship, ask yourself:
- Does the target think of me more like their crutch (that helps support them so they can live a normal life) or more like their home gym (that improves them through challenge and work)? A crutch is disposable once a person has healed; a gym is not—so long as one wants to keep improving.
- Is my primary value to the target (in their eyes) my advice, labor, money, security, or emotional support? If your value to your partner consists of anything other than your advice, you are just their “hero.” If you still aren’t sure, think through how often they seek your advice and how often they take it.
- If my partner were feeling emotionally vulnerable, would it improve their trust in me more were I to (a) calmly point out their lapse of emotional control and help them regain their composure or (b) comfort them? A person who sees your comforting them as a betrayal of trust demonstrates that, to them, you are a tool for constant self-improvement more than an interchangeable emotional security blanket.
The Admiration Lure Variant of the Self-Identity Lure
The Admiration Lure simply entails demonstrating a high amount of admiration for one’s target. The target then dates the pursuer because they like the feeling of being admired. This tactic is often employed alongside other lures and is uniquely effective at securing dominant partners. We might go so far as to say admiration plays a critical role within any mate acquisition strategy targeting an individual that tends towards the dominant end of the sexuality spectrum. Dominant individuals often experience strong cognitive dissonance when they feel a partner does not actively admire them.
The Admiration Lure differs somewhat from other lures as it is a necessary component of almost any strategy when targeting a specific personality type, naturally dominant individuals. Failure to properly deploy it lies at the core of a huge number of failed mate acquisition strategies. This is particularly true among heterosexual and bisexual women, who (statistically speaking) are more likely than other groups to be hunting exclusively for actively dominant partners (this is not conjecture, but rather based on a large volume of data, see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more detail—bisexual women actually become aroused by acting submissive in a sexual context at a rate of 80%, the highest of any demographic).
The most common mistake people make when trying to secure a dominant partner involves an attempt to raise one’s stature in a partner’s eyes by dismissing something about them as unimpressive (be it an achievement, a personal characteristic, a meaningful possession, distinct knowledge, an important milestone reached, etc.). While this kind of play MAY sometimes be effective at asserting dominance in purely social contexts, deflating a target’s ego in an effort to increase one’s own perceived value is instant death to a strategy designed to secure a dominant partner.
We have also observed individuals with a strong preference for a dominant partner who, for whatever reason, see it as demeaning to express frequent admiration toward another person. Typically this takes the form of someone with a superficially high and fragile ego they fear might be damaged through any display of admiration. We have yet to see such an individual maintain a high-value dominant partner in a stable, happy relationship.
Discomfort with expressing admiration presents one reason why professionally successful women who still want a dominant partner have so much trouble securing one. When a person is objectively smarter and further along in their career than their partner and intelligence and career status comprise the things they value most in life, how can they honestly show admiration for that ‘lesser’ partner? If they are someone who is objectively highly successful in the domain they value most, yet they still yearn for a happy relationship with a dominant partner, we strongly recommend that they explore admiring different domains of achievement, specifically domains in which they are weak.
The Admiration Lure is fairly useless if not deployed with genuine conviction. Feigning admiration will not get a person far. We recommend finding something the pursuer truly admires about a target and digging into that when speaking with the target about the manifold ways in which the target impresses them.
Expressing genuine admiration for a partner has near-zero downside risk—other than the fact that admiration alone is unlikely to secure a partner. While a willingness to express admiration is a near prerequisite for securing a dominant partner, expressing admiration toward a submissive or neutral partner in an attempt to augment one’s appeal is still effective and necessary in many cases (just not as often a prerequisite). Learning how to admire other people and believably show that admiration is far more useful than getting good at something like sex if a person wants to secure a healthy relationship with a high-quality partner. Almost every emotionally healthy person gets a strong sense of validation from knowing they are admired and likes to surround themselves with people who yield that validation.
The one caveat of the Admiration Lure may be this: If at some point the pursuer turns off that addictive IV drip of admiration and validation, that action may cause their relationship to take a nosedive. This becomes a genuine risk when the core and only thing the pursuer admires about a person is temporally locked (e.g., good looks or being captain of the football team). Given how hard admiration is to believably fake, we would therefore advise avoiding relationships in which the source of one’s admiration has a clear expiration date.
The Friend with Benefits Lure
Most people have a general idea of how the Friend with Benefits sexual strategy works: A person targets a partner with whom they are already friends and leverage that friendship so the transition into a sexual relationship will not involve a significant escalation of the existing relationship. While we call this the “Friend with Benefits Lure,” it just as often transitions directly into a dating relationship as a friends-with-benefits-style one. The core strategy behind this lure is to make the transition from friendship to a dating or sexual relationship only require a tiny nudge because the target is already someone with whom the pursuer has a strong non-sexual relationship.
This strategy comes very close to the Sneaky Lure and can easily be interpreted as such by the target. The core difference between the two is that, in this strategy, they are friends because they both want to be friends and the escalation of the relationship is a bonus, whereas with the Sneaky Lure, all investment put into the friendship was made with the ultimate goal of securing a sexual relationship.
The Friends with Benefits Lure is a dangerous lure to intentionally use. Close friendships feature significant prior investment and are typically riddled with externalities (a larger friend group that could be disrupted through romantic entanglement). Failure to escalate a friendship to a sexual level can easily lead to resentment and a perception that the pursuer was attempting a Sneaky Lure all along (e.g., they were only faking friendship in an effort to secure sex and/or a relationship).
On the other hand, when executed successfully, the Friends with Benefits strategy can form strong, long-term relationships. When the strategy yields a relationship, and that relationship forms a solid foundation, the pursuer will enjoy one of the best outcomes possible. Consider leveraging this lure if you have strong evidence suggesting your target is interested and if you wish to create a long-term relationship with this person. Do not waste a valuable friendship on this potentially ruinous tactic just for sex or casual dating.
One limitation of relationships formed through this lure is that, given the couple’s history as just friends, it can be very difficult to implement a hierarchy once they are in a committed relationship. This limits the categories of relationship contracts and conflict resolution mechanisms available to such a relationship. We will explore this in detail in the next chapter on relationship contracts. Fortunately, even this one limitation can be avoided if both partners are able to transition from seeing themselves first as friends and secondarily as partners to first as partners with some form of joint purpose that dwarfs their friendship.
Note from the Research:
- One study found that heterosexual men on average prefer opposite-sex friends to whom they are attracted, whereas this is not an important trait when heterosexual women choose friends of the opposite sex. In other words, straight guys prefer their female friends to be hot, whereas straight women don’t care how hot their male friends are. Perhaps males secretly hope the odd female friend might become a friend with benefits and thus preferentially cultivate relationships with individuals to whom they are attracted.
The Long-Term Relationship Lure
Prospective partners deploying the Long-Term Relationship Lure are transparent about looking primarily for a long-term relationship and seek targets who leverage the same lure. Those using this lure believe they are better off in a long-term relationship than they are single or casually dating—the relationship dynamic itself is the goal.
This can either be a fairly effective lure, or it can be the symptom of a lack of appropriate planning.
Sometimes the Long-Term Relationship Lure is implemented by people sleepwalking through life who one day wake up and realize they have passed the age at which they “were supposed to be married.” This is essentially the musical chairs game of choosing a life partner. Those playing this game end with whoever they happen to be with when the music stops or rush around trying to throw other people off chairs. In this game, the music often stops with a sudden realization that the window one gave themselves to find a long-term partner was too short within their life plan (e.g., thinking “I won’t start looking for a husband until I am established in my career, but I also want multiple kids that are biologically mine” doesn’t grant a realistic window of time to find an optimal spouse for most people, as one is usually not established in their career until their mid to late thirties and securing an optimal spouse takes around seven years of work on average).
People in this position often end up in suboptimal relationships for a plethora of reasons. Often their sad outcomes result from living in an extreme state of autopilot, just taking life one day at a time, meaning they haven’t really thought through what they want from life outside of fulfilling some generic vision of a good life. Upon realizing the utter vapidness of this generic vision, these victims of society’s default settings end up having that clockwork meltdown in what our society calls a midlife crisis.
That said, this lure can and does often lead to positive long-term relationships. How to implement the Long-Term Relationship Lure to ensure it does end in a positive relationship depends heavily on an individual’s age and gender.
If you want to try to systematically implement this lure before your late twenties, regardless of your gender, it can be one of the more effective lures out there. The only downside is that if you want to use this lure while you are still young, you are likely to get odd looks, as people don’t expect younger individuals to be transparent about a goal like this. You also may find yourself limited to more conservative partner choices, which can be problematic if a liberal ideology is important to your life goals.
To implement the Long-Term Relationship Lure in your twenties, simply clarify very early on dates that you are looking for a long-term partner and speak with your target about what they are looking for in a long-term partner. People love talking about this sort of thing in a group context, as it can be very juicy and gossipy. This gives you a chance to signal your desires to a larger group. Regardless of your gender, you will have to be aggressive and not rely on innuendo when signaling to a target. People in their early twenties often choose to believe others think the worst of them rather than just read between the lines, so you will need to assume your targets are doing this. Be warned that this lure requires a lot more time and effort (around a couple years) before getting a payout when contrasted with others, as you are asking for a much larger emotional and time commitment with someone than you are when merely offering sex or dating.
As one gets older, optimal deployment of the Long-Term Relationship Lure shifts. For men, it will always be fairly straightforward and will become easier to use as time progresses. As we discuss in subsequent chapters on timing and marketplaces after the age of 30 or so, there are fewer high-quality men looking for long-term relationships than there are women, and there are copious statistics to support this that we will dig into. However, even though women are disadvantaged when looking for a long-term relationship, simply being direct about it can still be one of the best strategies available to them with a few caveats.
The key to successfully implementing this strategy as a woman in your late twenties and over is the internalization that your relative value within the marketplace has shifted (more on the specifics of what causes this in this book’s discussions of timing). Women approaching and beyond age 30 must accept that their position has shifted from gatekeeper to active pursuer. This shift in dynamics can leave one feeling hopeless, but there are actually a lot of decent guys out there waiting for a woman to pursue them. The key words here are “decent guys” and “waiting for a woman to pursue them.”
Decent guys: A woman implementing this strategy will have the most success if she remembers that a male of average attractiveness is liked by only 1 out of 115 women on Tinder. An average man should expect less than a 1% interest rate on the dating market. Half of men are below average in appearance. On dating sites, men below the top 10% in terms of physical attractiveness receive very little outreach from women, even though attractiveness is not often considered to be one of the most critical factors in the success of a long-term relationship. We refer to Tinder as the dating app plays host to some of the most robust and practical studies on this market dynamic that have been performed, but when implementing this strategy, one should not rely heavily on Tinder and other hookup and casual-dating-oriented apps; instead, focus on apps that guys generally only use when looking for a long-term relationship (such as Match or eHarmony).
Waiting for a woman to pursue them: Statistically speaking, most heterosexual women want a man who will pursue her. Realistically speaking, most decent men who actively pursue women and want a long-term relationship have been filtered out of the market by their mid-twenties, as a significant proportion of these proactive men get locked down by partners—but this is not the only reason. Statistically speaking, men who are dissatisfied with a relationship leave at much lower rates than women, meaning good guys leave bad partners more slowly than good girls do (more on this later).
Fortunately, this does not mean a woman using this strategy will never again get to savor male pursuit; women using this strategy need only “activate” this pursuit through some pursuit of their own, initiating contact and letting the targets know explicitly they will not be rejected if they take the emotional risk of pursuit—which unfortunately comes with the cost that men are used to bearing: That the guy will tell the woman he isn’t interested and change how he sees her. Sometimes life sucks. We refuse to lie to our readers and imply that they can secure a partner when in a disadvantaged state without significant personal tribulation. Such feel good assurances are the bread and butter of grifters looking to sell you something.
The Social Construct Lure
This lure entails the use of a structured social construct, such as an arranged marriage or structured matchmaking market, to create a relationship. We could easily write an entire book on the various social constructs used to produce relationships and their varying efficacy, but since this book is primarily written for those searching for relationships and sex within modern Western markets, such information would be of little utility to the reader.
It is difficult to make overarching statements about relationships born from these systems given their vast diversity. Typically, they are on the higher end of relationship quality given the intentionality that often goes into designing these social constructs and the emphasis they often place on a combined mission for the couple (as opposed to encouraging couples to obsess over how in love they are). However, as most of these systems developed a long time ago, social-construct-generated relationships almost always feature strong patriarchal overtones that are distasteful to the modern Western palate.
Some of the most common Social Construct Lures are those based around matchmaking specialists like the Jewish Shadchan, Egyptian Khatba, or the Hindu Astrologer. In these systems, a third-party relationship expert will find and match two individuals or sanctify a parent’s choice of an arranged marriage partner, making it harder for hesitant assigned partners to object.
Another type of Social Construct Lure involves a matchmaking community and/or location. This can be seen among the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Singles Wards or the structured social dances that are still common throughout the world (such as square dancing and contra dancing in frontier North America or the Ceilidh dances of Scotland). These systems enable youth from cultures in which premarital relations are discouraged to meet and mingle in supervised contexts with plenty of rules and chaperones. These controlled interactions are quite effective, but they can create social unrest in that they tend to visually reinforce strong gender discrepancies in terms of market availability. It is common for either males or females to leave these cultures at disproportionate levels—or a portion of a gender’s population is discounted due to a social requirement for matchmaking (land ownership, virginity, devoutness, etc.). In other words, this matchmaking system can make it depressingly obvious there are far more single men than women or vice versa when a person arrives at a matchmaking event with twice as many individuals of one gender.
Many matchmaking systems are far more complex. At the Shanghai marriage market, parents write down details such as the age, height, job, income, education, family values, Chinese zodiac sign, and personality details of their children on a sheet of paper and hang up said paper on strings. These pieces of paper act as advertisements to other parents looking for a match for their child.
Social constructs designed to form relationships can become significantly more formalized and even state run, as can be seen with Singapore’s Social Development Unit (SDU), which offers a combination of professional counsel and dating system technology. While we may see long-term pair-bonding as a totally personal responsibility, across cultures and history these decisions have more often been facilitated by either a person’s family unit, religious subculture, or the state in an effort to maintain and propagate social order, cultural values, and/or stability.
With dropping birth rates around the world beginning to threaten the extinction of certain cultures (Japanese and Korean being the first—but not only—cultures on the list) and seriously damage the world economy, we anticipate we may see these government-run systems become more formalized and aggressive within our lifetime.
Which Lure Should I Use?
It is easy to read through the above section and think: “Well . . . Damn, there are not many good options.” This is true. To speak honestly, society has not handled its transition to sexual freedom and individual autonomy, as well as we like to pretend it has. We discuss this and the associated statistics in detail at the end of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.
That said, every person still has a lure that is optimal for them, given their current goals, gender, and stats (intelligence, attractiveness, age, wealth, etc.).
To help you out, we will quickly recap the major lures, dividing them into three categories:
- Can be effective
- Extremely situational
- Almost never effective
We will discuss each of these three categories in the context of lures effective at securing either sex or healthy, long-term relationships, as most people reading a guide like this are looking for one of those two things.
Long-Term Relationships
- Can be Effective
- The Pygmalion Lure: This is the king of lures for creating effective, long-term relationships; however, it requires more work to secure and maintain a relationship than other lures. The Pygmalion Lure also necessitates a very high level of initiative, persistence, and self-awareness that many lack.
- The Long-Term Relationship Lure: This is a good lure to implement when young and is still fairly effective as one ages, so long as you are willing to be the active pursuer.
- The Sexual Exploration Lure: This is the only lure on both lists, as while it is effective at obtaining sex, it is also one of the best options available for women over thirty looking for a long-term relationship. The greatest caveat to this lure is that you must be comfortable with your sexuality to use it. Another catch: To implement this lure, you must deal with communities highly intolerant to conservative worldviews.
- The Social Construct Lure: Despite the shade our society casts on things like arranged marriages, they are often more effective than the other strategies available to our generation. Significant drawbacks of this lure include required membership in a community that has the infrastructure to support a social construct lure, the often-misogynistic cultures of these communities, and the non-trivial risk that any third party handling your matchmaking might have interests that are poorly aligned with your own.
- Extremely Situational
- The Friend with Benefits Lure: This lure should only be used to create long-term relationships and carries a high risk. However, when it is successfully deployed, the Friend with Benefits Lure can lead to stable, productive relationships.
- The Status Lure: Luring targets with some sort of status is effective when the status bump you offer is immutably connected to who you are (or is at least very secure). That said, this lure is very dangerous when the status you offer is temporary (e.g., status associated with attractiveness, youth, or a temporary position of leadership).
- The Admiration Lure: This is a solid lure and a near necessity for securing dominant partners. However, mere admiration is rarely effective on its own.
- Almost Never Effective
- The Damsel in Distress Lure: While this lure may be mutually beneficial for short-term dating, it is dangerous for forming long-term relationships.
- The Love Lure: As we said before, thinking that someone will want to be with you because “you love them” is like thinking that someone will want to be with you because you masturbate while looking at a picture of them.
- The Nice Lure: This is the “nice guy/girl” strategy and is largely ineffective in all circumstances. Do not attempt to obtain a partner by behaving like an over-eager fan/servant. If that type of role in a relationship excites you, find someone looking for that particular flavor in what is called a “service submissive” within the BDSM community using the Sexual Exploration Lure.
Sex
- Can be Effective
- The Sexual Exploration Lure: This is hands down the best strategy to implement when you first decide to start exploring your sexuality. The two core drawbacks are that it requires a medium to high level of social intelligence to implement, especially for men.
- The Self-Identity Based Lure: This lure is uniquely effective at securing targets who are living life on autopilot and the best lure for casual dating and casual sex (assuming you don’t need to respect your partner). The major drawback is the type of people looking to have sex or casually date people they don’t respect are rarely self-aware enough or have the social intelligence to competently implement the lure.
- Extremely Situational
- The Dominance Lure: Dominance presents a very useful lure for any gender with low social intelligence that is only looking for sex. While understanding the mechanics behind the Dominance Lure can have utility for those of above-average intelligence, there is virtually no value in practicing it, as other strategies are strictly better, lower effort, and less risky. Under no circumstances do we recommend using dominance as a lure to obtain anything more than casual sex.
- Almost never effective
- The Sneaky Lure: While the sneaky lure is effective at preventing explicit rejection, it sucks at most everything else and features high risks.
- The Easy Lure: This is one of those lures from which nothing good can come. Even though it may help women attain low-effort sex, it has a high probability of putting them in a dangerous situation.
Relationship Contracts
T
here is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity).
The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend’s recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend’s ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier.
Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action.
This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.
These template contracts are not always well-communicated and differ between social groups. This can lead to unintentional contract violations and the breakdown of otherwise healthy relationships. For example, within some template contracts, flirting with someone is considered infidelity, while in others, an individual may not think twice about it. Assuming your partner is going to be operating on the same template contracts as you will set you up for disaster.
Let’s take a moment to look at the stats so that we can better appreciate why these mismatches are so common. One study showed that ten percent of the US population considers watching porn to be a form of cheating. What if your partner is among that ten percent and you are not? If you consume porn, you would therefore think you are golden within your relationship contract, whereas your partner would see it as you committing a clear violation—you could easily end up cheating in their eyes without ever intending to.
But wait—it gets messier. Thirty-six percent of college-age women and thirty-nine percent of college-age men said that oral contact with another person’s genitals counted as sex when the question was framed as them doing it, but when the question was framed as their partner doing it, sixty-two percent of women and sixty-three percent of men counted it as sex (the sample size of this study was robust as well, at 839). As you can see, when people don’t explicitly delineate contract terms and definitions, people will subconsciously define the expected norms of the contract in their favor—especially after they have broken an aspect of a contract they may have known was an expectation. This is a product of the phenomenon called the actor-observer effect. This cognitive bias allows one to give oneself the benefit of the doubt to maintain a positive self-image (“It was a one-time thing, and I was drunk, so it doesn’t count”), but it does not extend this courtesy to others.
Another larger problem is that these template contracts were written into the fabric of society centuries ago—before birth control, before it was common for women to have jobs, before online dating, and when people’s life spans were much shorter. Even if we just focus on one of these points, how is a template for marriage, written in an age in which it was expected that a woman would not have a job, supposed to practically apply to a modern relationship?
The template contracts society gives us simply do not produce effective, happy relationships for people living in the twenty-first century. The good news is that this problem is very easy to fix: Just be explicit with your partners about the ways a relationship contract with you differentiates from common templates—or better yet, choose a specific and optimal position to take on every element of relationships that matters, building a custom contract from the ground up.
Even when just casually dating someone, there are a few points that should be explicitly clarified. Specifically, be sure to:
- Define infidelity: In implied societal contracts, definitions of infidelity range from sleeping with someone else without first gaining one’s partner’s consent to merely holding hands with someone of another gender, so it is crucial to clarify what infidelity will be within your relationship. For example, is sleeping in the same bed with someone of a gender an individual is attracted to (with clothing on) cheating?
- Define your Cost Sharing Strategy: Who pays for what in various circumstances? This changes dramatically between template contracts and can be quite the sore spot for some. For example, do you keep track of expenses in any way? What is the maximum price allowable for surprise gifts? (This one can be a big differentiator in template contracts, as some will see an expensive surprise gift than cannot be returned as a way for an individual to non-consensually force relationship escalation.)
- Define Your Transparency Policy: When does your partner need to tell you what they are doing? Is it OK to go on a two-week vacation without informing your partner? Is it expected that you will share your locations with each other using smartphone apps or things like Google Maps’ location-sharing feature? Do you expect them to give you their email and phone password as your relationship escalates?
Not clarifying these points and then trying to define them in your favor after a “transgression” will not work to your benefit. Telling someone you never clarified that your relationship was supposed to be monogamous, so it is okay you were sleeping with other people is transparently manipulative. You may be able to convince yourself that you did nothing wrong, but you won’t be able to convince most partners of such. Everyone knows the default boyfriend-girlfriend contract in the Western world involves monogamy. If you want to alter this template, there is nothing wrong with that, but you must do so explicitly and with your partner’s consent or expect your partner and their social circle to be angry.
Implied Contract Escalation
There are many ways to inadvertently and unknowingly demonstrate consent to society’s default relationship contracts. Entering these contracts is not always as simple as verbally agreeing to be someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend. For example, according to most Western society default templates, after a certain number of dates, after having sex, or after having spent a certain period of time dating, a portion of the population will begin to assume you have entered into a relationship. At this point, your partner, their friends, and your own friends may become angry at you if they find out you have been sleeping with or dating other people. Even though you never explicitly agreed to a relationship or monogamy, most of society will assume you implicitly accepted these terms through your actions because you did not explicitly opt out.
Bear in mind that:
- The implied escalation points of default social contracts differ widely between individuals and many individuals don’t have them at all. This is yet another reason to not presume that you and your partner are running off the same template. Research on people in the US found men don’t typically think of themselves as dating until four to six dates have passed, while women consider themselves dating after between two and three dates on average.
- Even though many people do not operate using societal default contracts and only allow themselves to assume a relationship has escalated after an explicit conversation, a relationship guide would be woefully incomplete if it did not mention that some people will nevertheless be operating under these assumptions. In the same way, it is worth guarding yourself against STIs even though not every partner has them, it is worth avoiding mismatched expectations among those with whom you regularly interact.
- Even if the person you are dating/having sex with is not one of those people who thinks relationships can escalate without an explicit conversation, that does not mean that others in your lives will hold this belief. For example, a sex partner’s parent believing that you are seriously dating can cause a big fuss when they see you with someone else at a supermarket. Again, it sucks that society works this way and that people don’t mind their own business, but someone not minding their own business can still negatively impact your life—you should still look both ways before crossing the street even at a red light.
The most catastrophic instances of implied relationship escalation are “common law marriage” conditions, which can functionally and legally marry two people who have been dating and living together for various periods of time within specific geographies. However, these are much rarer and more restrictive than you might imagine.
Fortunately, outside of the odd “common law marriage” and honor killings in regions where this book is almost certainly not going to circulate, there are no catastrophic repercussions for breaking one of these accidentally entered into societal template contracts. Nevertheless, breaking these contracts can come with a social cost to you and to your reputation.
In violating a societal template contract, you run the risk of making people doubt whether they can trust other implicit contracts they might assume they have with you, which lowers your reputation. Peers may also attempt to shame you as a way to reinforce the importance of social order.
It is easy to avoid misunderstandings caused by perceived tacit agreement to a contract. Simply communicate your intentions to your partner. If you do not want to deal with the terms of a “casual dating” relationship, just make sure that within the first few dates, you have told your partner explicitly that either you do not consider yourself to be dating them or that you expect the relationship to have terms that differ from the societal template, and consider putting this notification in writing after delivering it in person to create a clear record of your societal default contract amendment. Do this while being aware that nosy friends and family members might still make assumptions that lead to undesired consequences.
If you fail to communicate your desired relationship terms to your partner because you fear they will not agree to them, then you know for a fact you are deceiving your partner through omission. While this can be an effective strategy in the short term, it is not recommended. Such deception typically ends in discovery within three months or so and has a fairly high probability of leading to retaliatory reactions that can meaningfully impact your life (calling your boss, keying your car, destroying prized positions, spreading rumors, etc.). Failure to communicate clear intentions is rarely worth the risk when there are probably plenty of people out there willing to agree to the relationship contract you want, assuming your desired terms are not completely unreasonable and one-sided, in which case, it’s not so much a contract as it is a plan to screw your partner over.
Marriage Contracts
While casual relationships can usually get by using slightly modified societal template contracts, marriage contracts typically need to be rewritten completely. Marriage presents by far the single most important social contract into which people enter during their lifetimes. Modeling your personal marriage contract off a societal template is completely mental. Worse, if you don’t explicitly alter the societal template, some elements of that societal template will be legally applied to your relationship and life. If society thinks you should share income or women should raise the children, and you haven’t negotiated something else, tough luck: You could be legally forced down that path in the event of a divorce (and you might be forced down that path even if you have negotiated something else, depending on the country in which you live). Unlike a normal relationship contract, a marriage contract should always be written from the ground up to ensure every aspect of it yields the type of relationship you want.
Appendix: If you are looking for a place to start when designing a marriage contract, it can be helpful to design the contract around achieving a specific “theme,” such as mutual happiness, fighting for a common ideological goal, raising children, self-improvement, etc. If you want help thinking through this, we created a list of common themes in the appendix under the Common Marriage Contract Themes section on page 563*.*
Download a Contract Template: We created a downloadable contract template that can help you out. You can find it at Pragmatist.Guide/MarriageContract
Clauses to Avoid in Marriage Contracts
Clauses Making Impossible Demands
Despite the fact that nearly every Western marriage ceremony includes the couple making some sort of promise to always love their partner as long as they live, we strongly recommend against including such impractical, impossible clauses in a marriage contract.
Humans cannot control feelings of love or sexual attraction (especially when they cannot control the way their partners age and change behaviorally). Imagine someone said, “love me or I will kill you.” or maybe “find me attractive or I will kill you.” You know very well you wouldn’t be able to force yourself to feel those things—the best you could do is lie about it.
Leave clauses that promise you will feel a certain emotion out of your marriage contract. They belong on the pages of romance novels, not amid social contract clauses that affect the overall happiness and productivity of your short existence.
Clauses Leading to Asset Depreciation
Optimal relationship dynamics naturally improve each partner’s individual desirability and aggregate desirability over time. Avoid building any dynamic into a marriage contract that would lead to any partner losing individual value over time, essentially dooming the future of your alliance. In other words, do not tie an appreciating asset to a depreciating asset, and do not create contracts with clauses that cause assets to depreciate.
This dynamic is most often inadvertently woven into relationship contracts when partners agree to have one partner sacrifice their future in exchange for a desirable short-term state. Such sacrifices appear most commonly in relationship contracts that permit one partner to forego a career to become a dedicated, young, and attractive sexual partner (i.e., trophy wife) or gestational carrier, childcare provider, and housekeeper (i.e., stay-at-home mom/dad).
Once the partner who foregoes a career to assume a short-term role no longer provides value in said role (e.g., the partner ages, loses beauty, becomes infertile, becomes an empty nester, hires house cleaning help, etc.), their value in the relationship plummets. It is common at this time for the partner to become resentful, having, for the most part, surrendered the chance of building a meaningful career and being capable of earning significant income. In some cases, the sacrificing partner also feels entitled (“I spent the best years of my life on this relationship—you owe me!”) and expects to be rewarded as though they are still bringing value to the relationship, even if they become a net drain.
Relationships that require these dynamics are only safe for the sacrificing party if said individual can be absolutely sure their partner will not leave them out of faith in certain aspects of their partner’s personality (not generally a safe bet to make) or if their contract includes clauses that cover the sacrificing party’s support later in life. In the case of a TradCon relationship (a traditional conservative relationship), a husband would need to promise to not divorce his wife and trade her in for a younger model as soon as the kids go off to college and/or if/when the wife becomes unattractive.
Unfortunately, even fairly strong legal contracts are not ironclad and not able to consistently hold people to such promises, leaving such contracts dependent on other strong negative consequences to be even plausibly effective. These consequences might include the mostly extinct traditions of social shaming by one’s community or fear that the jilted partner’s family will literally kill any jilting partner. This is why TradCon like relationships are becoming increasingly uncommon outside of the few remaining pockets that consistently apply these punishments, such as strict religious groups and very conservative geographic regions.
Before you pass through this discussion visualizing heartless men abandoning post-youth women, let us set the record straight when it comes to the gender more likely to terminate a marriage. Women initiate divorce in all relationship types, including TradCon relationships, much more often, with about 70% of divorces initiated by women. We discuss the economic pressures that lead to this later.
Everyone suffers in these relationships.
“Wait,” some might think: “It is really the one who keeps their job who gets screwed. They have half of everything they earned for the past few decades robbed from them to pay off someone who did a job that a minimum wage employee could have done, and worse, a court can overturn any prenup the couple had in place and force the primary breadwinner to pay a huge chunk of their income for the rest of their lives to someone they hate. What if they want to retire or leave their job for something that they are more passionate about? Tough luck, because a judge won’t let them (in many Western countries, it is illegal to leave your current job for a lower-paying position if you are paying child support or alimony). Essentially, these people may become an indentured servant to the state. Heck, some Western countries have even come to define the denial of money to a spouse as abuse! Aren’t the breadwinners really the partners who got more screwed? Aren’t they the partners who need more protection!?”
This is one way of looking at the dynamic. We aren’t choosing sides in this fight; we don’t care who the “victim” is. We merely observe that the system doesn’t work optimally and that people on both sides of this problem need to understand the real risk they take when they enter a long-term relationship with an individual whose income isn’t scaling in parity with theirs, especially when one individual is making major life choices with the assumption of continued joint access to communal income.
“Hold on,” you may be thinking; “If TradCons represent the manner in which relationships have always been structured, how could they be so flawed?”
While TradCons can be thought of as people cosplaying what they think the “historical” style
of marriage was like in the “good old days,” it is important to note that the style of marriage they emulate was relatively short-lived—a kind of wacky fad or social experiment. A nuclear family living together in one house with a dominant male breadwinner and 2.5 kids who stay at home with one parent only really began to exist as a “thing” in the early 1900s when male wage labor started to become common. The model largely died out in the 1970s when female wage labor got big and the “dual earner” family model came to dominate. The only reason we think of this TradCon family structure as “traditional” is that its heyday just happens to coincide with the early days of cinema and the childhoods of the people who wrote the most popular sitcoms. In reality, this relationship structure presents quite the historical anathema.
Personally, we have a predilection for a historical model of marriage called the corporate family.[[39]](#_ftn39) A corporate family exists as a social unit organized around a family business. Historically, corporate families consist of 7.5 children, unmarried family members, and live-in staff. Unlike with other models, children were integrated into the lives of the adults rather than being raised by a corporation, the state, or single parent. Another peculiar feature is that staff of the family are often thought of as part of the family unit/household. Finally, unlike other relationship models, the husband and wife act as a single unit and present themselves to society that way.
Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, estimates this alternate model to have been the way 90% of American families were structured in 1800. For those who don’t read many historical books in which corporate families are featured, two good examples of a corporate (or NeoCorp) family model, would be popular media depictions of mob families and (outside of only having two children) the fictional Addams Family.
The great thing about the corporate model when contrasted with the TradCon model is that both partners’ careers advance at the same rate, removing a key vulnerability contributing to the collapse of many TradCon relationships. The downside to the corporate family model is that the career paths available to the couple become incredibly limited (we would be able to make a lot more money if we didn’t always insist on working together).
Still, with the rise of the gig economy, we expect a “neo-corporate family” iteration of the model to come into vogue, with the NeoCorp iteration of the corporate family model being different in that it exists within a society featuring new innovations in child rearing and more fluid norms related to gender roles.
Defining features of the NeoCorp model:
- The couple acts as a single unit and not as kings of isolated domains of life—though they may choose one partner to be the “face” of a project for convenience.
- The couple identifies as a couple first and as individuals second.
- The model typically includes a unified family business, non-profit, or series of enterprises. This “corporation” is indistinguishable from the family unit. Thus, the name “corporate family.”
- When possible, children are taught through direct involvement in the family business and daily lives of their parents (though this aspect is highly variable).
- Individuals who work in the family business are treated as family (and sometimes live with or date family members). In this way, inclusion in the family unit is more about fighting for a common goal and competence than it is about genetic relation.
- Family wealth and power are centralized in the corporation. Contrast this with a close-knit group of related TradCon families, among which a windfall might be expected to be divvied, whereas in a NeoCorp, any windfall would be stored and grown within a centralized vehicle (such as family businesses, family foundations, family land, etc., which in turn would employ down-and-out family members).
Constructing a Marriage Contract
A shocking number of people get married without first realizing that one partner can’t live a life with children while the other can’t live one without them. The process of constructing a marriage contract prevents such oversights from slipping through by anticipating disagreements that may occur in the future, and pre-negotiating each potential disagreement before it becomes a heated issue.
This process enables partners to create optimal solutions outside of the heat of the moment and establish policies that might not be required for years (or may never be needed, but are nevertheless good to have around, like a lifeboat or fire extinguisher). Negotiating all these terms at once also enables partners to trade favors on points that would otherwise not be traded (for example, while the disagreements tied to thermostat control and child naming will happen years apart, a tradeoff can be made in which a partner agrees to a lower normative temperature in exchange for more control over child naming). More importantly, this process allows you to isolate and identify intractable differences before you have invested years into a marriage.
Observe what does and does not work in other relationships to build a contract that details the expected terms of your relationship and each partner’s expected responses to stressors and potential points of conflict as they arise. Interview every old person willing to be open about their relationship struggles (both those who had failed marriages and successful ones). Also, peruse online threads (such as those in r/relationships and r/deadbedrooms on reddit) detailing conflicts in relationships.
It will be impossible to anticipate everything before marriage, so this contract must be a living document that will change as the relationship and its partners evolve. Prepare a process for adding both level-headed and contentious amendments. Just as good legal contracts have clauses addressing arbitration and legal jurisdiction should conflicts arise, a robust marriage contract will feature clauses outlining a thoughtful, organized process for negotiating contract alterations in a level-headed manner. Keep in mind that all marriages have unexpected complications—be they infertility or one partner getting an ambassadorship in Mongolia. Partners in any relationship will need a way to deal with these complications as they arise.
Delineate how consent from both parties should be granted before changes are implemented. List circumstances in which a partner may not be allowed to propose changes before a cooling-off period (e.g., when they are drunk, injured, overly emotional, high, etc.). The whim of an emotional or otherwise-compromised state does not provide an effective compass for making decisions. Humans are naturally more willing to compromise their better judgment when they see someone they love in pain. Be extremely careful about allowing contract changes to be made when one partner is visibly suffering (emotionally or physically).
Altering Marriage Contracts to Manage Individual Desirability
Probably the most undervalued aspect of a relationship contract is that they can be updated in a manner that improves your individual desirability to a specific partner—especially after that individual desirability, for whatever reason, takes a hit or is relatively unbalanced at the outset.
Some relationships are made sustainable by favorable clauses in a relationship contract. In cases in which a very wealthy, powerful, or famous individual is marrying someone who is not, it is common for the person they are marrying to trade an expectation of fidelity in their contract to secure the partner. Essentially, one partner acknowledges that they bring less to the table in the relationship, but mollifies that fact by letting their partner sleep with whomever they choose (normally this is modulated by both a requirement for discreteness and strict controls on how much money the philandering partner can divert toward extramarital partners—note that we do not say “poly” as polyamorous communities typically exclude relationships instigated through this type of coercion/tradeoff).
Adjusting a relationship contract to modulate a partner’s individual desirability becomes very interesting when the contract of an already existing long-term relationship is altered after one partner’s value to the other plummets. Many circumstances can trigger these changes, but the most common are:
- One partner is caught breaking the contract’s fidelity clause.
- One partner loses their libido or attraction toward the other partner.
- One partner objectively becomes less attractive either through a lack of maintenance (e.g., they stop showering regularly) or a medical issue (e.g., their face gets burned off).
- One partner loses access to something that was expected when the relationship was initiated (e.g., a relationship in which both partners were expected to work turns into a relationship in which one partner is working, and the other is a stay-at-home partner).
- One partner is discovered to be infertile.
A decline in personal desirability need not doom your relationship so long as you are willing to renegotiate your relationship contract in a way that ensures its aggregate value to everyone involved is better than the value proposed by available alternatives. Because such acts of relationship salvage require a level of pragmatic emotional maturity beyond the reach of most humans, these renegotiations are uncommon. Most drastic drops in one partner’s individual desirability end in relationship dissolution.
These failures stem from an unwillingness to accept that, even though a partner’s value decreased through no fault of their own, they will now have to find means (through self-sacrifice) of increasing their value to the relationship in order to maintain it. Most modern societies teach us to expect the world to be a fair place; hence we become angry when it isn’t. Such reactions are objectively harmful to a person’s ability to thrive in the real world.
Keep in mind that the part of the human mind that reacts aversively to “unfair” scenarios does not represent more evolved, higher-order thought, but rather lower-order instincts shared with our ape relatives. If you have a moment, look up the capuchin fairness experiments on YouTube. You’ll see a monkey is happy to get cucumbers in exchange for work until he observes another monkey getting grapes for the same task—at which point he loses it and throws his cucumbers back at the researchers.
We advise against letting your monkey brain overwhelm the part of you that is human. Accept that sometimes life is unfair and build strategies to navigate the obstacles life throws at you. There is little to gain from airing grievances before a reality that frankly doesn’t care what is and is not fair.
Accept that sometimes relationship contracts need to be renegotiated. If both you and your partner wanted kids that are biologically yours, yet you later find out one of you is infertile, some sort of compromise will need to be made to keep the relationship stable. If sex with people to whom you are attracted to is important to both of you, yet one of you loses their attraction to the other, some form of renegotiation will be needed.
The two most common clauses designed to manage these types of events in a relationship contract before they come into play are the “sex clause” and the “hot clause.”
It is fairly typical for monogamous relationships to have a sex clause, even if it is only informally implied (e.g., “After we get married, we are still going to have sex at least once a week, right?” or “Let’s only have sex when both parties are interested”). This clause is often explicitly negotiated by the party that believes they will have a higher libido going forward and often includes optional remedies (in the event that regular sex ceases being desirable to one partner) allowing the relationship to stay together even if the commitment is broken.
The “hot clause” is typically an agreement to not “let oneself go” after marriage and is virtually ubiquitous in younger marriages, though such agreements have not always been so common. We hypothesize that the popularity of this clause was spurred by younger generations’ discomfort with older generations’ tendency to stop investing in self-improvement after marriage. This clause can be anything from a “fat clause” to an “intellectual curiosity clause” depending on the value set of the couple and what they find “hot” or otherwise stimulating and is paired with potential remedies when breached.
Important: Should you plan to have an open marriage in any way, we cannot stress strongly enough that you pre-negotiate terms around how much money can be spent on these other partners and the level of discretion expected in each partner’s interaction with them.
Varying Levels of Contract Clause Risk
There are three broad categories of clauses, each carrying with it a different level of risk:
- Clauses about which both partners agree (e.g., “We both love minimalism and agree to hold quarterly purges of non-essential items.”).
- Clauses about which both partners agree in principle, but one partner struggles with emotionally (e.g., “We both agree to have a policy against drug use to reduce the risk of addiction and financial/legal problems . . . but oh my God I am going to miss cocaine.”).
- Clauses about which the partners disagree, but one partner concedes to the other’s demands (e.g., “I want to have sex with other people, but that makes you uncomfortable. Since I really want to marry, I’ll forego having sex with other people.”).
The strongest relationship contracts are composed almost entirely of clauses in the first category—clauses that each partner neither wants nor feels compelled to break. Despite being clauses that are easy to adhere to, they still warrant discussion with any potential long-term partner, as it is easy for someone to poorly signal their actual preferences early in a relationship. For example, Partner A may assume that Partner B likes to live frugally and minimalistically only to later find Partner B had always assumed their lifestyle would scale up as Partner A’s earning power increased—a difference in preferences that could create major conflict later in a relationship.
Clauses falling into the second category, while potentially dicey, can also be incredibly beneficial, especially for the individual making the concession. For many people suffering from addiction or involved in other potentially dangerous hobbies (e.g., base jumping, bull riding, cheerleading, racing motorcycles, etc.), the presence of a partner who cares about them enough to want them to drop that dangerous behavior is the only thing standing between them and death / serious injury.
On the other hand, an addicted individual may grow resentful of a partner who stands between them and their addiction, even if, logically, they would prefer to overcome that addiction. With such matters, it is best for the conceding party—the partner giving something up—to be the one to decide to include these clauses and write them into the contract. This partner must establish very explicit laws governing themselves, clarifying thresholds that should not be crossed, as well as responses to violations of those boundaries.
Clauses in the third category—concessions one partner would strongly prefer to exclude from the contract that are nevertheless admitted after the other partner frames them as non-negotiable—should be avoided entirely. While plenty of marriages have survived for lifetimes with partners making major ideological and value-based concessions, we see such concessions as too risky for something as life-defining as marriage.
Before terminating a relationship due to a failure to reconcile with a partner’s values or deep-set needs and preferences, think long and hard about whether opposition to their non-negotiable preference is truly non-negotiable. Many supposedly non-negotiable terms, such as monogamy and religion, are more flexible than one might assume, being more a product of societal defaults than one’s own values. It is best to think long, hard, and independently about one’s core identity, one’s top values, and the things one wants to maximize in life before drawing a hard line in the sand on difficult concessions in a marriage contract. Be uniquely suspicious of your non-negotiables if you think that they are positions on which society or your family would enthusiastically back you, as those are the stances we as humans question the least. Such “non-negotiables” may not ultimately matter that much to you, as an individual.
Conflict Resolution Clauses
No matter how well-researched and constructed your contract may be, you will inevitably run into disagreements you had not anticipated. Such hiccups can be easily dealt with so long as your contract features a conflict resolution clause dictating how the relationship responds to impasses.
Common mechanisms used to resolve conflict include:
- Compromise
- Hierarchy
- Third-Party Arbitration
- Votes
The point of conflict resolution is to come to the “correct” solution, where “correct” is defined as the solution that best serves the relationship and maximizes the objective functions of each partner (i.e., the values and life goals of each partner). With regard to this point, some methods are decidedly better than others.
On Resolving Conflict with Compromise
There is an old saying that has led to the death of hundreds of relationships: “Relationships are built on compromise.” We consider “compromise” to be a toxic conflict resolution mechanism. Why? Suppose you want ten and your partner wants twenty. You will be motivated to tell your partner you want zero with the expectation that if they say they want twenty, the compromise will be ten. Similarly, your partner will be motivated to represent what they want forty—or more!
Compromise incentivizes parties to misrepresent what they really want. To make matters worse, prolonged, and repeated compromising can trick us into thinking our false, exaggerated views are our true views, which exacerbates conflict. Even the most honest person under the influence of a heightened emotional state will subconsciously adopt a more extreme position than what they really want when compromise is being used as a conflict resolution model.
Furthermore, compromise incentivizes people to tie unrelated conflicts together and exaggerate the importance and emotions tied to conflicts. For example, if a couple trade a compromise in which Terry allows Sam to adopt a dog in exchange for Terry being granted final say on baby names, it behooves Terry to pretend to care more about dog ownership and thus escalate an unnecessary conflict.
Compromise may even encourage people to create conflicts that don’t exist. Let us say Sam wants the toilet paper roll pointed a certain way. Sam may get this concession from Terry by claiming to be upset about a car the couple is planning to buy—even if Sam is perfectly happy about that car choice. Worse, in pretending to be upset about the car choice, Sam may become genuinely emotionally attached to this feigned position, leading everyone to be less satisfied than they would have been had they not chosen to compromise.
Finally, compromise rewards those who act emotional and unreasonable, and it punishes those who work toward resolving conflict. In every relationship we have observed in which compromise is used as a conflict resolution method, the more unreasonable member gets their way more frequently—occasionally leading the reasonable member to dramatically snap after years of succumbing to these frustrating, unfair negotiations.
Compromise is a caustic element that turns small fissures into gaping wounds over time.
On Resolving Conflict with Hierarchy
Rather than subject yourself to the minefield that is compromise, we advocate for a hierarchical approach to conflict resolution, in which one partner is granted the right to make a final call about some or all domains related to the relationship. For example, one partner may have complete dominion over all decisions related to the couple’s finances while another makes the final call on decisions related to the couple’s social life.
Though domain-specific hierarchy can help to protect delicate egos, we find it most elegant to provide one party unilateral final decision-making power, meaning that one party has the final say in all disagreements not already negotiated in the contract. Unilateral hierarchy prevents tit-for-tat and retaliation problems emerging from domain-specific hierarchy (i.e., “You decided against my preference that we would go to Paris on our next vacation, so I am going to paint the living room that aubergine color you detest.”). Any mechanism that yields rewards for creating conflict in a relationship is toxic.
Per the unilateral hierarchical model, whenever there is a point of disagreement, the subordinate partner alerts the dominant partner and asks them to make a call on behalf of their combined good. Surprisingly, in a healthy relationship, this method of conflict resolution actually leads to the subordinate partner getting “their way” more often than the dominant partner. Why does this happen? By giving all the power to one person, you are forcing them to take a step back from what they want and consider the conflict from a third-party perspective.
For example, suppose you stand at the top of your relationship’s hierarchy, and you and your partner have a disagreement about room temperature (and you somehow forgot to include a room temperature clause in your contract . . . like a madman). Instead of thinking: “I want the room colder. How do I convince my spouse to make the room colder?” you will likely think: “I want the room colder because X, but my spouse, the person I love, wants it warmer because Y—what is an equitable solution to this that is in both of our best interests?”
Because most people in long-term relationships love their partners, the dominant partner will typically err in a partner’s favor, improving their own happiness by making those they love happier as opposed to taking advantage of their position. Moreover, dominant partners must make decisions not just for those they love, but specifically for those who trusted them enough to give them the power to make final calls on their behalf—further making it difficult for a decent human to abuse such a position.
In moments of disagreement, this conflict resolution method forces both individuals to remember the commitment that they made to each other and the trust that they put in each other. This dynamic often removes the negative emotions from conflicts on both sides. If a subordinate comes to the dominant partner in anger or is acting unreasonably, they are unlikely to engender the compassion necessary to get the outcome they want. Concurrently, the dominant partner has to take ownership for the way in which any conflict was resolved and be aware that a poor decision can literally doom the relationship, which encourages them to think logically and behave justly—instead of just arguing for a position that benefits themselves.
If you do not trust your partner enough to give them that level of control over your life, your relationship is not necessarily doomed, but we would estimate lower than 50% odds that it continues for any long period of time as a constructive, mutually beneficial relationship. By entering a long-term, committed relationship with others, you grant them immense influence over your personal success and happiness—regardless of which conflict resolution method you implement. If you cannot trust someone to sacrifice their personal best interest in favor of your combined best interest, the odds of you enjoying a successful long-term partnership together are quite low. Thus the final (and perhaps best) benefit of this conflict resolution method is that it accelerates the termination of bad marriages, an outcome we consider quite favorable in comparison to a life wasted on a bad match.
This dominant-subordinate partner method only works if the dominant partner was voluntarily given their final call power by the subordinate partner, thanks to the subordinate partner’s trust in the dominant partner’s prudence, wisdom, generosity, and impartiality. If the dominant partner believes they have the role because God gave it to them, because of the “natural superiority” of their gender, because the other party gave it to them as a trade (e.g., “I will let you be the dominant partner if I don’t have to work”), or because they took that position by force, they will be very likely to abuse that position—as they may feel they owe the subordinate partner nothing.
On Resolving Conflict with a Third-Party Arbitrator
The dominant-subordinate partner method of conflict resolution is designed for relationships that are optimized for quality and therefore can afford to fail. If failure is not an option and you need to optimize your relationship for staying power over quality, we recommend using a third-party arbitrator for conflict resolution instead of the hierarchical model. In this model, conflicts are arbitrated by a neutral third party who acts as the deciding “vote” in a disagreement. This third party is typically a religious figure (e.g., a priest or a rabbi), a family elder, a lawyer, or a marriage counselor.
The key to writing a third-party arbitration clause into your contract is finding a way to reliably replace an arbitrator when the one with whom you start is no longer available (e.g., you have moved, they die, etc.). Should you not have a clear succession plan in place, you may reach a stalemate in which each party refuses to accept an arbitrator who does not show a clear bias in their favor.
An arbitrator is not meant to take each person’s side in equal portions, but to ensure the common good of the couple in how he/she votes. An arbitrator who always sides with one party may still be doing a perfect job.
If you want to build this into your relationship contract or an exciting relationship and don’t trust the above listed third-party arbiters but like our approach to thinking through things, we may be able to help out. Email Hello@Pragmatist.Guide and we can work together to come up with a procedure.
On Resolving Conflict with Votes
Should you be drawn to third-party arbitration as a conflict resolution method but not want a fixed arbitrator, you might use one or more people to act as a tiebreaker in votes. In some cases, a third/fourth member of a polyamorous triad or quad will make that final vote, or the vote might be supplemented by an agreed-upon friend group or the relationship’s children. The only requirement is that the total voting body, between the relationship’s partners and any outside voting party, must be odd to ensure there are no ties.
We strongly recommend against this solution. While not as inevitably toxic as compromise, votes lead to bitterness and social politicking while giving swing voters an undue amount of power in the family.
As a final note on conflict resolution in general: Conflict resolution should not be designed to grant each partner an even number of “turns” in which they get their way. Doing so actually encourages conflict, as it allows a partner to create “fake issues,” then concede to them. Worse, this model does not internalize that in many relationships, one partner is almost always in the wrong when there is a conflict (perhaps because they have a greater tendency to see problems from their personal perspective, while the other partner looks at problems from the perspective of the relationship’s greater goals and values). This can be very destructive to the fabric of a relationship if the habitually wrong partner is unwilling to accept that a conflict arbitration method that almost never works in their favor isn’t necessarily biased or not functioning as designed.
Addressing Finance Clauses in Marriage Contracts
Because the default marriage contracts society provides do not explicitly spell out how finances should be handled, special attention must be paid to this topic. This lack of clarity on a “standard system” for handling finances has caused the most common subject of argument within a relationship to be finances (statistically speaking). If your marriage is going to fail, chances are a major component of its downfall will stem from how finances were handled. You will find it difficult to get too into the weeds when establishing definitions, standards, rules, and procedures with your partner(s) around finances.
Key subjects of discussion when negotiating financial clauses in general include:
- Which expenses count as joint versus personal
- Which joint expenses require discussion and joint approval
- Which personal expenses require discussion and joint approval
- How to approach budgeting
- How to approach debt (When is it OK to take out debt?)
- How to approach third-party requests for money (What will be the policy regarding friends asking for loans, elderly parents requesting support, etc.?)
- How to approach retirement (Should partners save for retirement or prioritize other present-term goals? Should each partner commit to saving, or should it be an independent decision? Should savings be pooled or individual? Is one partner expected to support another in retirement if one partner neglected to save and needs help?)
Partners typically adopt one of the following financial strategies in marriages:
- Complete Financial Separation with Agreed-Upon Individual or Shared Payments
- Complete Financial Separation with An Allowance
- Shared Pool with Discretionary Income Allowances
- Shared Pool with Pocket Money
We will go through each of these strategies in detail below. Before selecting a particular strategy, verify whether those involved have any debt, and do a credit score check all around. A partner with an abysmal credit score may not only hamper all partners’ abilities to take out loans in the future, but also suffer from behavioral issues that could put the relationship at risk (i.e., it may come up that Partner B has an addiction to gambling, drugs, or a penchant for expensive products and services). It should go without saying that if one partner has an abysmal credit score, a large amount of debt, or no savings for retirement, they should allow their more financially secure and likely more responsible partner to dictate the financial terms of their relationship contract. A partner who won’t take responsibility for a bad credit score, outside of cases of identity theft, presents a GIANT red flag.
Other Financial Strategy Considerations
Luxury Accessories
We often see those trying to secure wealthy partners in a traditional relationship (i.e., one in which the wealthy partner supports them) intentionally display obviously expensive accessories, such as cars, cosmetic procedures, clothing, and jewelry. This is an absurd strategy, as most wealthy individuals are good enough with money to have the sense to filter out potential partners who are going to have high ongoing expenses, even when only looking for potential trophy wives/husbands.
Expensive accessories present one of the best ways to signal you make bad financial decisions. Even targets who would not be worried by the high maintenance costs signaled by a potential partner’s pricey accessories may be less interested in such people, as it would be far easier to surprise and delight a partner who lacks such fancy things (i.e., Where’s the fun or feasibility in pleasing the individual who supposedly has everything?).
Expensive accessories exist to signal dominance to other peers of the same gender when a person has nothing else to recommend themselves, not to establish value to potential partners. Besides, expensive accessories make for a terrible store of value.
Mismatched Expected Lifestyles
Humans do not need much money to feel fulfilled, though some normalize to higher burn rates than others, and each partner’s desired burn rate can profoundly affect both partners’ ultimate happiness. It is, therefore, crucial when selecting a long-term partner to assess the lifestyle and monthly spend level this partner requires to be happy.
We know two men of similar age (semi-retired, US-based). Both love to travel and explore the world. Ironically, the wealthier man travels less than the more middle-class man and comes across as significantly less fulfilled, frequently expressing his regret that he cannot travel more because it is so prohibitively expensive. How can this be?
The lifestyles to which each man and their respective partners have normalized make all the difference in the world. The middle-class man and his partner are willing to fly coach and stay in bare-bones hotels and Airbnbs, whereas the wealthier man and his partner must fly in business or first class, rent luxury cars, and stay in luxury accommodations. Even with his generous savings, the wealthier man simply cannot afford to constantly travel in his semi-retirement.
A household’s burn rate—monthly spend for both partners combined—typically is determined by the burn rate of the partner who defaults to more expensive things to achieve a baseline level of comfort. This is because the person who defaults to nicer restaurants, hotels, and houses when given the choice determines the spend rate of both partners (i.e., if Malcolm is happy staying at a cheap Airbnb, but Simone couldn’t be happy anywhere below the quality of the Ritz, then both Malcolm and Simone will be spending money at the Ritz). A family’s burn rate can affect its lifestyle and financial freedom dramatically—more than the wealth each partner brings to the table.
When a person is financially constrained, they will only live up to the quality they can afford. Nevertheless, as people get wealthier, most reach a point at which they stop wanting to increase the luxury within which they live. For example, Warren Buffet has a net worth of $84 billion dollars but still lives in a house he bought for $31,000 in 1958, doesn’t have a computer at his desk, doesn’t carry a cell phone, and drives himself in a car he bought for $45,000 in 2014—plus in his spare time, he plays bridge with friends. This behavior is not unique to Warren Buffet; most financially successful people reach, over the course of their lives, a point at which they “max out” their luxuries.
Do everything possible to avoid a partner if it looks as though there is a large mismatch in ideal lifestyle and “necessary” monthly spend. Failure to do this may lead to a life spent treading water, no matter how much each partner earns. Many partners work punishing hours late into life at jobs that don’t inspire them, foregoing lives with more time for leisure, family, hobbies, and passions (albeit less money) because their spouses require a relatively expensive lifestyle to be happy. Plenty of ultra-wealthy celebrities are barely staying afloat financially because they never hit their personal stopping point.
The best way to assess this in an individual is to just talk through it. Get their opinion on various luxuries: Would they work six extra hours each week if it meant that whenever they fly, it would be in business class? Were money no object, how many bedrooms and bathrooms would they have in a house? If they could make clothing appear out of thin air, what clothing would they materialize, and how often would they materialize more? Would they take on a night/weekend job if it meant that they could always drive around in a nicer car? If they had a choice, would they feel more content in a cheap house with low taxes in the suburbs, or would they prefer one apartment in the center of an expensive city even after having kids?
We really can’t stress enough how much this will matter to your life and how thoroughly you need to vet this in potential partners.
You have three lives available to you:
- If the water rises faster than you can swim, you will live your life underwater, panicking while you hopelessly gasp for air.
- If the water rises in pace with your swimming speed, you will spend your life treading water—every day feeling like a pointless struggle.
- If the water stops rising and you swim fast enough, then you can break free and live with the birds—only then will you understand what freedom feels like.
Asceticism is as valuable a trait in a partner as earning potential.
Note from the Research:
- Studies have repeatedly shown that people who buy less “stuff” show higher mental wellbeing, fulfillment, happiness, decreased psychological disorders, and decreased psychological distress. You might be inclined to think this may be due to some related effect and not just pure asceticism increasing happiness as the writers of Materialist values, financial and pro-environmental behaviors, and well-being did. They tried to determine if it was actually the self-knowledge that these individuals were being environmentally conscious that lead to the positive mental effects of asceticism, but instead found that asceticism driven by the goal of helping the environment did not have the positive effects of asceticism for its own sake.
Common Financial Configurations in Relationships
Complete Financial Separation with Agreed-Upon Individual or Shared Payments
Partners who feel uncomfortable pooling finances and commingling assets may choose to adopt a strategy in which each partner’s finances are completely separate (Partner A never sees Partner B’s income, has no access to their bank account, etc.). Each partner assumes individual or shared responsibility for different communally enjoyed expenses.
For example, Partner A may choose to buy a house and pay for the house as well as annual property taxes independently. Whereas Partner B pitches in by paying for water, electricity, internet, and streaming entertainment subscriptions. Together Partner A and B share health insurance and childcare costs.
Should you choose to adopt this strategy, be explicit in your financial management clauses about which expenses are expected to be shared and what is to be done when one partner decides that it is no longer worth spending money on something (usually this means that product/service goes away entirely if the other partner does not wish to independently shoulder the financial burden).
For example, what if the individual who was paying for streaming services just decides to stop? Their partner, not wanting to lose access to this joint resource, might assume this financial responsibility. Through this process, more and more financial responsibility can quietly shift to one partner, creating a system that feels deeply unfair and builds resentment.
The adverse effects of this strategy include the distinct signaling of a lack of trust and misaligned incentives (e.g., if Partner A’s income will go up 300% if the couple moves, whereas Partner B’s income will drop 30% with relocation, Partner A will likely resent Partner B if the couple does not move, and Partner B will likely resent Partner A if they do move).
Nevertheless, this strategy is optimal for relationships that are not expected to last, especially for those with an individual who has earned or will earn an amount of money that is disproportionately higher than their partner. Avoiding the comingling of assets is essential if you are the wealthier partner in a relationship and are keen to avoid the financial damage associated with a divorce.
This strategy is also optimal for relationships in which one partner is irresponsible with money or has problems with an addiction of some sort, as well as relationships in which a partner has anxiety tied to money and finances—quite the common neurosis.
Partners incorporating this approach into their marriage contract must be sure to address:
- Whether one partner will ever receive an allowance from another partner (which may be necessary if one partner earns significantly more than the other partner yet wants to maintain a parity of lifestyles).
- Which products and services purchased by each partner individually may be used by the other partner (e.g., If Partner B buys an expensive car, is Partner A allowed to drive it?).
- What happens when one partner decides to stop paying for something on which the other relied (e.g., heating or Netflix).
- Whether each partner is entitled to know how much money the other partner has or not (e.g., is Partner A entitled to know that Partner B has no retirement savings? This is the only financial model in which it is possible to enter into a relationship without a full understanding of your partner’s finances).
- How the relationship will function in retirement and during times of hardship (If Partner A has a retirement fund and Partner B has nothing saved, is Partner A expected to support Partner B in retirement, enjoying a lower quality of life than expected due to Partner B’s lack of savings?).
Shared Pool with Discretionary Income Allowances
Couples who wish to work on some financial activities jointly but manage other activities personally benefit most by funneling all of their income into a joint account, but splitting off an agreed-upon percentage or amount of income into private discretionary spending accounts.
This strategy gives individuals privacy and freedom with finances while also keeping incentives aligned, as in most cases, discretionary income is equally distributed and therefore each partner is incentivized to maximize the relationship’s overall income rather than just their personal income.
Perhaps, one partner is keen to build up a retirement fund, whereas the other inherited wealth sufficient to act as a retirement fund and wishes instead to invest newly received income in startups. Or maybe each partner has a guilty pleasure or hobby on which they like to spend money and would rather do so without judgment from the other partner. Consider also partners who wish to purchase surprise gifts for each other without the other partner necessarily learning about the purchased item early when reviewing a credit card statement. In all of these scenarios, a strategy involving pooled income with private discretionary income allowances is optimal.
Those adopting this strategy must create very clear policies around the following things:
- How the amount of discretionary income is calculated. Is it whatever is left after all agreed-upon shared expenses divided by two? Is it a fixed amount each month?
- Whether each partner receives the same amount of discretionary income. What if one partner has a very easy job that earns only a small amount, whereas the other partner works 60+ hours a week and finds their work very stressful?
- Which expenses may come out of the relationship’s joint account, and which expenses are to come out of each partner’s discretionary income? How are vacations funded? How is food paid for, especially if one partner consumes a lot of expensive organic food or alcohol and the other does not?
- Whether and how funds in the shared pool will be further subdivided into accounts/funds that are intended for specific purposes, such as an emergency fund, a fund dedicated to childcare costs, a fund dedicated to home improvements, a fund dedicated to saving up for vacations, a fund dedicated to discretionary income for the couple (e.g., luxuries that all partners want but aren’t necessary for survival), etc.
Single Pool With Pocket Money
Partners who expect a lifelong relationship and minimum administrative burden often opt to pool all of their finances into a joint account and pay for all expenses from joint accounts. This strategy usually involves some form of joint discussion and agreement that must be made and reached before expenses above a certain threshold are approved (e.g., buying a boat or house).
While this approach is simple, it can lead to bitterness and resentment when one partner racks up more small personal expenses than another or when partners reach an impasse regarding a significant expense, which, in any other scenario would be resolved by purchasing the non-jointly desired product or service using personal or discretionary funds.
Those who adopt this strategy must negotiate clear clauses delineating:
- The minimum threshold for joint discussion and agreement for an expense. Do expenses under $100 require approval? What about expenses over $300?
- An approval process for expenses above the agreed-upon threshold. How will agreements be documented? How can misunderstandings (i.e., “I thought you said it was fine when I asked you at 3:00 a.m. last night”) be avoided?
- The procedure to be followed when the couple reaches an impasse on an expense that is desired by one partner but rejected by another. Does each partner have an annual amount of joint funds they may spend despite disapproval?
- The procedure to be followed when one partner feels the other partner is spending above what is permissible on products and services that disproportionately benefit only them.
- As with the shared-pool-with-discretionary-income strategy, whether funds in the shared pool will be further subdivided into accounts/funds that are intended for specific purposes.
Keep in mind that if one partner expects to financially exploit another partner, this will be the strategy they are most likely to advocate. The best way to avoid financial exploitation by another partner is to maintain entirely separate finances and allocate an allowance to the partner if it is clear that they wish to financially exploit you or are flagrantly irresponsible with money.
One final financial relationship tip: Don’t forget to both share your ideal future living situation with your partner and have them share theirs with you. These differ widely between people. Comic Johnny Beehner has a routine in which he describes his wife turning to him a few weeks after their marriage and saying, “I can’t wait until we can settle down on our little farm,” to which he replies: “Our little what?!” People often assume their retirement dreams are universal. This is far from a reality.
Addressing Marriage Contract Violations
Each possible contract violation should be matched with an appropriate consequence of which all involved parties are aware.
The default theoretical response to contract violation among most template marriage contracts granted by society is: DIVORCE!!
Did she cheat? Divorce!
Did he become a lazy deadbeat? Divorce!
People like to say they will leave their partner when wronged while their responses to being wronged in practice typically vary from angry outbursts to retaliatory contract violations.
Unenforced contract terms are extremely dangerous to an entire contract’s integrity. It is better to leave out terms that will not be enforced than to leave them in and allow them to train others that violations will go unpunished.
If someone tells their partner: “If you do X, I will leave you,” then fails to leave their partner once their partner commits X, they are tacitly communicating to their partner that retaliation for other contract violations will either be inconsistent or entirely nonexistent. Failing to execute a response to a violated term in a marriage contract signals to the violating partner that there are no consequences to their actions—or that the consequences are not predictable and consistent—thereby rendering the contract useless.
Because enforcement is so crucial, the immediate dissolution of a partnership in response to any violation is neither a prudent nor a realistic approach. Instead, apply one default low-level response to any sort of generic violation and specific, logical, reasonable, and easy-to-actually execute responses to more extreme violations where applicable.
Specific common responses to contract violation include:
- Hurt Feelings and Lost Respect
- Reversal or Correction of Violation
- Specific Generic Cost
- Specific Unique Cost
- Relationship Renegotiation
- Partnership Dissolution
These responses may be enforced in isolation or combined. Some of these responses are, in our opinion, unrealistic to implement in a long-term relationship, but since we have seen other couples apparently use them to some success, we will address them here.
Hurt Feelings and Lost Respect
One of the most elegant responses to contract violation involves nothing more than making it clear to your partner that violating terms of the contract will result in hurt feelings and a lower level of respect for the contract violator. In most healthy relationships, this is more than enough to prevent contract violations. In fact, we feel at least within most relationships, lost respect is far more painful than a few thousand dollars fine.
Among partners who genuinely care for each other and respect each other, this is by far the best default “punishment” to maintain within a marriage contract.
Reversal or Correction of Violation
In some cases, the simplest and easiest way to address a contract violation is to reverse it. This method of addressing contract violations is often used in conjunction with others. If Partner A used joint rent funds on a personal indulgence, have Partner A return those misappropriated funds. If Partner B changed the house temperature to 75 when it was jointly agreed that it should be 68, have Partner B return the house’s temperature to 68.
Not all violations can be completely “undone,” but even simple correction may do the trick when applicable. If Partner A contractually agreed to quit smoking, then lapsed back into the bad habit, have Partner A quit again. If, in a moment of anger, Partner B called Partner A by a forbidden word in violation of agreed-upon language usage, Partner B must apologize.
Simple reversals and corrections such as these might not feel adequate when used in isolation, as we humans love to see retaliatory punishment and “justice,” but sometimes the most practical thing is to merely set right that which is wrong. More serious consequences may be needed for repeat violations, but it serves us well to remember how fallible we are as humans and leave a bit of wiggle room.
Specific Generic Cost
In this case, a specific, discrete, concrete cost is associated with a breach of contract. The archetypal example is a discrete amount of money paid as a penalty toward a joint account, such as an emergency fund. This is most commonly seen in popular media with “the swear jar,” into which those who use forbidden words must contribute fees per forbidden word uttered. When people use these, they typically only use them as a broad punishment for very small contract violations.
This cost should be something that does not delight or benefit a non-violating partner because this might enable a violating partner to feel justified in their actions (e.g., “It’s OK that I stay out late drinking in violation of the contract tonight because then I’ll have to give him foot massages every night for a week and he loves foot massages!”).
Also, keep in mind that partners may see any cost incurred as a fair trade, meaning that it is OK to violate that contract clause as much as one likes, so long as one pays. Generally, we advise against contract clauses that are habitually and casually violated, hence we would advise against contract violation repercussions that facilitate such casual violation.
At the same time, repeat violations to a contract clause may be perfectly acceptable to the violated partner(s) . . . if the price is right. Perhaps Partner A is perfectly happy to have Partner B leave dirty dishes in the sink each night so long as Partner B receives $10.00 each time this happens. Perhaps Partner A really doesn’t mind Partner B sleeping around in violation of a monogamy clause so long as they receive a new luxury car for every time Partner B takes a new lover. What matters is that all partners in a relationship carefully think through just how much certain contract clauses matter to them, and determine whether there are certain reparations that could be made to nullify the sting of a particular clause being violated.
Specific Unique Cost
Some contract violations are most appropriately addressed with unique responses.
For example, at one point I (Malcolm) violated the weight clause in our contract by putting on a few too many pounds. As a consequence, I had to give up beer outside of special occasions for nearly a year—a cost that quickly brought me back within an acceptable weight range.
The above cost worked because:
- It was reasonable
- It was in my best interest
- It was self-resolving
Trying to stay with the above three points when designing these aspects of a contract is useful. However, when designing responses, keep in mind that there is no promise that a cost imposed on a violating partner will not turn the relationship into a net negative for them and cause a dissolution event. This is especially a problem in the case of contract violations tied to addictions; many people would rather split than endure the cost of their transgression if that cost involves going cold turkey on an addiction.
This type of punishment is best used as a solution for contract terms tied to financial or physical health scenarios in which a violating partner will regret their transgression and want to atone for said failure. In this case, the punishment’s core purpose is to help steer that partner’s atonement and self-punishment instinct into productive action that ameliorates the problem.
Relationship Renegotiation
In some instances, the best response to a violation involves renegotiation of the relationship contract.
If Partner A gives Partner B very permissive terms in a relationship contract—such as an honors system with regard to how joint funds are spent—and Partner B violates that trust by spending over an agreed-upon threshold on purely personal products/services, an appropriate response (among other consequences) would be to change the contract’s rules regarding the use of joint funds to be less permissive.
Keep in mind that any renegotiation that makes a relationship categorically worse for one party can lead to that person leaving the relationship if they feel they have better options elsewhere, even if (and perhaps especially because) that particular party technically deserves retaliatory action.
In other words, sometimes partners realize that both want to stay together even if a certain clause of the relationship is violated, but the current terms of the relationship contract simply are not going to work if one partner cannot trust another to not violate said terms. For example, you want to give your partner the chance to use your credit card responsibly, but if they can’t that does not imply that you want the relationship to end—just that the terms dictating the manner in which joint finances are handled need to be changed.
Relationship renegotiation happens organically all the time among those working on default societal contracts and is far more common than dissolution. Typically, these renegotiations happen unilaterally (e.g., one partner cheats, so the other decides they are no longer permitted to meet alone with those of the opposite gender, imposing this as a new rule in the relationship’s implied contract) and may ultimately undermine the relationship’s structural integrity.
A sustainable renegotiation should incorporate ideas and consent from all involved parties, and, if truly intended to make the relationship attractive on an ongoing basis to all parties, it will likely entail some concessions to the violating party. For example, it may simply not be feasible for one partner to be monogamous; hence, a renegotiation in response to a violation may involve opening up the relationship, which in most cases is a huge concession for a violated party to make, but one that may be feasible so long as the violated party is also granted rules that make them comfortable with the new arrangement, such as veto power over certain partner choices, routine STD testing, etc.
Partnership Dissolution
In dire cases, the most appropriate response to the violation of some marriage clauses is ultimately dissolution, though it is possible for dissolution to be entirely absent from marriage contracts. An absence of dissolution clauses in your contract does not mean you will never leave your partner; it merely indicates that you will not be expected to leave your partner over something specific. If a relationship becomes differentially undesirable to any partner when contrasted to other relationships they might secure, that partner will likely leave even if there is no dissolution clause.
If you would like to explore the concept of so-called “dead bedrooms” (long-term relationships without sex), we encourage you to flip to: Sex in a Long-Term Relationship in the appendix on page 552.
[[1]](#_ftnref1) The movie was made specifically to mock the book’s government as a dystopia, so it intentionally mischaracterized the governance structure and the philosophical question the book was written to explore. The movie is a great work of art in its own right that asks an equally valuable question: “Can militaristic fascism be made to look good?” The book, however, does not focus on this question.
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[[8]](#_ftnref8)Fairness itself is a bit of a farce, as it could be determined using an endless array of criteria: “Who worked hardest? Who suffered the most? Who needs it most? Who does the crowd think should have it? Who wants it most? Who has been the most disadvantaged? Who will benefit from it most?” etc.
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