Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 47.4.2 · 36,197 words · 2.7 hr read · Great Chatting Again

Cataloging Voting (part 2 of 7)

[[14]](#_ftnref14) Masket, S., & Lewis, J. (2007). A Return to Normalcy? Revisiting the Effects of Term Limits on Competitiveness and Spending in California Assembly Elections. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 7(1), 20-38. doi:10.1177/153244000700700102

[[15]](#_ftnref15) Churchill was actually quoting someone else when he said this, but we don’t know who.

[[16]](#_ftnref16)Walker, S. (2020, March 4). ‘Baby Machines’: Eastern Europe’s answer to depopulation. The Guardian. from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-fit-the-nationalist-agenda-but-do-they-work

[[17]](#_ftnref17)Stone, L. (2020, March 5). Pro-Natal policies work, but they come with a hefty price tag. Institute for Family Studies. from https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-come-with-a-hefty-price-tag

[[18]](#_ftnref18) Note: We recently switched a huge chunk of our Latin American operations to a different operational system that we won’t explore in detail, as we think it only works in LATAM cultural environments and is an additional level of complication above the level of “black box” management. Essentially, we took our “human teams” and grouped them into family units, allowing the senior person on the team to liberally hire family members, with the team’s success determining how many family members it could employ. This approach still functions in a large “black box” environment, with each family unit acting as a single component in the system, while also synergizing better with LATAM culture. As such, this approach has led to huge productivity gains even though it goes against every sane principle of U.S. business culture. The biggest advantages are that it allows for much faster skill transfer (high-skill workers have an easier time cloning their skills with family members than with outsiders) and leads to much higher motivation and lower team infighting.

[[19]](#_ftnref19) There is actually an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to flight crashes that were caused, in part, by high-power-distance culture problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_culture_on_aviation_safety

[[20]](#_ftnref20) Even if they are not power hungry themselves, a single woke individual or ultra conservative individual in one of these environments can feel an ideological mandate to begin converting the organization and flat organizational structures have no immune response to this behavior.

[[21]](#_ftnref21) Using a company like Valve to argue that holacracies work is akin to presenting Norway as an example of how socialism can work while ignoring the money printer of oil running in the background (the money printer is Steam in the case of Valve). The strategy for beating a game when you have the free money cheat activated will not work in a normal playthrough. That doesn’t mean the strategy will not work, but maybe we should not be looking to the life paths of rich kids whose first job was at their dad’s company when we try to design our own career paths.

[[22]](#_ftnref22)Elsesser, K. M., & Lever, J. (2011). Does gender bias against female leaders persist? quantitative and qualitative data from a large-scale survey. Human Relations, 64(12), 1555–1578. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726711424323 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018726711424323

[[23]](#_ftnref23)Weiss, D. C. (2011, October 24). Not One legal secretary surveyed preferred working with Women Partners; prof offers reasons why. ABA Journal. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/not_one_legal_secretary_surveyed_preferred_working_with_women_lawyers_prof_/

[[24]](#_ftnref24) Kurtulus, F. A., & Tomaskovic-Devey, D. (2011). Do female top managers help women to advance? A panel study using EEO-1 Records. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 639(1), 173–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716211418445, Bossler, M., Mosthaf, A., & Schank, T. (2019). Are female managers more likely to hire more female managers? evidence from Germany. ILR Review, 73(3), 676–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793919862509, Cohen, P. N., & Huffman, M. L. (2007). Working for the woman? female managers and the gender wage gap. American Sociological Review, 72(5), 681–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200502

[[25]](#_ftnref25)Williams, J. C. (2014, August 7). Who wants to work for a woman? Harvard Business Review. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2013/11/who-wants-to-work-for-a-woman

[[26]](#_ftnref26)Sadly, our ideas never got implemented.

[[27]](#_ftnref27)Molla, R. (2018, October 31). Tech employees are much more liberal than their employers – at least as far as the candidates they support. Vox. Retrieved December 18, 2022, from https://www.vox.com/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-politics-liberal-employers-candidates

[[28]](#_ftnref28)Morris, K. (2022, May. 11). Democratic vs. Republican jobs: Is your job red or blue? Zippia.com. from, https://www.zippia.com/advice/democratic-vs-republican-jobs/

[[29]](#_ftnref29)Garelli, S. (2022, November 25). Why you will probably live longer than most big companies. IMD business school for management and leadership courses. from https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will-probably-live-longer-than-most-big-companies/

[[30]](#_ftnref30) We have always been shocked by how well the Freakzoid theme song applies to 4chan as a community.

[[31]](#_ftnref31)Coleman, S., & Cardoso Sampaio, R. (2016). Sustaining a democratic innovation: A study of three e-participatory budgets in Belo Horizonte. Information, Communication & Society, 20(5), 754–769. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2016.1203971

[[32]](#_ftnref32) A cultural supervirus is a self-replicating memetic package stress tested and strengthened to the extent that it becomes highly virulent and difficult to defend against as a set of cultural norms, behaviors, and memes. We discuss cultural superviruses at length in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion.

[[33]](#_ftnref33)Stewart, A.J., Mosleh, M., Diakonova, M. et al. Information gerrymandering and undemocratic decisions. Nature 573, 117–121 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1507-6

[[34]](#_ftnref34)Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2020, May 6). The power of small wins. Harvard Business Review. from https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins

[[35]](#_ftnref35) For a functional explanation of how this can be achieved: Give managers secret “compliment quotas” where the complimentary emails they send must be BCCed to a separate address where they are archived to ensure the manager is on track. Alternatively, you could set things up such that managers get automated emails upon the completion of team-based projects, reminding them to compliment everyone who contributed to the project’s completion—in this case, the compliment would be totally voluntary but also more likely to happen due to the reminders.

[[36]](#_ftnref36) This is true for all relationships except those created by Dominance Lures—another reason why those relationships are so unstable and the communities that use them feel so threatened by the concept of hypergamy.

[[37]](#_ftnref37) Sunk Cost Fallacy: When an individual invests in something, not because they see it as a good investment, but because they do not want to write off investments they have already made in that thing.

[[38]](#_ftnref38) Specifically, we would point to 70% of divorces being initiated by women. It seems to be that when women get dissatisfied with their partners, they are more likely to leave them. This implies that if a person has a bad personality that reveals itself after a few years—or had their life spiral out of control between their 20s and 30s—they are more likely to be spit back onto the dating market if they are male. Obviously, marital dissatisfaction is not the only motivation for divorce, but this subtle skew in behavior increases the extent to which the mature dating market is disproportionately populated by the cream of the female population and the dregs of the male population.

[[39]](#_ftnref39) We do not favor this approach because it is traditional per se—things are not better because they are old—but rather note its historical roots to highlight the irony of TradCon relationships being framed as traditional.

Cognitive Integration in Marriage and Long-Term Relationships

O

ne of the greatest benefits of marriage is that it allows partners to act as a single unit and offload parts of their cognitive load and basic life maintenance to each other. The extent to which partners leverage this feature in their relationships varies widely, with some living almost entirely bifurcated lives (separate homes, friends, bills, problems, etc.) and others nearly melding into a single hive-minded person (working side by side, living together, solving nearly all problems jointly, etc.).

While many choose to minimize cognitive integration with their partners, we would go so far as to argue that cognitive integration represents the core value of marriage in modern Western society, as almost everything else a person gets from a relationship—be that sex, love, or childcare—can be achieved through hiring someone or dating, while cognitive integration is only accessible through a long-term relationship with a person.

To be clear, one can cognitively outsource various elements of one’s life to someone who is just on their payroll, and many do exactly that, but doing so is risky. This is a bit like having someone making major strategic decisions at a company who will only work for salary and not equity. An employee who is paid in equity is incentivized to act in the best interest of the company and is less likely to make decisions that are purely selfishly motivated and/or find ways to exploit the company for personal gain. Serious, long-term relationships essentially entail humans making an equity swap with their lives. This is why divorces can be so messy; you, the CEO of your life, must essentially fight for as much of your life’s value as you can take back, with a fellow executive who has a major stake in the business.

There are three extremes of cognitive integration. Every relationship exists within these extremes.

Cognitive Separation

Cognitively separated partners are essentially roommates who have sex, maybe kids or pets, and perhaps (though probably not) some shared income.

Cognitive separation is optimal in cases in which:

  1. Partners have no reason to trust each other
  2. Each individual prioritizes personal freedom and independence over a relationship
  3. At least one partner has a strong ideological belief that prevents them from subverting their sense of self to become part of a unit

Cognitive separation is, ironically, also optimal for relationships in which at least one party’s objective function (driving life purpose) revolves around maximizing personal happiness, power, or social status—even though this approach generates the least happiness, power, and success. In cases in which a partner is ideologically motivated to do whatever is ultimately going to give them the most personal happiness, power, or success, the other partner puts themselves in danger by outsourcing some or all of their cognitive load to this self-interested party. (You see this in almost all domains in life—someone striving for personal happiness or fulfillment will always feel less of it and have a harder time achieving it than someone who cares about other things more—see The Pragmatists Guide to Life for more info on this.)

Cognitive separation features two core benefits:

Cognitive separation yields a higher likelihood of relationship termination. This is not just a matter of low exit barriers; nothing about the relationship encourages the partners to grow in parallel, hence within a few decades, partners often become very different people and grow apart. Fortunately, it is easy to bounce back from a cognitively separated relationship, as all parties have been managing their own lives for the most part. This benefit is non-trivial in an age in which relationship separation can be very painful and damaging from a legal, logistical, and statutory perspective.

Cognitive Siloing

If cognitively separate relationships are akin to hunter-gatherer societies, in which each person more or less knows how to survive on their own, cognitively siloed relationships more closely resemble post-industrial societies, in which each person contributes specialized labor and cannot complete every survival-related task themselves.

Consider the idealized 1950s marriage in which the husband processes all family thought and strategies related to work, investing, big ideas, and world affairs, while the wife processes the family’s thoughts and strategies related to meals, child-rearing, home keeping, and morality.

Whether leveraging this approach in a TradCon-style relationship or some other fashion, the dynamic remains the same: Certain domains of one partner’s life are completely offloaded to another partner. By offloading these large chunks of their lives and minimizing overlap, partners can increase output and skill in the domains in which they specialize and excel, thereby increasing the overall output of the relationship unit.[[1]](#_ftn1)

We do not recommend cognitive siloing among couples in which any partner prioritizes their own happiness or success over the relationship’s or family’s combined goals, values, and objectives. Whereas a cognitively siloed relationship can certainly form among self-interested parties, such setups typically end in disaster for at least one partner with time. This is because when a person silos a part of their life—whether it be their finances, their income, or their children—and give it completely over to another individual, they give that person enormous power to work against their best interest without them noticing.

The effectiveness of this relationship model is that it offers the efficiency gains created by the domain specialization of each party without the dangers of complete cognitive integration. For example, if only one party is responsible for family finances, home repair, or gardening, they can theoretically focus more time building expertise in that task than if it was split between both parties. However, we must specify this is theoretical, as in the few instances in which this has been studied, the data is not as clear as one might imagine.

Cognitive siloing is commonly used to enable relationships in which one partner focuses on housekeeping and child rearing-related tasks while the other focuses on career-related tasks. The science is unclear whether this style of child-rearing has any benefit to children, and a lot of the data seems to indicate it might be actively harmful to children. For roughly every four studies touting the benefits of being raised in a household with a stay-at-home parent, there are five indicating that children who grow up in households with a stay-at-home parent have higher rates of discipline problems, lower mental health scores, and get lower grades on average (these effects are most pronounced in female children).

While these studies seem to be pretty well controlled for things like income and parent education, we suspect this still might be a correlation issue with helicopter parents, narcissists, and mentally unstable parents being more likely to be a stay at home just because they can’t hold a job. It is impossible to control for such factors, so they must bias the data a bit. We, therefore, assume the evidence for and against stay-at-home parenting is more likely to be evenly balanced. No particular approach can be assumed to be superior at this point.

If we take this even balance at face value, it indicates strongly that children are strictly better off when raised in households in which both parents work. This is because the studies that show small benefits to having a stay-at-home parent do not temper these benefits with the benefit of the extra income (children do better in marginally wealthier households). This can be a painful concept to absorb, especially for those who sacrificed careers for what they thought was the best interest of their children. If it makes you feel any better, none of the studies showed a large effect either way, so if you are or were a stay-at-home parent and you didn’t have much-earning potential, you likely did not hurt your children that much by foregoing a career and at least your children were/are statistically much better off than they would be if they had grown up in a single-parent household. Given that the research on this topic seems to swing both ways at pretty even intervals, we also would not be surprised to see it swing back in the other direction in the near future.

At any rate, the potential pitfalls of child-rearing-oriented cognitive siloing can be avoided by ensuring each member is actively contributing toward the relationship’s wealth, influence, and/or power. Divisions, for example, may be made along corporate lines, with partners taking CEO vs. CFO vs. COO positions. Or each partner in a relationship may specialize and rise within a different professional field to protect the relationship from downside risk in recessions.

Both a risk and a benefit of cognitive siloing is that it makes exchanging one partner for another specialist in the same cognitive category fairly easy. For example, it would be easy for a partner to swap out one home-keeping, child-rearing partner for another—or even just hire a nanny and maid.

Those whose specialized value has a time limit are in extremely tenuous positions in such relationships. A child-rearing-specialized female who leveraged physical attractiveness to secure a high-value partner will have little value to her partner and the open market after reaching a certain age. This fact will destabilize her relationship over time. To avoid such dangers, ensure any specialization a partner develops will maintain or increase its value with time. A good example of this might involve one partner focusing on building wealth and the other focusing on building influence (through something like politics)—such a relationship would not put either party in a vulnerable position.

Each partner in a cognitively siloed relationship should regularly audit the value their domain brings to the relationship and take measures to ensure that value does not diminish. Never believe you “lucked out” because your partner handles everything for you. Committing to a partner who handles almost everything for you, from income to chores, puts you in an incredibly vulnerable position. Should that person perish or leave you, you will have next to no value on the open market and be unaccustomed to fending for yourself.

Given the low amount of actual interaction needed for this model to function, it is very easy for cognitively siloed partners to grow apart over time and cease improving themselves. Because their partners may not fully understand all the work, stress, and effort that goes into their specialized work and contribution to the relationship, cognitively siloed partners may also come to feel lonely, unappreciated, and unsupported. Cognitively siloed partners must therefore put a uniquely high effort into communicating about their work and achievements, plus supporting the efforts and accomplishments of their partners.

Cognitive Integration

Whereas cognitive siloing usually involves partners taking on different domains in their lives (e.g., “I’ll work and increase our wealth, you’ll build our influence through a political and media career.”), cognitive integration entails partners dividing responsibility for different stages in the decision-making processes related to some or all domains of their lives (e.g., “I will come up with all proposed solutions, you will vet them, I will make a final call, and then you will execute on our decision.”). In other words, cognitively siloed partners divide responsibility by domain, whereas cognitively integrated partners divide responsibility by stage in the decision making and action-taking process.

When people read our books, they often think some chapters are primarily written by Simone and others by Malcolm. This reveals an assumption that we write the books using a cognitively siloed methodology when in reality we write using a cognitively integrated methodology. We talk about what we are going to write together until we have a rough idea of what it will look like, after which Malcolm writes a rough first draft that Simone turns into something readable, and Malcolm ultimately polishes. This is an example of cognitively integrated writing strategy in that the responsibilities are divided by the stage of the decision-making process rather than the domain.

A cognitively integrated couple may, for example, divide all decisions by complexity (from nuanced detail to big picture decisions), then allow each partner to specialize in one type of decision making. Were Partner A to be tasked with making big picture decisions, they may focus on constantly consuming news media, information, and studies, digesting everything, and ultimately communicating a condensed summary to Partner B. Partner B might then be tasked with using this information to make detail-oriented decisions—information they wouldn’t have been able to collect themselves as their noses are buried in the nuances of the detail-oriented decisions affecting their joint lives. Partner B is permitted by the relationship’s arrangement to genuinely focus on every problem without removing their nose from the details through the understanding that partner A has their head up and is alert to larger trends that could be impacting their up-close analysis.

If the actions of partners in a relationship were to be illustrated as a tree, and the color of the tree’s branches indicated the authority of each member, a cognitively siloed tree’s branches would be all one color or another, whereas a cognitively integrated tree would have branches that are vertically striped.

A fully cognitively integrated couple will not have independent thoughts, opinions, or friends (acquired post-relationship start date). Cognitively integrated partners combine their cognitive pathways to the extent that any interaction they have with the world is partially processed by each partner’s brains.

For this model to be effective, each partner must be completely comfortable surrendering individuality and allowing someone else to think on their behalf. Independent thoughts and opinions remain but are as a rule are subordinate to the thoughts and opinions of the collective. While most initially recoil from this concept, 64% of the men and 41% of the women we polled agreed that their ideal marriage would be one in which their lives are as integrated with those of their partners as possible.

We theorize that cognitively integrated relationships are poorly represented in public because:

  1. They only work for partners with unique objective functions and lifestyles, typically allowing the partners to work together in some capacity.
  2. The social absolutism of individual empowerment in the 70s and 80s created a hostile environment for a relationship style that does not value the individual.
  3. It looks like enmeshment to relationship psychologists—which means they would counsel against it. While superficially similar to enmeshment, cognitively integrated relationships and enmeshed relationships have about as much in common as poly relationships and relationships in which someone enjoys many sexual partners by cheating on a spouse.

Enmeshment is when the emotional state of the group is imposed on the individual and is most common in cognitively siloed relationships. Enmeshment is characterized by emotional manipulation through guilt, shaming, and a lack of respect for an individual’s personal boundaries. Think of the cliché societal image we have of the overly dramatic mother asking her daughter how she could so wantonly wound the mother by not yet being married and pregnant. This is enmeshment.

Enmeshment is mandatory emotional integration

Cognitive integration is voluntary intellectual integration

An easy rule of thumb for distinguishing between the two involves checking how partners regard emotions. Enmeshed partners will place importance on emotions and emotional displays, while cognitively integrated partners will often have the utmost contempt for decisions made under the influence of emotional states and treat emotional displays as the height of character weakness. Cognitively integrated couples rarely attempt to suppress emotional states, but accept that emotions are just an accident of our evolution (or in the case of those religiously inclined, a tool of the devil), something to be experienced, accepted, and calmly communicated, but not permitted to become the driving force behind an action or a decision.

Consider a case in which a woman gets slighted by a coworker.

While we are referring heavily to enmeshment, we don’t believe enmeshment is a real “thing” or at least not as it is characterized by relationship psychologists. Instead, what we believe psychologists are observing is an emotional manipulation tactic that is bolstered by creating an expectation of emotional alignment. This expectation of emotional alignment is holistically secondary to the emotional manipulation and represents a power-wielding tactic commonly deployed by those in a submissive or subordinate position in a relationship. That is why this tactic is used so frequently by narcissistic-yet-traditional women; they want to exert control, but don’t want to take control through an act of dominance due to their traditional views on gender roles, so they do so instead through emotional manipulation, which requires some expectation of emotional mirroring in their target (though this can go two ways—something common in mother-daughter relationships).

We ourselves (Simone and Malcolm) have a mostly cognitively integrated relationship and aside from undergoing the hassle of setting it up (a process that took about two years), we have experienced no discomfort from the dynamic—aside from accidentally signing off emails with the wrong name from time to time.

This is not to say we don’t experience negative interpersonal interactions with each other: Once every couple of months, one of us will fail to live up to the expectations we have set for ourselves as a unit. When this happens, we count on our partner to call attention to the failure so we can take a moment to collectively develop a strategy ensuring we never fail in the same way twice. That said, a partner pointing out an unacceptable failure feels less like an outside attack and more like the voice in your head that chastises you for doing something you knew was stupid.

When someone is in a runaway state of anxiety, fear, or grief, it can overwhelm their cognitive load and prevent them from the mental work required to shake it. When half of someone (their partner) can think clearly, it is much easier to implement a strategy to extricate unwanted emotional states before they fester. In a similar vein, it is very easy to suppress a desire to have “fun” or indulge in self-image-reinforcing activities when a person knows their other half is hard at work.

Of all the couples we know who operate on this model, we cannot think of one that has split up or is not extremely successful in a classical sense—though this is likely not because this model is superior but because a couple must be very well matched and financially secure to even attempt it (everyone we know who operates under this model owns a company with their partner, and we have trouble thinking how it would work if they did not—this also might be why we know more people operating under this model than an average person might, as it is disproportionately represented in married CEOs and married CEOs often know each other).

It is not surprising that cognitively integrated couples tend to be CEOs of the same company, as this was the default style of relationship within the “corporate family” model—in which the partners both raise children together and run a company together from their home—which predates the TradCon model and has dominated the past couple thousand years of Western history. What killed the corporate family model was the rise of the male wage job in an office, which started in the early 1900s and gave birth to the TradCon model. What killed the TradCon was the rise of the female wage job in an office through the 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of the gig economy and work-from-home models of corporate work, we can’t help but wonder if we are on the cusp of seeing the rise of a neo-corporate family model (NeoCorp being a term for an iteration of the corporate family model designed for the 21st century).

As a quick aside, it is technically possible to run a NeoCorp or corporate family model in a cognitively siloed fashion as well; it is just less common.

Cognitively integrated relationships require precise circumstances—specifically:

Though it can squeeze even more productive output from a relationship than the siloed approach, cognitive integration features enormous risks and drawbacks:

The Economics of Relationships

T

hough not all men and not all women want the same thing, it is still immensely helpful to know what a market, in aggregate, values. If Person A has a piece of gold, he may not give it to Person B—even if it is of no use to Person A and he does not value gold—because enough people in society do value gold to make Person A careful about how he spends it. The fact that Person A is not personally keen on gold does not mean that gold will not have a significant impact on his life. Even those who create the market demand for gold value it due to socialization and not some genetic compulsion to value gold; this fact does not change the value of gold.

We provide this example to make the point that even though not all women and men want the same things, if enough do have similar desires that manifest along gendered lines that will affect the economics of dating where economics is defined as “the study of how society uses its limited resources.”

Notes from the Research:

Economic Trends to Exploit

Understanding different quirks of gender differences in dating and marriage markets can enable you to recognize and exploit trends. We will highlight a few common trends so that you can learn to leverage their currents—and their effects on dating markets—to your advantage.

The Illusion of Hypergamy

Within various “manosphere” communities of the internet, hypergamy is perceived as being an intrinsic female behavior and as a major problem in current dating markets. Though hypergamy is technically defined as the action of marrying someone of a superior class, the going online connotation for hypergamy entails a woman leaving an existing partner the moment a better option arises, the moment they have a chance to trade up.

What is interesting is that this accusation is, surprisingly, factually accurate: When a long- term relationship is terminated, said termination is much more likely to be initiated by the female. More than 70% of divorces are initiated by women. But in this statistic lies the crux of the illusion: Women leave relationships at much higher rates than men both because they are less likely to cheat and more likely to trade up. Why is this?

Historically speaking, women in many societies had severe limitations on their ability to earn income. In such societies, cultural norms developed around men financially supporting their female partners. This cultural artifact still exists as a societal norm even though the earning potential of women has dramatically increased over the past 100 years or so. The cultural artifact can be seen everywhere from men being expected to pay for dates to gift-giving rituals (flowers etc.) and the concept of the stay-at-home wife—even though many will be loath to acknowledge it, recent study showed that only 51% of women even offer to pick up the check on a first date.

In nearly every realm, bad actors emerge who either consciously or subconsciously abuse the system to their advantage. In the case of this particular cultural artifact, bad actors manifest as women using men they date to supplement their income and enable them to live a lifestyle above their independent means. When you combine this inevitability with the social stigma that shames men when they financially support a woman who is sleeping with other men, you get a situation in which a portion of the female population expects resources from their relationship partners, but can only easily secure resources from one partner at a time (this is because part of the resource-giving ritual often involves the male publicly exhibiting his relationship with the female, be that on Facebook or at a popular restaurant, and if a male cannot publicly display his relationship with a female, he will be hesitant expend significant resources on her). Should such women feel fairly confident that they can do better than a current partner from a resource perspective, then their most logical move would be to leave the current partner so they can secure resource flow from the more endowed partner.

To put it in other words, “hypergamy” as the manosphere sees it is inevitable in any society in which (1) there is a social expectation that a woman should be able to draw resources from a man and (2) there is a social expectation that a woman can only draw resources from one man at a time (were the second condition not the case, women would just get additional partners, and there would be no reason to trade up). Were this cultural expectation reversed and we lived in a world in which these conditions were applied to men, we feel confident in saying that men would be far more likely to terminate long-term relationships than women—there is nothing “innately female” about being subject to market forces.

Men are not saints in this equation either. In our society, sex is perceived as a core value of a relationship to men—thus when a man feels he can do better than his current partner, he is better off just cheating on this partner with the other woman covertly. This way, he gets sex with other women and his current partner: Maximum sex! Society insinuates to men that relationships are for sex and implies to women that relationships are for resources/status. It is much easier for a man to hide that he is getting sex from multiple women than it is for a woman to hide she is securing resources from multiple men. This is why men cheat at much higher rates, with about 20% of men cheating versus around 13% of women.[[2]](#_ftn2)

In other words, the average man (in a society in which men commonly financially support female partners, and monogamy is expected) will be incentivized to cheat with willing sexual partners instead of breaking off a long-term relationship, whereas the average woman (in said society) will be incentivized to end a long-term relationship when a more desirable partner presents themselves—or when she believes she could do better on an open market. This is why men cheat more often than women and why women more frequently end long-term relationships in the pursuit of better mates.

The simplest explanation for this behavioral tendency is that it is solely a product of a tradition around unidirectional resource flow (a society in which men typically give resources to women), not some biological impulse women have to betray men as some groups would argue.

This behavioral tendency yields very interesting externalities. For example, women over 30 or so will notice an alarming dearth of high-quality men in the marriage market, whereas post-30 men will see plenty of eager high-quality 30-something female candidates. This is because high-value men with low-value partners stay with those partners, but cheat, while high-value women with low-value partners are more likely to leave those low-value partners to look for a better partner. Though this isn’t always the case, it happens differentially enough to seriously affect the dating markets as we age.

Here comes the important part: How can we exploit this dynamic to our personal advantage?

For one thing, understanding this dynamic grants some predictability around partner cheating and relationship abandonment and enables you to take action to prepare for or possibly prevent these occurrences from happening.

Men are more likely to cheat when they feel that they can do better than their current partner or when the sexual spice from a relationship fades due to the Coolidge effect (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more info on this. In summary: Men get more turned on by a new woman more than a woman with whom they have had sex before . . . though this is complicated by some new research showing a similar tendency may affect women even more than men with some caveats).

Statistically speaking, men have very little motivation to leave a partner who is not actively making their lives miserable—so long as they can get away with having sex with other people and believe their partner is faithful to them. Alas, allowing men to sleep around is risky, as there is a chance that a person with whom a man sleeps will attempt to secure non-trivial resources from him. This person may also attempt to hamper resource flow in the man’s preexisting relationship or even try to terminate the preexisting relationship entirely in an effort to secure 100% of the potential resource allocation granted from that man (resources need not be monetary; they may also manifest as emotional investment and time).

If letting a guy sleep around introduces exogenous risks, how can you remove almost any risk of a guy leaving you? One strategy we have seen involves taking ownership of additional partner selection. This may sound extreme, but it is not that uncommon for women to select additional partners for their husbands and long-term male partners. This seems to be a strategy uniquely effective in enabling some women to maintain high-value male partners. We are not condoning this strategy per se, just noting it as a potential solution that exists and is uncomfortably successful.

Women in long-term relationships primarily cheat when looking for validation. A woman may crave validation when she no longer feels desired by her current partner or when her partner’s validation loses its luster because his value has decreased in some way. On average, women terminate long-term relationships when they feel they can secure a significantly better partner, something that is not the case for the average man. This leads to dynamics that feel very unfair when women leverage their partners’ value to increase their own value, then leverage their upgraded value to secure an even better partner (whereas a man would just utilize a similar rise in status to cheat). Fortunately, men can largely prevent cheating by constantly improving their status.

Exploiting Differences in Standards

Another useful “mega trend” among average gender dynamics is that men in short-term dating markets settle for much lower-value partners than women.

Even though some groups deny this fact for ideological reasons, the data makes this trend painfully difficult to avoid. On Tinder, 80% of men compete over the bottom 22% of women, while 78% of women compete for the top 20% of men. If you calculate this out as a Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality across a population that is usually applied to economies and societies), the dating market for men is less equal than 95% of economies in the world. To put it another way, a man of average attractiveness will only be “liked” by 0.87% of women (1 in 115).

The marketplaces created by various dating apps are not all as unequal in nature as the marketplace created by Tinder, but still dismal from a male perspective.

On OkCupid, women rate 80% of men as “worse-looking than medium” and men in this 80% category get their messages replied to 30% of the time or less. On the other hand, men rated only about 50% of women as “worse-looking than medium” and were much more generous to women in this category, replying to them 40% of the time.

Females on the dating app Hinge (another dating app) have a Gini coefficient of 0.324, while males have a still much higher Gini coefficient of 0.542. Were we to compare these Gini coefficients to those of actual countries, the dating economy for women on Hinge would rank as the world’s 75th least equal economy, about the same as the economies of the UK or Canada, and the economy for men on Hinge would rank as the 8th least equal economy. Countries ranking this low on economic equality are typically embroiled in active civil war—people are starving on the streets, etc. Countries rarely stay this bad for long, so it dates the book to cite the few in that category now, but for some context, the Gini coefficient experienced by men on Hinge is worse than the economic state of the Congo, Rwanda, or Nigeria (these three only go up to around 0.50 whereas men on Hinge are at 0.542).

Essentially, even in better case scenarios, men still live a daily dating life in which a small minority live like sexual super billionaires and the rest live in abject poverty, while women enjoy a sort of sexual middle-class rank in society. This significantly influences the tactics men end up using when dating online.

It is not uncommon to see women beg to not be sent low-effort messages like “Hey,” wishing instead for more thoughtful, personalized messages. This is a reasonable request from a woman’s perspective because men reply to 50% of messages women send. Alas, the typical man on an online dating site can’t just put more effort into each message. One study demonstrated that lengthening a message from fifty words to two thousand five hundred words increases a man’s odds of receiving a reply by less than 10%. This marginal boost in odds does not make the time investment logical if, in a similar time period, he can reach out to nineteen additional women with a “hey” equivalent. If time is a limited resource to a man, it is simply not logical for him to waste it drafting well-thought-out messages in initial online dating outreach.

A woman of average attractiveness scolding a man for sending her low-effort messages online asking for sex is a bit like someone who grew up middle class scolding a homeless refugee who is asking them for change. Refusal to take the mental effort to model what the world is like for others will make their behavior seem quite bizarre. By making an effort to understand the daily struggles of others. You will find it easier to understand them. Through that understanding, you can more efficiently exploit others to achieve your goals.

A fascinating caveat to all this is that gay, male-on-male markets exhibit reply rates that more closely resemble women looking for men (with partners being easy to obtain), whereas female-on-female markets resemble markets in which men are looking for women (with partners being difficult to obtain). This implies that the target gender in any particular market dictates how easy or difficult it will be to obtain a partner.

Again: How can we exploit this dynamic to our personal advantage?

Because men rarely hear from women and rarely get responses from women, women can gain a massive leg up in online dating markets by taking the lead, reaching out to desirable men, and sending them thoughtful responses. I, Simone, did this when dating online and found it worked splendidly. I never had trouble securing dates and filling my pipeline with promising leads—heck, this is how I landed Malcolm. I would suggest aiming for emailing at least ten new men a day during any period in which you are sourcing a new partner.

Furthermore, men should learn that online dating is a numbers game. Write a clever (but sufficiently generic) initial message template, contact as many female profiles as possible, and do not waste time on leads that appear to be stringing you along. Furthermore, consider sourcing women outside of online dating apps, leveraging markets in which you might enjoy a higher status. While you might not be in the top 20% when it comes to physical attractiveness and therefore suffer on photo-based dating apps, you may be in the top 20% of a social club, academic group, church group, or charitable organization.

Timing Considerations

Instinctual Life Stage Behavioral Impulses

That which is appropriate for you, relationship-wise, may depend heavily on your particular stage in life.

Anyone who has owned a dog or watched a nature documentary about lion cubs is familiar with something called “play behavior,” which only lasts for a certain period of time. Just as adult dogs and lions lose their drive toward play behavior and find themselves motivated to do other things, humans experience instinctual changes, feeling the drive to exhibit different behaviors during different life stages.

Shifts in our instinctual behavioral impulses can cause surprise and consternation when an individual repeatedly attempts to derive happiness from an old instinctual impulse. If a person goes long enough without exploring new categories of behavior while older behaviors cease to generate happiness, they may even end up feeling as though nothing gives them happiness anymore (though clinical depression can also cause this feeling).

Changes in behaviors that generate happiness matter a great deal when people make relationship decisions. Someone may assume they never want children because children annoyed them as a teen only to find that later in life, interactions with children cause more happiness than anything else. Plans this person may have made for their lives in adolescence would not anticipate this shift and, if executed, could cause a huge drop in life satisfaction over the long run.

To our knowledge, there is no coherent model that illustrates how our sources of happiness change as we age, so we will have to build one ourselves, gathering data points from personal experience and potentially relevant studies.

In general, we assume that the systems influencing what makes us happy are not that different from the systems that cause us to feel sexually aroused. We have a number of “stimuli” detectors in our brains that generate an emotional reward when they recognize something that fits into a set of pre-defined parameters. These detectors cycle throughout a normal person’s life, seem to be inborn and not learned, and have an average way that they function, which varies among individuals.

Just as turn-ons vary between people, stimuli that create happiness vary from one person to the next. For example, while play behavior typically ceases to generate happiness around mid-adolescence, in some individuals, play behavior continues to be a source of great joy well into old age. As with the arousal systems, we have reason to believe that happiness-generating systems were evolutionarily selected by somehow increasing the survival rate of the offspring of those who had them, as they appear inborn and across cultures.

Childhood

Think back to one of your favorite childhood activities that has since lost its appeal. Doing so should give you a clear idea of what it feels like to have an impulse to do something at one stage of your life that subsequently disappears with age.

As discussed, play behavior, which typically manifests as interaction with peers in a physically taxing manner that involves a high degree of touching and boundary testing, is critical during childhood. This play behavior is designed to help children develop social connections and understand the world around them. However, if you as an adult, were to attempt rolling around on the grass, wrestling your best friend, you would likely be able to derive little positive emotion from it—or at least would get bored after only a minute or two.

Childhood is a unique age in that humans appear to be able to derive a high level of emotional output from totally imagined scenarios, leading to most childhood games to incorporate a high degree of imagination. A child can gain almost as much happiness from imagining orbiting earth in a space station as they could actually doing so. Children are even able to gain social stimulation from entirely imaginary friends who amount to nothing more than cognitive models. Perhaps children are afforded this imaginary luxury because it does not distract them from other important tasks that adolescents and adults cannot afford to ignore.

Finally, children derive happiness from pleasing authority figures at this age and look to them for cues about what should make them happy (consider kids pretending to be parents, drive cars, talk on cell phones, etc.). Mimicking authority figures’ interests and activities may help children develop knowledge in domains that will be relevant to them in adulthood.

Adolescence

Behaviors that cause happiness in adolescence are problematic in that we often internalize them as core elements of our identities. We begin to believe these inclinations are part of who we are because we feel them strongly at the same time we develop a sense of identity and place in the world, then become confused when we no longer derive happiness from them despite having made life decisions around them (like people becoming video game designers because, as teens, they loved playing video games).

At both this age and in childhood, social acceptance plays a more prominent role in happiness than it does in adulthood. Adults often complain about how small their friend groups become; however, the reality may be that people simply put less time into these sorts of interpersonal relationships as adults because they derive less happiness from them.

In general, studies have shown adolescents are extremely sensitive to social cues and have trouble ignoring them. One study showed that when performing an emotion-themed version of a Stroop test (e.g., saying “sad” when looking at a picture of a happy person), adolescents performed dramatically worse than adults. You will never care as much about what other people think of you as you do at this age.

In contrast to childhood, adolescents do not derive happiness from pleasing authority figures, and complying with authority figures may even cause a fairly strong aversion reaction. We would assume this evolved to help push humans away from their parents once they reach breeding age, both so their parents could give them more siblings and to increase genetic diversity by encouraging movement to other tribes.

Studies have repeatedly shown that at this age in life, novelty creates a stronger positive feeling than it does during other stages. This both creates an urge to explore and seek out novel ideas (learning forbidden knowledge by exploring something relatively obscure, like communism or Wicca, or finding a band no one has heard of). It is often during this stage of life, in which novelty provides excessive positive emotional stimulation, that people decide they want to travel the world—only to find the experience to be somewhat hollow in their more affluent years when they can actually afford to do so.

Some hypothesize that this drive for novelty, combined with the drive for social acceptance, creates the “meta drive” for deviance in adolescents—meaning that youth don’t actively have an urge to seek deviant behavior. These feelings may also explain why adolescents often begin to identify as “rebellious” and become confused as to why rebellion feels less fulfilling with age.

Promotion motivation also is statistically much stronger at this stage of life. This means that you get more happiness from pursuing huge, idealistic long-term goals. At this time of your life, you are focused on your hopes for how you can create a better future for yourself and the world, and this drives youths to more idealistic endeavors and ideas.

As for a negative emotion during this stage: People often find children and babies quite annoying as teens. This is likely evolved to prevent them from procreating too early and having to divide their resources at an age during which they are better served by building a stable platform within the tribe to maximize their position within its hierarchy. Position in a tribal hierarchy historically mattered more to one’s total number of surprising offspring than getting an early start with kids (this is likely also contributes to people’s high sensitivity to social stimuli at this age).

Finally, analysis of twelve million personal blogs for how youths interpret happiness found at this stage exciting things trigger more happiness (this may just be an artifact of novelty leading to more positive emotions at this stage). In general, the anticipation of future goods also caused more happiness in this group with a focus on things like “like finding love, getting ahead at work, or moving to a new town,” though, again, this is likely just a combination of novelty-seeking behavior and promotional motivation.

Midlife

Midlife changes in desire are critical as they likely are often the ones that happen after we secure a long-term partner. Often our long-term partners are chosen to optimize our adolescent desires and not those of the longest stage: Midlife.

Research has shown that as adolescents and young adults transition into midlife, they begin to derive more fulfillment and happiness from prevention than from promotion—meaning that goals designed to minimize losses and maintain that which has already been secured become more satisfying and motivating than goals revolving around big wins and changes.

This shift likely ties strongly to the trope of individuals losing their idealism and becoming more conservative as they age. An increased desire to protect what one already has may also explain why humans often move into hobbies focused on “prepperism” or sustainability in midlife, such as gardening and wood working. Marrying someone as an adolescent out of shared, passionate idealism could therefore be a suboptimal life choice

While we haven’t seen studies promoting this idea, it seems as though humans may also experience a stronger desire to acquire physical assets and build things at this age. The first half of this is realized through things like land acquisition while the second is realized through fixing up old cars or making Martha Stewart-inspired displays.

In the study that looked at a large number of blogs, they found people at this stage of life got more happiness from things that made people feel “peaceful, relaxed, calm, or relieved,” though this may just be another manifestation of prevention motivation.

Long walks and scenery seem to make people happier at this life stage. While the positive stimulus that comes from exploration of totally new things typically decreases at this stage, “surveyance” activities seem to increase (starring at a pretty view, for example). Our assumption is that this behavior might be tied to scouting good camp locations and protecting them by looking for areas close to sources of water like streams or the ocean and where you could see someone coming from a long distance away (a view). But obviously, this is a “just so story” and holds no weight.

Finally, and most importantly for this book, at this age, you begin to develop a strong affinity for both bearing and interacting with children. This often shocks people because most adolescents have an active aversion to children. This desire happens both in males and females and is not tied to adherence to societal gender roles (making it unlikely that this occurs “because society tells us to want children” and more likely that it is a biological urge to procreate and nurture—because your ancestors who had this urge kick in had more surviving offspring than their peers). That said, there is a gender difference in this emotion—it starts younger for women and goes down in severity over time (especially after having some children), while in men it occurs at lower rates but increases over time.

The desire to have a baby is not the only major children-related change that takes place during midlife. While most of the happiness we get from exploring new things decreases with age, the happiness we derive from exploring new things through others increases dramatically with age. So as an adult, while you may not be able to gain as much happiness as you used to from activity X, you can regain that happiness by experiencing activity X with a child. The same can be said for resource acquisition: When younger, you gain more happiness through dreams of acquiring great things for yourself, whereas that emotional stimulus seems to shift onto children with age.

Old Age

Sadly, most research we have found on this subject doesn’t break out old age from midlife, and we haven’t experienced old age ourselves yet, so we cannot easily say how things change.

Note From Personal Musings:

To be clear: We don’t think people are actually getting “stuck” in a stage of development when this happens, but rather that years of consternation and focus on a specific unmet objective cause strong cognitive dissonance when the objective is attainable during later life stages. Even though such people are no longer inherently driven to these previously unmet-objectives later in life, they convince themselves they are—only to throw immense resources into pursuits that don’t ultimately satisfy them.

The Profound Effects of Fertility and Childbirth

No talk of relationship timing would be complete without a discussion of fertility, especially because conventional wisdom does not correlate with present scientific research.

A recent New York Times article bemoaned the fact that, while college students overwhelmingly wanted children, they did not understand their time window for having them: “only 38 percent of men and 45 percent of women stated correctly that a woman’s fertility declines between 35 and 39 years of age, and only 18 percent of men and 17 percent of women knew that men’s fertility declines between 45 and 49.” This is funny, as the article bemoaning youth who don’t know about how fertility fluctuates with age gets the research wrong. Specifically, a recent shift in research findings suggests the claim that female fertility declines dramatically at 35 is a misnomer perpetuated by bad science that relied on French peasant birth records from the 1700s and thus was not conducted within the context of people who grew up with modern medicine. Does this mean women are forever fertile? Hardly. But it does suggest common perceptions need adjustment.

It appears that what the previous predominant view on fertility got wrong was its perception of a sudden cliff in fertility that appears around a woman’s mid-thirties. Instead:

With all that said, none of that really matters for three reasons:

  1. If having kids that are biologically yours is super important to you, you should build your life plan, assuming you will become infertile a bit before 40. If the general population experiences moderate drops in fertility with age, some members of the population still do experience plummeting fertility. You might be one of those people. It seems unwise to run that risk if you have a choice.
  2. Some couples have trouble conceiving, for a wide variety of reasons at any age. Fertility treatments tend to be more successful on younger patients, so to make the most of these expensive and uncomfortable procedures, it would be best to undergo them as early as possible, when yields are likely to be higher.
  3. Even if your personal fertility remains sky high through your thirties and even your forties, society on average has the perception that fertility plummets around age 35, meaning you will have to combat that stigma on dating and long-term relationship markets. In other words, men who want kids will generally assume a woman in her thirties is too old to have them and thus will not marry her—her actual fertility is irrelevant to her ability to secure a partner, and only her perceived fertility matters.

Should you want to avoid these risks but also advance your career a bit more before having children, you can always do what we did: Bank a large number of healthy embryos in your twenties or early thirties so that you do not have to worry about doing so later. Though keep in mind, this costs a lot (we spent over a $100K banking 27 healthy embryos).

Finally, keep in mind how having children affects earning potential. Parent status increases the hireability of men. In one study conducted on the subject, dads who indicated they were part of a PTA on their resumes were called back for interviews at a much higher rate. Conversely, women in this experiment were asked back for a second interview at less than half the rate of those who did not mention the PTA. In general, men earn an average of 6% more for every child they have (and live with), whereas women earn 4% less. This suggests that for a married couple earning an equal salary, every child yields an average net bonus of 1% in higher income. There have also been studies showing a productivity increase in the office after having children (in men at least)—a productivity bump that is highest for men with two or more children (with fathers becoming 52% more productive on average after the birth of twins).

This is all very strange to us, as within our companies (which are roughly 90% female), we have noticed that mothers perform exceptionally well. Studies also show mothers are more ambitious than women without children, with mothers being 15% more likely to want to become a top executive.

Essentially, having kids is a strict net benefit to a family’s career (unless the woman is earning more than the man in a relationship) and is a huge earnings boost for gay male couples. As a downside, or potentially an upside, having a child will also make partners more critical of their friendships, with 69% of women and 67% of men feeling satisfied with their friendships before having kids and only 54% and 57% feeling the same way afterward.

For those monstrous ghouls who value happiness over money, the jury is still out on the subject of children. Studies looking at how children affect happiness yield a broad range of conclusions. Some suggest children increase happiness and life satisfaction while others argue the opposite. We read no clear consensus. The one thing on which these studies do seem aligned is that parents with very young children are less happy.

Those afraid of dying would be well-served to review the twin studies (studies that contrast identical and fraternal twins separated at birth and raised by different families) exploring how much of a person’s consciousness is preserved in their genetic code. Everything from a person’s political inclinations to the way they interact with friends is hard-wired into DNA and can be inherited by biological children. Better yet, parents get to choose the person with whom they mix their DNA to create their next iterations. If all that isn’t enticing enough, you as a parent can give the next iterations of yourself any type of childhood you want them to have. As for all those biases and crusty old ideas stuck to the walls of your mind like scum on the side of a pot—well, this next iteration of you will get to choose which of them it accepts. Children are not burdened by their parents’ memories—only memories parents choose to share. Did we mention that you get to create as many new iterations of yourself as you want? We will never understand this cryonics and life extension contingent of people trying to live forever through freezing themselves and religiously adhering to wacky diets. It just seems like such a waste when most people are born with all the bits they need to live forever and in a way that is about a billion times better than living forever in your current body.

The Wall & How Dating Dynamics Change at Age 30

Nowhere is the sexual dimorphism in human dating more salient than the dynamic change that happens when those playing within the sexual, dating, and relationship markets hit their thirties. Namely: Male market value steadily increases past age 30, whereas female market value drops. Colloquially, this phenomenon is commonly known as “The Wall” and is well attested to in statistical analysis of both dating website behavior and research data.

Typically this dynamic is presented within the narrow view of the ticking biological fertility clock, which obscures the larger issue: Women prefer to date men who are their age or slightly older, whereas men prefer to date younger women. Statistically, this means that a 26-year-old woman will have more online pursuers than the average man but, at age 48, men have twice as many online pursuers as the average woman.

To understand how this works, let us look at a hypothetical college campus in the middle of the woods, in which the only available partners are members of the opposite gender and all members follow the rule of women-only dating guys in their grade or older and men only dating girls in their grade or below. A first-year female is a desirable partner to men in their second, third, and fourth years, while a first-year male is only a desirable partner to first-year girls—who simultaneously have a choice of any guy in the school. By the time they are both in their fourth year, the boy is a desirable partner to any girl in the school, whereas the girl is only a desirable partner to other fourth-year boys (who have the choice of any girl).

This may not seem like a big deal, but the effect is enormous. If we define the period between second and third year as equilibrium, then each gender will find it about four times harder to secure a partner in their low year than at equilibrium and about sixteen times harder in their low year than their easier year (they can only target one fourth the population and that quarter of the population has access to four times the potential partners). Imagine if you had to put in sixteen times the amount of effort and time to earn your same salary! We will call this equilibrium “The Wall,” and in our adult life, it occurs around the age of 30 for heterosexuals looking for a long-term monogamous relationship.

In the real world, The Wall affects dating dynamics even more severely than the hypothetical college model would predict. Why is this the case? And why does this happen to women around age 30 and not around age 39, the midway point of the average human lifespan? We have different theories on this—maybe you can settle it for us.

Malcolm argues: The answer becomes pretty clear when you look at the data. OkCupid did a study of what age of partner men and women prefer throughout the course of their lives. Men within every age cohort preferred women 20-23 on average, while women preferred men slightly older until they hit 30, then slightly younger from 30 to 40, and at any age past 40, women prefer 40-year-old men. The Wall surfaces at the age of 30 and not 39 because, on average, all age groups of men prefer women between 20-23 and it takes women a few years to realize that it isn’t just a string of bad luck for them: It really does become astronomically harder to secure a decent guy after the age of 26 or so. This also means that after the age of 45, the market dynamics of The Wall, and specifically the disadvantage it gives to women, largely disappear as both females and males prefer younger people. Thus “The Wall” should really be thought of more as “The Trough”—but that just doesn’t have the same ring to it does it?

Simone argues: The equilibrium point at which woman should really start to feel a crunch is actually around 39, but the age at which women start to really realize that they can’t secure the same high quality of partner with the same amount of effort—as well as the age at which women internalize that their fertility is beginning a downward slope—is around age 30-31. Upon realizing this, women begin to panic, especially if they had planned on having kids because they feel they are running out of time. Much like how populations can trigger economic collapses by getting spooked and making a run on banks, women can trigger a Great Dating Depression of viable male partner availability by making a rush on all plausibly good male long-term partners when they get spooked at around the age of 31. (Look up the data on “panic buying” for interesting examples of this phenomenon and how it plays out in different areas, For a recent example of this, consider the toilet paper shortages that broke out during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Alternatively, it could be argued that women are acting rationally. If they see their value dropping on the dating market with no hope recovery, they may start trading against their expected future value instead of their current value.

Another possibility for your consideration: The Wall could just be a result of female libido increasing dramatically in women when they hit age 30. Women between 30 and 40 have more sexual fantasies, more fantasies about men who are not their partner, more casual sex, cheat more often, and more one-night stands than their college-age counterparts. As to why this is the case: The most accepted current theory is that women evolved increasing sex drives to keep their birth rates steady despite declining fertility (the increase in sexual desire maps pretty well to declining fertility). As one would predict from this theory, after menopause female sex drive often decreases precipitously, though surprisingly a woman’s sexual satisfaction increases with age despite this lower sexual desire. This complicated picture contrasts with men whose libido peaks in their teen years, then remains fairly constant.

Note from the Research:

As a society, we used to warn young girls and boys about this dynamic with concepts like “the old maid,” but as that concept was offensive, we swept it under the rug. A lack of proper warning puts many responsible, hard-working women who truly want long-term relationships at a huge disadvantage in the long-term relationship market. The fact that a woman is going to have an easier time securing a higher quality partner when she is younger is daunting—even offensive—because it hurts the feelings of women who did not take advantage of those years or felt they couldn’t properly secure a good relationship without sacrificing their budding careers. That said, it is cruel not to warn young girls that they are going to have to put in at least five times the amount of time and effort as a 35-year-old to secure the same quality of partner they could have at 25.

We cannot imagine what it would feel like to pass the wall without understanding the economic forces at play that drives handsome guys with good jobs to cease being so eager to go on public dates. A perfectly reasonable woman experiencing this shift would mistakenly think something is wrong with her, not realizing she is caught up in something much bigger. An entirely level-headed woman would reel in horror at the amazing partners she squandered not knowing how hard such partners would be to come by only half a decade later—or grieve at the realization that she never indulged in the joy of being treasured and pursued by most people she came across when she had the chance.

Worse still, in modern Western society, even the most open-minded of little girls are socialized to look down on people who marry in their twenties. They see such people as less educated and poor because statistically they are. To avoid seeing themselves as uneducated, imprudent, and poor, ambitious young ladies make plans to start looking for a husband at a “respectable age to get married,” like 28. Not only do we raise women to not be aware of this cliff, but we are enthusiastically hurling them off the edge.

Simultaneously, men deal with a bizarre mirror phenomenon: A Tinder study found that an attractive 34-year-old man has a much easier time attracting women his own age than a 26-year-old man, but that the 34-year-old will attract women in the 26-year-old age bracket at the same rate as the 26-year-old. In other words, not only can the 34-year-old male attract 34-year-old women easier than a 26-year-old man can attract 26-year-old women, but he can also attract 26-year-old women with the same ease of a 26-year-old man. That said, this effect is not felt by most men that strongly, as most men are not in the “attractive man” category.

We find it hilarious that many pick-up artist gurus are generically attractive men that magically develop their systems for easily getting laid by lots of women at around the age of 30. What genius role models these men are. Remind us to share our ingenious system for getting free sand at the beach.

Fortunately, an awareness of “the wall” phenomenon can be leveraged to develop a strategy that maximizes the quality of long-term relationship partners available. If a heterosexual woman is looking for a TradCon or NeoCorp relationship and wants to make optimal use of her changing market value, she is best off utilizing the period before she is 19 for experimentation and casual dating, as by age 20, the training wheels should be off and she should be focused on finding her long-term relationship partner with the expectation of securing one before or around age 27. Given her astronomical value on the market between ages 20-23, she should not waste even a few days of those years off the market unless there is a real possibility of a long-term relationship with the target in question.

This timeline is onerous in that it requires major life decisions to be made during periods many people are still emotionally developing and thus even if it does allow one to better take advantage of their changing value on the market it is not necessarily the best strategy for all women looking for a TradCon or NeoCorp—keep in mind marriages before 18 have a 60% chance of divorce, this contrasts with an average 30% divorce rate for first-time marriages of those 23 and over and a 5% divorce rate of those 35 and over. Life doesn’t always have a “correct” answer. Sometimes life presents us with a few solutions, each with a unique drawback.

Another factor any heterosexual woman looking for a TradCon or NeoCorp relationship should consider is that if she secures a marriage partner during her prime age range, she will, on average, have a much worse aggregate desirability upon divorcing and will be targeting a very different pool of men. In other words, a woman who secures her first husband in her early twenties will, on average, have a harder time securing a second husband of equivalent quality—this is doubly true if she had kids during her first marriage. This is of course assuming that the divorce happens before the age of 50 (as we have mentioned, the market equalizes again in later life) and assuming she fails to increase her market value in some other way during the interim (by securing a better job, for example, or getting a prestigious college degree), but even with improved market value, securing a high-value second partner will be hard.

While one can always find exceptional deviations from the norm, this a clear trend in aggregate—one of those shitty realities we like to hide from young women. Hiding these realities can ultimately cause immense harm through the poor decisions this ignorance causes, like: “Let’s just try out this marriage thing; I can always get divorced and give it another shot if it doesn’t work out.” While not realizing that the period of her life she is expending on the “trial” will be her most advantaged time on the marriage market. Worse, that the guy in this little experiment loses nothing by expending the ages between 25 and 35 with a “trial wife” because when he hits the market again, he will statically be able to secure someone even better with less effort.

There is a reason why men are more than twice as likely as women to remarry after a divorce. While some would argue the reason is that women realize marriage is a raw deal after going through one, we imagine this is more of a “sour grapes” scenario than a lucid analysis of the benefits of marriage for a woman whose personality is compatible with one.

Should the idea of an older partner not be disagreeable, targeting older groups while at an age range of peak desirability (age 20-23) provides women with access to a spectacular market arbitrage opportunity as few other young ladies are interested in pursuing such a strategy. Nevertheless, those looking for a lifelong marriage and children should disregard the older-men-gold-digger strategy: Statistically speaking, the wider the age gap in a relationship, the shorter the relationship and the higher the probability of genetic abnormalities in offspring it produces.

What can men learn from this?

Men looking for TradCon or NeoCorp relationships are best off casually dating until around age 25, after which the search for a more permanent partner should begin. We suggest age 25 as a starting point instead of 30, seeing as the hunt to find a wife may take around eight years of sustained effort, and while it is not talked about as much as it should be, men experience declines in fertility after age 30. In general, if the man is looking for a TradCon relationship, with a wife who stays at home, he can afford to start on the older end of the spectrum, while if he is looking for a NeoCorp, with a wife who works alongside him, he may even want to start looking as early as around 22, as he will be optimizing for a partner of a roughly equivalent age, not wanting to take the earnings hit of partnering with someone earlier in their career.

This book’s gay readers have our hearty congratulations, as they will not have to contend with The Wall. That said, gay relationships do exhibit higher average age disparity. Among heterosexual couples, a male is on average 2.4 years older than a female (this age difference persists across cultures, but it is exaggerated in more “traditional” cultures like in Egypt, where average age difference stretches to over 5 years). So just how much higher is the average age gap in gay relationships? It is over 9years among male gay couples and around 8 years among lesbian couples.

Marriage

Let’s take a moment to dig into some data about the changing landscape of marriage to see if we might help you extract something of strategic utility.

In the US, marriage is and has been in open retreat. From 2000 onward, married 25-34-year-olds comprised 55% of the population while their never-married peers accounted for a paltry 34%. By 2015, this married group had slipped to 40% of the population, overtaken by their never-married peers who had quickly climbed to 53%.

It is currently predicted that 33% of those in the US who are currently in their twenties will never wed. Historically, only 10% of the population never married.

What is happening here? Perhaps men’s’ lower wages relative to women have dampened their confidence in dating markets; however, the fact that regions in which men do maintain disproportionately higher wages than women do not enjoy higher marriage rates suggests this is not the case. Specifically: Regions affected by the fracking boom, which yields increased wages in predominantly male jobs, did not see the increase in marriage rates we would expect if increased wage parity was a marriage killer.

The declining popularity of marriage also doesn’t seem to be due to any lack of desire to marry or a fear of committing to a woman. Surveys show neither of these reported desires has significantly decreased (even though groups like MGTOW—heterosexual men who choose to forego relationships with women—are on the rise, the stats make it clear that their sentiment is not leading to a shift at a society-wide level).

We theorize that two concurrent phenomena are causing this phenomenon: (1) A significant drop in the amount of investment required for a high-value man to secure sex (on average studies show, attractive men don’t just expend less energy to secure relationships, but also invest less in relationships once they have them) and (2) increasing female independence and control over fertility (women neither need a male partner to support them nor do they even technically need a male partner, or any partner, to have children).

In countries like the US, in which female college graduates by far outweigh male graduates—and yet women want male partners who match or exceed their own education level—there are just not as many viable pairings as there used to be. These dynamics together have “broken the ecosystem.” High value men invest less in relationships because they do not need them to secure sex. High value women invest less in relationships as they depend on men less and outperform men more. Mechanisms for fixing this system are honestly quite fun to explore; we will cover some at the end of the Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. It is also worth keeping in mind that the system may not need “fixing”—maybe this is just a natural transition period between one system and another better system.

Notes from the Research:

Appendix: Interested in digging into more data on securing a husband? Flip to Securing a Husband on page 478 in the appendix.

Geography

An individual’s ability to find, vet, and secure sexual and marriage partners varies widely among locations. A robust 55% of relationship-seeking singles claim it is difficult to meet people where they live. Dynamics can be shifted favorably by simply changing locations.

For example, New York is a men’s market for dating, being a place where men—and significantly older men—secure much higher-value female partners than they would be able to secure in other markets. On the other hand, Seattle is a woman’s market, which changes the strategies that are successful. Seattle, for example, is the only market where longer form message outreach significantly improves reply rates for men on dating sites. This market is so bad for men that there are two men for every woman within some segments.

Extreme cases aside, how will geography affect your dating life? Counterintuitively, those living in cities with more singles generally have a lower probability of forming a relationship. This makes relationship formation rates lower in large cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami, but higher in medium-sized cities like Colorado Springs, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Louisville. The surprising dynamic stems from the default cultural expectations different cities present—when seemingly everyone is in a relationship, the average single person will feel more pressure to form one as well.

Which markets are best for each gender?

Males looking for females should go where there are the most single females per single male:

  1. Memphis, TN
  1. Jacksonville, FL
  1. Fort Worth, TX
  1. Charlotte, NC
  1. Richmond, VA

Women looking for men would be best served by relocating to markets with the most single males per single female:

  1. San Francisco, CA
  1. San Jose, CA
  1. Seattle, WA
  1. Salt Lake City, UT
  1. San Diego, CA

It is difficult to provide equivalent recommendations for gay men and women. While men outnumbering women in a city might give a woman a market advantage, the same cannot be said about a preponderance of other gay men in a city. Also—and this pains us to say this—we could not find any charts of cities that break out gay women and gay men, so all we can provide is the top five cities for LGBTQ individuals in general, population-wise:

  1. San Francisco, CA
  1. Portland, OR
  1. Austin, TX
  1. New Orleans, LA
  1. Seattle, WA

As tempting as it might be to circumvent the limitations of local geography by entering a long-distance relationship, the average duration of a long-distance relationship is only four and a half months. While we would hardly argue that there are no ways to make a long-distance strategy effective, we think it important to highlight that they require more persistence and creativity. We also suspect long-distance relationships should be divided into two categories: Those that were in person, then split up due to life events, and those that were created and initiated among people who are physically separated. We suspect the second category is far more stable.

The Human Mating Season

Humans seem to have something of a mating season, which is weird because no one ever talks about it. This season lasts from Christmas through Valentine’s day and reaches its peak on the Sunday after New Year’s day (which in the dating industry is called Dating Sunday). This increase in dating activity can be seen very clearly in data from dating apps; however, seasonal fluctuations in dating behavior are not just a dating app phenomenon. There is actually a seasonal increase in sexual interest and desire over the same period. You will see an increase in Google searches for pornography and prostitution over this period. (We would really love to conduct more research to determine whether this is a cross-cultural phenomenon and whether or not it affects genders differently.)

We are not sure what one can take away from this functionally speaking but thought it was too cool to not include here.

Choosing Not to Have a Partner

Among men and women alike, there has been a growing movement of people who have decided that a relationship is simply not worth the emotional effort, risk, or cost.

Among men, the most predominant of these groups is MGTOW: Men Going Their Own Way—a fairly large online community who argue that relationships as traditionally structured are so systematically unfair to men they are not worth engaging with. While not all MGTOWs have sworn off relationships entirely, opting instead to pursue novel models of relationships, the group and movement in general is helping to reduce the stigma of living forever single as a man.

There is no uniquely monolithic anti-relationship subgroup of women; however, factions do pop up occasionally and we expect to see a movement in this direction again in the near future.

Most research indicates that being in a good relationship is better than being single. Most research also indicates that being single is better than being in a bad relationship. Those who have sworn off sexual/romantic relations entirely have justly observed that, for some individuals, the economics of relationships do not act in their favor, and these people in particular are better off staying single.

Some men simply do not want the risk associated with choosing the wrong partner. The cost of a divorce, alimony, and a mutinous partner taking their children is incredibly high for many men (women have a leg up on all those fronts in divorce courts within most Western countries). Combine this hazard with the high cost of dating and the extreme effort required if a man is handicapped by a low market value, and it is hard to fault someone for concluding they will be far better off alone.

Many women feel as though they have been given a similarly raw deal. After all, many studies indicate that women are less happy if they choose to get married (though the data is all over the place here—it seems like marriage ultimately has a neutral effect on women). It is easy for women to look at these studies in isolation, consider friends who got screwed over through marriage, feel somewhat underwhelmed by the realistic options they have in potential partners, contemplate the sacrifices required to enter and invest in a long-term relationship, and ultimately decide that marriage is just not worth the effort.

We do not suggest that foregoing romantic relations is always the optimal choice for women and men disadvantaged in their respective markets. We only want to clarify that it is not an actively stupid or illogical path. Should you find yourself at a disadvantage in marriage markets, you might consider finding other ways to satisfy needs in your life otherwise satisfied by relationships. Consider just how bad a toxic relationship can be to a person’s quality of life. Consider how rare intentional, emotionally mature humans really are—two traits we would argue are prerequisites for any truly successful relationship.

Historically, any self-realization that the odds of securing a quality, trustworthy partner are very low would not be enough to stop someone from trying to secure a partner—at least if one wanted sex and/or children. Now, thankfully, we have better options. We can, if we want, get all the benefits of a relationship from other things. Want sex? Pay for a hyper-realistic sex doll, pornographic virtual reality rigs, or prostitutes (pending availability and legality). Want kids? Pay for a surrogate or enter a co-parenting relationship. Want new relationship energy? Casually date. Want company? Make some good friends. Want to feel needed? Build a charity. Want unconditional love? Adopt a dog. The only two things one cannot get without a committed long-term relationship are the social and personal validation of having a high-value partner and the benefits of cognitive integration (though this is only true if you value validation from people who would only see you as “complete” if you have a traditional relationship and many people who do “go their own way” just don’t care what these sorts think of them).

The research is nevertheless very clear about single parenting: One-parent homes raise children who have much lower-quality lives in every area, from income level to alcoholism. This effect is more pronounced in single-parent female houses than in single-parent male houses, which are not drastically worse than two-parent houses (though this is likely correlational and not causational, given how hard it is for males to win custody in a divorce). Perhaps this data is driven by failed marriages and unintentional parents. Perhaps as more people choose to go their own way and, as singles, raise children on their own terms and with all the care and intentionality they deserve, these stats will change.

“Bad” Relationships

A

book on relationships that neglects to explore bad relationships in depth is akin to a book on explosives that exclusively discusses how delightful it is to blow things up. We are sure it’s really, really fun to play with explosives, but explosives and relationships are also super dangerous. A bad relationship can be incredibly hard to leave. A toxic partner can completely ruin a life. Those not capable of identifying and extricating themselves from bad relationships should not be dating, period.

We characterize all “bad” relationships the same way and in a manner that deviates significantly from cultural norms, so buckle up and prepare to be offended.

A “bad” relationship is a relationship in which one of the partners would be better off not participating—from the perspective of their objective function (the thing they are trying to maximize in their lives, be that happiness, wealth, offspring, etc.—see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life for more on determining and pursuing objective functions). As we define a relationship as a collaboration among participants who believe they differentially gain from a partnership, all “bad” relationships exist due to one of the participants being incorrect in that belief.

“That doesn’t sound so offensive” a person may conclude, perhaps not having thought through the real-world consequences of the above statement. By our definition, it is possible for a physically abusive relationship or a marriage plagued with regular marital rape to be “good”—where good is a differential term rather than an absolute term (i.e., the relationship is shitty, but staying in it is still the best option available to them).

Why do we use this metric? We care about actually helping people, and this definition is far more practically useful than any other metric if we are trying to write a guide that offers utility for everyone, regardless of their goals and predilections. Frankly, a large portion of the population would be quite satisfied to be in a relationship with an attractive billionaire who regularly beat them. They might argue that the abuse is better than having to get a minimum wage, nine-to-five job they live in constant fear of losing, leaving them unable to support themselves or their kids. Depending on a person’s value system and alternative options, an abusive relationship could still be a net positive for them.

A relationship guide that pretends this portion of the population doesn’t exist betrays itself as more concerned with virtue signaling than helping people. Another person’s objective function is not our choice—we are just here to help people get what they want on their terms.

Thus, to us there is only one way a relationship can be bad: If a person incorrectly thinks they differentially benefit from being in a relationship. There is a panoply of ways a person can develop an incorrect belief as to whether or not they benefit from a relationship. By examining these pathways, we can come to a better understanding of when we may be entering into a “bad” relationship or when a relationship we are already in has become negative.

Fear of Change

Fear of change exists as a major component of all long-term relationships and only gets worse with time. Leaving a partner takes work. Leaving a partner requires change. Leaving a partner exposes one to the possibility of failure.

Anyone who hates initiative more than they care about their own happiness and effectiveness (i.e., everyone) will find leaving a partner to be a nightmarish endeavor. To avoid the hassle and uncertainty of change, people will desperately conjure excuses to convince themselves that leaving a current partner is not something they should be doing on any given day. We have personally known people who stayed with a partner who they wanted to leave for years because they were always somehow able to conjure up a new excuse as to why every particular day or week was just not the right time to end things.

If you know you need to leave a relationship and have ever once put off breaking off before, now is always the right time to do it unless breaking up immediately puts your personal safety at risk.

Incorrect Judgment

Many people remain in suboptimal relationships due to incorrect judgments about the differential benefits of their relationships. Someone in an abusive marriage may believe that their children will be worse off growing up in a divorced family than they are growing up in an intact (albeit abusive) family and that assumption may be incorrect. Alternatively, someone might determine that they would be unable to secure another partner of equivalent quality at their age, and they may be totally right.

Incorrect judgments of the value of a relationship exist because it can be genuinely difficult to predict how a vastly different future might play out. It is just as possible to leave a good relationship (one in which a person is differentially benefiting) due to an error in judgment as it is to stay in a bad one. The person who is afraid that no one else will want them may be right. When we trivialize that fear, we make people in bad relationships cling to them with increased enthusiasm because we show them there is a risk that we have not taken sufficient time to evaluate their situation and are happy to wash our hands of their wellbeing as soon as the make the choice we deem “correct.”

However, there is one incorrect judgment we can happily dispel right now: The common assumption that “all relationships are secretly alike this behind closed doors.” This is false: not all couples fight, not all partners end up emotionally unavailable after a few years, not all people will blame their partners for their own failures, not all spouses take their anger home, not all women gain excessive weight after having a baby, not all men cheat, and not all relationships are abusive. This is not to say that every relationship you have may consistently yield a certain dynamic; some people have habits that turn all of their relationships toxic. If you experience regular, large spats in every relationship you have had, you are likely the cause of that dynamic, which is good news because it means you can end it.

The Most Important Skill in Dating: Avoiding the Local Optimum Trap

The local optimum trap is the primary culprit leading many to remain in bad relationships. The number one skill in dating is an ability to break up with an ill-matched partner. Whether the goal is sex, securing a husband or wife, or merely improving a long-term relationship, the success of any given “relationship life” is as much dependent on an ability to identify a “bad” partner and leave them as quickly as possible as it is on an ability to secure a “good” partner.

Breaking up with someone is difficult because doing so typically makes your life worse for a period. A relationship is almost always a local optimum. A local optimum is a state that you can only leave by first going down. Being trapped in a local optimum is like standing on a hill and seeing a mountain: To get to the top of the mountain, you must first walk down the hill. A decision to leave a relationship is a decision to make your life worse—at least in the short term. Our society does not prepare us to pull the trigger on decisions like that.

The most common form of bad long-term relationships occurs among couples who, while not great together, are not so bad as to lead to a quick dissolution. These couples stay together because doing so is always easier than breaking up, and through staying together longer, they become more deeply ensconced in their local optimum. The longer a person stays with someone, the higher the cost of leaving them becomes: “But… we just bought a couch/puppy/apartment/house together!” they think to themselves when confronted with dissatisfaction.

The hills these couples stand on never get higher, but the valleys around them continuously grow deeper and deeper and deeper.

After however many years, a worrying proportion of these couples decide to get married— again, not because the participants are a good match for each other, but because the cost associated with leaving continuously rises and things like starting a family are time-sensitive.

The local optimum trap extends beyond long-term relationships into casual dating and even casual sex. If you can recognize someone as a bad pairing on the first date instead of on the third date, you gain the ability to test two other potential partners on nights during which you would have otherwise wasted time and money on the suboptimal partner.

Even when only looking for sex, people will hit this trap. A guy going to a bar to secure a partner for the night may end up spending half the night chatting with someone who has no intention of going home with him, and by not breaking off the conversation, this guy has likely blown his chances of getting laid that night. This man has succumbed to the local optimum trap. In the moment, it may indeed feel pleasant to linger for some time talking to an attractive person at the bar who, while clearly not sexually interested, is still happy to chat. It is also painful to bear the awkward solitude experienced after disengaging from this person and attempting to chat up someone else. That is the essence of the local optimum trap: What a person is doing at a particular moment is more pleasurable than what they will need to endure to get to where they want to be.

How can we avoid this local optimum trap? How can we avoid wasting a night—or our entire lives—on the wrong person? Consider the following three scenarios

Escaping the Local Optimum Trap in Long-Term Relationships

Realizing you are in a differentially bad long-term relationship is extremely difficult. Getting out of a relatively stable yet suboptimal long-term relationship requires a huge amount of willpower, initiative, and work. Asking how to get out of a relationship like this is like asking how to not be addicted to heroin. The best answer is: Do not allow it to happen in the first place. The best interventions to protect yourself from a suboptimal long-term relationship are those designed to weed out poor matches during the dating process, which we described above.

What if that ship has sailed? What if you think you are already in a suboptimal relationship?

It is not easy to soberly evaluate the quality of a relationship in which you already find yourself, especially if you have been in that relationship for a long time. If you are determined and driven enough to tackle this endeavor, we recommend you first determine your objective function. Determine which thing(s) you believe have inherent value that you wish to maximize with your life (see our last book, The Pragmatists Guide to Life for guidance on determining your objective function without having someone else, a particular group, or your culture push you in any particular direction). Once you have determined your objective function, ask yourself if your partner in your relationship aids or hampers the maximization of that objective function.

In attempting to determine whether your current long-term relationship is worth maintaining or not, avoid leaning heavily on societal tropes of negative and positive relationships (e.g., “We don’t fight much, so our relationship is good” or “He cheats on me, so our relationship is bad”). Features that society labels as classically negative or positive in a relationship may not ultimately matter that much to you or your values and objective function.

You may not even like your long-term relationship partner, but ultimately deem your relationship to be “optimal” as defined by this guide. You may, for example, hate your husband, but have an objective function around maximizing the success of your offspring and be aware that leaving this man would put your offspring in a differentially disadvantaged position. That said, anyone who chooses to stay in a relationship that is at least partially harmful in the name of objective function maximization must VERY CAREFULLY validate their conclusions, as in many cases they are poorly substantiated and more a product of habituation than logic. Depending on the standard of evidence you require, this evaluation may involve anything from looking at what happened to your friends’ kids after their divorces to reading the latest scientific literature on the subject.

If you are not yet in a long-term relationship, take a sober-minded moment to build a set of heuristics telling your future self when to leave a long-term relationship that has ultimately proven to be suboptimal. Create this relationship ejection protocol now, before you meet any eventual long-term partner, because your future self is going to lose objectivity. Future you may do everything in your power to evade escape from this bad relationship. To protect yourself from this folly, even consider making an informal contract with your friends and family, so that if you ultimately are too weak to execute your relationship ejection protocol despite all the alarms sounding, they can sweep in and save you from a loss of objectivity.

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Dating

Dating can largely be broken into two categories: Casual dating and dating with the intention of securing a long-term relationship. After high school and college, casual dating is extremely dangerous, as it can lead one to fall into an unintentional long-term relationship-of-least-resistance with a lackluster partner.

Chronic casual dating is usually driven by a fear of long-term relationships or an addiction to new relationship energy. Regardless of your motivation to casually date, you should know how to properly drop suboptimal partners before any significant logistical or habitual attachment forms.

Eliminating someone you are dating is quite distinct from eliminating a sexual target because personality becomes an important factor. Each participant in a date must ascertain as quickly as possible whether there is, or is not, a promising relationship to explore. Each of us (Malcolm and Simone) implemented different strategies to this end; both were fairly successful.

Simone utilized a five-question post-date evaluation to determine whether someone was a candidate for a second date. Each question had a score of 1-10. Dates that scored under 30 were obvious rejects. Dates scoring 30-40 might be worthy of a second date for further evaluation. Dates scoring above 40 had immense potential and warranted significant investment. At least personally, Simone’s average score of first dates was 16.

Note: We talk about this system and the questions used in detail later in the book.

Malcolm followed a strategy in which he quickly probed for personal attributes of his dates that would be problematic in a long-term relationship. This ranged from desire to have children (or at least flexibility on that point) to the date’s objective function and general worldview. This enabled Malcolm to quickly drop dates who exhibited behavioral red flags and helped Malcolm signal to dates specifically why they were not well matched (e.g., “I want to have a large family and you just clearly stated you are strongly against having kids”).

Note that the most effective dating strategies lead people to break up with you more frequently—not less frequently. For example, Malcolm used to tell women on the first date he was looking for a wife and only escalated things from there in terms of transparency on future dates. This led many women to dump him fairly quickly. Breaking up with bad potential partners quickly is a thousand times better than staying together with a poorly matched partner. Being dumped by a bad long-term partner is a sign of success not a sign of failure. Whenever people tell us they have recently broken up, we congratulate them and comment on how relieved and pleased they must be. It is a shame our comments are met with such odd looks of resentment and surprise—good, healthy relationships don’t break up.

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Looking for Sex

Note: If you read the appendix chapter on looking for sex when you are young, this portion of the book can be skipped. It is the less nuanced “bulldozer” version of the same strategy that has more utility in the types of loud “high stimuli” environments adults use to look for no-strings-attached sex.

If you only want sex, the key piece of information you must secure to avoid the local optimum trap is whether or not a target is receptive to the idea of having sex with you. Your primary mission when looking for sex, therefore, should be to make your intentions clear without outright stating them so that your target may turn you down quickly if interest in sex is not mutual.

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that among those looking for short-term sexual partners, looks prevail as a judgment factor in men and in women looks and dominance displays are predominant. Statistically speaking, if you are the average person looking only for sex, very little interaction is required to judge your own interest in sex with any given person. The only thing that is tricky is judging the interest of your targets.

This can be done through sexually suggestive topics of conversation (if the target engages with sexually suggestive topics enthusiastically, there is likely interest) and non-sexually suggestive physical touches (if non-sexual touches are engaged with enthusiastically, there is likely an interest). If the target appears receptive, you may move to more sexually suggestive touching, after which you may invite them somewhere private. If the target has already shown interest in sexually suggestive touching and consents to relocation to a private place, you may then invite them home and engage in full sexual congress (if a target engages in reciprocal touching when in a private space, the likelihood of sexual interest is very high, and this invite can be made without much fear of rejection).

This strategy will result in your inevitably crossing small boundaries with targets who do not ultimately turn out to be interested in you sexually. These experiences may be awkward for you but know that they are well worth any mild discomfort experienced. Why? This strategy vastly decreases the odds of accidental sexual escalation with a target in a way that made them feel pressured into consent. In an ideal world, any target not interested in having sex with you will say “no” as quickly as possible rather than after significant time and monetary investment or—much worse—after you have had sex . . . but we do not live in an ideal world.

Be extremely clear with consent before engaging in sexual contact—especially oral sex and hand-to-genital contact, which can “feel” less severe in the moment than penetrative sex, but if you have misjudged consent will have the same negative impact on your life.

Clear consent matters a great deal when you are only looking for sex. Why? An adult who is primarily looking for sex and skilled at securing it is probably sleeping with around fifty people every year. If this adult sleeps with 50 people a year and misjudges consent in only 5% of cases, they are ultimately raping an average of 2.5 people a year. Whether or not you count a “misjudgment of consent” as rape, society does, and those who engage with a high number of sexual partners are setting themselves up for serious legal and/or reputational damage.

If you ever hear someone championing a sexual strategy designed to get someone to sleep with you that involves pressuring a target past comfortable, conscious, active consent and that person has not yet been accused of rape, you can be fairly certain the strategy is not effective, or they have not been implementing it for an extended period of time. And if they have been accused of rape . . . why are you copying the strategies that took them to that place in their lives?

Also avoid strategies that involve securing no-commitment sex from industry colleagues, fellow members of a friend group, schoolmates, or coworkers. A target’s connection to social groups relevant to you adds an additional social cost to rejection—sometimes to you, and sometimes to the target. In cases in which the target feels your social connection increases the cost of their rejecting your sexual advances (i.e., you are a bigwig in an industry important to them, or you are their boss or direct manager), they are far more likely to allow you to push them out of their sexual comfort zone. Again, even if you don’t personally ascribe to this definition of rape, dealing with the fallout of accidentally pushing someone past their comfort zone is not worth something as trivially easy to obtain as sex.

Appendix: If you want to dive stupidly deep into the nuanced topic of the types of partners to avoid, see the appendix section A Guide to Avoiding Crazy on page 570*. While it has some good info, it turns into a boring, pedantic ramble at times.*

Avoiding The Local Optimum Trap While Single

A large portion of the population is better off single than they are dating a random person. In addition to making the slog of dating even more tiresome, this reality can create the illusion that even if you were able to obtain an ideal relationship, being in that relationship would be worse than being single (a uniquely tempting illusion, seeing as it’s true for a minority of the population). This illusion is often used as an easy excuse to not bother with pursuing an optimal long-term relationship at all.

Both recreational dating and single life is fun for most, while dating in search of an ideal long-term partner is stressful and exhausting. Don’t let the hard work required to find an optimal partner occlude the fact that life with this person will be better than life alone.

**Predicting When Your Partner Will Determine Your Relationship to Be “Bad”**

One surprisingly common relationship strategy involves keeping a partnership just above a “breakup point” while harvesting all the benefits that one can from said union. To implement this strategy effectively, a person has to become skilled at judging when a partner will hit their breakup point and always stay just above that point.

Two common strategies are leveraged to prevent a person from hitting a breakup point. The first is to improve the relationship’s value to this person while increasing the cost of breaking up. We call these “stable strategies.” The second is to increase the cost of breaking up dramatically while decreasing the value of the relationship, we call these “unstable strategies.”

Stable strategies are typically better for both parties, as a partner will be willing to do more to maintain a relationship that gives them more, however unstable methods are common enough to warrant exploration—if only to arm readers against a partner attempting to apply it to a relationship.

There is a wide array of both stable and unstable strategies for increasing breakup costs.

Examples of stable strategies:

All of these strategies significantly increase the cost of ending a relationship.

Unless you are certain you want a long-term relationship with someone, do not engage in any of these stable strategies. Be wary if it appears that you are being lured into one of these traps if you do not wish to enter a long-term relationship. These are not things to take lightly. However, if a long-term relationship is your goal, these stable relationship escalation mechanisms are generally great signs.

We label the above strategies as “stable” because their deployment does not necessarily decrease the value of the relationship. An unstable strategy is one in which a person decreases the value of their relationship but increases the cost of a breakup more than they reduce the value of their relationship.

Examples of unstable strategies:

Unstable relationship maintenance strategies can be effective in extreme moderation but are not recommended. No matter how high someone makes the cost of a breakup, once a confident person realizes they would be much better off single than in a relationship with said person, they will leave. Destabilizing a relationship with the above strategies turns every day into a battle to keep one’s partner from realizing the relationship is worth leaving by incessantly escalating behavior. A person only has to lose this battle once to lose their partner forever. Still, as stupid as unstable strategies are, they can be moderately effective in the short term—thus why they are so common in emotionally abusive relationships.

Furthermore, there is a special kind of crazy person who tries to use unstable strategies on people with whom they are not presently in an active relationship. Such individuals may try to convince someone they have a lower aggregate desirability in order to trick these targets into valuing a relationship with them. The classic example here is a person insulting someone after they are turned down (e.g., “if you won’t date me, you must be slut… Now do you want to date me?”). However, more aggressive examples of this strategy, like faking a pregnancy after a casual one-night stand, are hardly unheard of.

We genuinely do not understand how people think these strategies will lead to a desirable outcome for their pursuer. Thinking that someone would see a person attempt one of these strategies and delude themselves into believing they would be better off in a relationship with that person goes beyond stupid to the point at which we question if all humans are fully sentient. If someone attempts one of these strategies on you, we strongly recommend cutting off all contact immediately. People who think like this, no matter how hot they are, will never add anything of value to your life on the aggregate.

Enjoying this subject? We welcome you to take a deeper dive in the appendix:

Our Inefficient Biology

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et’s look at how our bodies affect us when dating. The human body is hardly appealing, oozing disgusting, smelly fluids not just from every orifice, but every pore. Despite this our brains trick us into thinking they are desirable. Just as our brains betray us into somehow finding these gassy, greasy, fleshy bodies arousing, they betray us into all sorts of other unconscious behaviors and predilections.

The Funny Ways We React to Testosterone

Testosterone is one of these fun chemicals that just completely screws with your brain and can make it do all sorts of weird things. It is often thought of as a masculinizing hormone; however, it is critical not just in female and male sexual development but also in male and female cognition. Even more fascinating: Average testosterone levels in humans started crashing a few decades ago across western society (it has gone down 30% since the ’80s) and scientists do not know why—but more on that later.

There is a myriad of cool research findings related to testosterone. For example, a man’s level of testosterone seems more related to where they grew up (childhood conditions) than their ethnicity or present location. One study found that Bangladeshi men living in the UK who grew up in the UK had a similar level of testosterone to other UK men, while those who grew up in Bangladesh had much lower levels.

We are fascinated by how testosterone affects looks. Higher levels of testosterone can lead to all sorts of negative aesthetic effects ranging from acne to increased probability of balding at an early age. Among women, an unnaturally high amount of testosterone causes male features to begin to develop, such as extra body hair.

The positive aesthetic effects of testosterone generally seem to outweigh their negative counterparts when testosterone is high but not to extreme levels. Moderately high levels of testosterone are associated with an increased probability of higher and more defined cheekbones (if one is exposed to high levels of testosterone during early development), muscle definition, and increased masculine features in both males and females.

The muscle definition increase caused by testosterone is quite pronounced. An individual with more testosterone in their system will develop more muscle mass and denser muscles at the same level of exercise. As muscles burn more calories than fat, those with greater muscle mass will have an easier time maintaining a lower weight overall. This is why people take testosterone in the form of steroids when they want to gain muscle quickly and easily. Unfortunately, this exogenous testosterone is recognized by the body, causing it to stop producing its own testosterone and shrinking the size of the testicles.

If testosterone makes both guys and girls into chiseled (if hairy) Adonises with gorgeous cheekbones and rippling muscles, why do we not naturally produce tons of the stuff? Alas, testosterone is also poisonous and is the primary reason why men have shorter lifespans than women (well maybe, this has long been an accepted idea in biology, but recent evidence suggests that if height and risk-taking behavior are controlled for it could be wrong). Moreover, men with more testosterone may die at even earlier ages than men with lower testosterone levels (we write “may” because, again, some new studies contradict this finding). Some hypothesize that testosterone in men is something like peacock feathers on a male peacock: It signals to women that a man’s genes are so splendid that he can excel despite being exposed to a chemical that is constantly killing him.

Furthermore, women are not always attracted to high testosterone. Instead, women differentially prefer high testosterone men when they are most fertile. We discuss this in a lot more detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

From an intelligence perspective, the effects of higher testosterone are fascinating. Testosterone appears to act a bit like a chemical that overclocks your brain’s processing and can either lead to better performance or burnout. For example, when young boys were tested for intelligence, those at both the highest levels and lowest levels of intelligence had much more testosterone than average boys.

Testosterone also affects general cognition. When individuals are dosed with testosterone, they are more likely to prefer luxury brands of cars, watches, pens, or clothing. This preference appears tied to higher testosterone individuals being more motivated to elevate their social rank. This may be tied to the association between higher testosterone levels and higher levels of ambition, aggression, and threat processing.

We wonder: Could the above fact, combined with the crash in testosterone that has happened since the 80s, be a major contributor to the trend of millennials appearing more frugal than early generations—with even wealthy millennials spending much less than previous generations at equivalent levels of wealth?

What you likely care about is how testosterone affects a partner’s mating behavior. An increase in testosterone will lead to an increase in sex drive in both men and women. Higher testosterone also leads to an increase in fetishistic interests (though at ultra-high levels, testosterone can have the opposite effect). While some studies indicate testosterone only increases masturbation behavior in females and does not increase sex drive in either sex, the finding runs contrary to conventional wisdom and most other studies, so we regard them with skepticism.

Given the effect of testosterone on sex drive, one could—purely for idle fun—theoretically estimate the sex drive of a person just by looking at their physical features and behavior. For example, women who have very defined cheekbones, as well as women with a keen interest in traditionally “masculine” pursuits such as contact sports, may have higher sex drives, as both characteristics indicate the presence of more testosterone in their systems.

The effects of testosterone on mating behavior extend beyond mere increases in sex drive. Men with higher testosterone show higher rates of mate-guarding behavior (attempts to prevent their partners from sleeping with other men). This is somewhat ironic, as a polyamorous lifestyle increases testosterone levels but also would make strong mate guarding impulses more problematic. Testosterone-driven mate-guarding behavior is not what you might consider to be the sweet kind of mate-guarding behavior (e.g., buying flowers and otherwise just trying to be better than other options) but rather the cost inflicting kind (e.g., threatening other men to stay away). This mate-guarding behavior is probably linked to the increase in activation you see in threat processing regions of the brain associated with testosterone, which also may be responsible for the “roid rage” phenomenon (a rise in uncontrollable, violent outbursts) among those who supplement with a lot of testosterone for bodybuilding purposes.

Fluctuations in the amount of testosterone your body produces can be triggered by all sorts of experiences. For example, testosterone levels increase in men after repeated wins and decrease after losses. In other words, testosterone gives men greater psychological momentum: When they’re on a winning streak, the rise in testosterone encourages them to take riskier risks. These findings are reinforced by studies conducted on birds, fish, and mice, which have shown that either being in competition with other males or winning competitions against other males increases testosterone. (As nerdy as an aside this is, we cannot help but note human males are basically playing life under “Warhammer” Orc rules, the more they win, the more muscly they get and the more they want to fight.) What’s more, men in higher positions of power often have more testosterone, and striking power poses in men can increase the output of testosterone.

Threats to a man’s masculinity may also trigger spikes in testosterone production—or at least spikes in testosterone-esque behavior. Male study participants who were told that they had a lot of “feminine knowledge” after taking a quiz would choose to be shocked by a higher voltage in a subsequent exercise in which participants received a harmless electric shock than participants whose masculinity was not threatened by this statement. Is that not hilarious? People are so funny.

Fascinatingly, testosterone (as well as cortisol, a hormone associated with stress) decreases significantly in men who are in long-term relationships. It seems this decrease is tied to a feeling of love for a partner. Essentially, when a man’s brain decides it is safely pair-bonded and doesn’t need to keep hunting new sexual partners, it lowers testosterone production—like a government deciding to decrease military spending in a time of extended peace. This lowering of cortisol and testosterone likely takes place both to lower the negative effects of testosterone on the body when it is no longer of utility to reproduction, and to lower a man’s sex drive and risk-taking behavior to allow for more dedicated focus on resource gathering.

Nevertheless, the effects of long-term pair-bonded relationships in testosterone can be easily reversed. While testosterone decreases while in a marriage, it increases after a divorce.

This relationship-triggered reduction in testosterone has all sorts of ancillary effects, ranging from behavior changes (men with lower testosterone are less aggressive, less dominant, and less sexually motivated) to physical changes (such as lower muscle mass and thus more fat accumulation at the same level of diet and exercise). If a man with whom you are in a relationship starts getting a bit softer, but his exercise and diet have not changed and his sex drive decreases along with decreasing aggression levels, these changes are a sign that he may love you. These hormonal changes obviously create problems if you were specifically attracted to a man for his higher testosterone levels (which is understandable, given that high testosterone men are more attractive in a masculine sense).

What if character traits associated with high testosterone are what you like most about men? How do you still find a man attractive after he falls in love with you and decreases production? Worry not; there is an easy solution: Individuals in the polyamorous community (both males and females) have the highest testosterone levels of any population. As long as you keep your man’s hunger for new females (or males) satiated with a constant stream of partners, his love for you should not have any effects on his testosterone production. Simple and easy.

Both smoking and obesity affect testosterone levels. Obesity-induced drops in testosterone are quite ironic: Because fat produces estrogen, which downregulates testosterone production, it becomes harder to lose weight when there is weight worth losing.

What we find uniquely titillating on a societal level is that when men see themselves as disempowered or “hierarchically lower” in their society, they down-regulate their testosterone production. For this reason, researchers have found lower testosterone levels among unemployed individuals. This finding sadly does not explain the crashing testosterone rates across Western society: While one may hypothesize that these changes are tied to rising obesity rates or economic recessions, such factors were controlled for in the studies that investigated them. No—it appears that men in general feel less empowered now than they did a few decades ago, even when they have the same jobs and better overall standards of living.

While some claim to be horrified by this grand hormonal shift society, we do not see any reason for concern (well at least not as much as concern for something like sperm count degradation which is also happening). Continued monitoring of the situation should be sufficient for now. Perhaps an overall reduction in testosterone is exactly what society needs given the “free radical problem,” in which unattached men cause higher rates of social problems—as well as terrorism (this is a topic we dive into in much more detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality).

All in all, the effects of testosterone are fascinating. While we would love to say the same of estrogen and progesterone, their effects on sex drive, attraction, and body structure are pretty boring in comparison.

Note from the Research:

Monitoring Personal Hormonal States

A relationship psychologist who helped us construct this book had a really interesting idea for women we thought was relevant here: Specifically, she claimed that women who tracked their ovulation cycle with a focus on how it affected their impulses were more faithful to their partners and had longer relationships. She claimed that cycle tracking made it easier for women to identify whether a fluctuation in hormones was driving them to do something that they would not do under other circumstances.

Specifically, women might consider monitoring how their stage in their menstrual cycle influences the likelihood of:

For example, a woman may find that she needs to be sensitive about verbally lashing out at her partner during her luteal phase. Understanding that her impulse to act negatively toward her partner is likely hormonally driven can help this woman disassociate from the impulse (“That’s the hormones talking, not me”) and let the desire pass by without acting on it.

Kissing and Touch

Kissing sparks the nerve endings on your lips, causing a surge of dopamine and oxytocin: The chemicals that cause people to feel as though they have an emotional connection. Kissing is, therefore, an effective strategy if you seek to make individuals feel bonded to you. Perfecting and implementing kissing early in a relationship can be of great utility when it comes to locking down targets. Unfortunately, the dopamine and oxytocin surge triggered by kissing is a two-way street and can compromise your own ability to think objectively.

Kissing is a very recent cultural development—at least as a tool for facilitating romantic pair-bonding. Kissing is only seen in 46% of cultures and differentially appears in cultures with distinct social classes (e.g., it is very rare in hunter-gatherer communities). In hunter-gatherer and other societies devoid of romantic kissing, kissing behavior appears only between a parent and their children (likely as a pair-bonding tool as well). One exception to this hunter-gatherer rule is seen among tribes that live in the circum-arctic region (Inuit people, for example), but this just appears to be a way for people covered head to toe in thick furs to have human contact.

We love looking through history to see how past cultures experimented with kissing as a tool for facilitating pair-bonds. Probably the most awesome appropriation of kissing can be found in the practice of kissing a lord’s hand in feudal Europe as a sign of devotion. What makes this so awesome? Hand kissing is like romantic kissing without the downside of two-way pair-bond creation. With hand-kissing, only a monodirectional pair-bond is cultivated: From servant to master. Suffice to say a working knowledge of neuroscience, cross-cultural anthropology, and medieval European cultures can yield some tactics to help one efficiently enthrall others.

General touch has similar pair-bonding effects. Honestly, lips only seem to cause a uniquely strong effect due to the high density of neurons they harbor. We imagine something like naked cuddling would have about the same effect in aggregate. In fact, a number of studies have shown that activities that cause this kind of activation, such as cuddling, backrubs, hugging, and kissing all are positively correlated with relationship satisfaction. There are gender differences, though: males report significantly stronger arousal while being the active partner doing the touching, whereas females report a stronger sensation when being the ones touched.

Notes from the Research:

Blue Balls

Blue balls is a term for a discoloration of the testes and pain associated with a long period of arousal not punctuated by release. There is a common misconception that “blue balls” are not real. In reality, when a male is aroused, the arteries dilate in his genitals, and his veins constrict, causing them to fill with blood. As a result, not just the man’s penis, but also his balls are, on average, double in size when he is aroused.

Human blood appears blue when looked at through the skin because red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, causing it to be absorbed deeper into the skin, whereas blue light gets reflected before it is absorbed by deeper veins. This ultimately has the effect of making your blood appear blue and thus a man’s testes appear blue when they are engorged with blood for a long period of time (actually, the same thing happens to the female vulva and clitoris, leading to “blue vulva”). The pain this condition causes can be easily removed with an orgasm or decreased arousal and an ice pack.

Mate Guarding Behavior

Behavior falls under the designation of “mate-guarding” when its objective involves increasing the probability of maintaining sexually exclusive access to a partner. In humans, mate-guarding manifests as anything from putting your arm around someone in public (to demonstrate to others they are “taken”) to sleeping in the same bed as your partner or adorning your partner in attention-grabbing possessions like jewelry (people who use this tactic are statistically more likely to be jealous partners).

Better knowledge of mate-guarding behavior will help you identify, contextualize, and suppress the mate-guarding impulse in your brain. Why suppress mate-guarding behavior? As we will discuss below, it can often yield very counterproductive results.

The most common mate-guarding behavior in human females manifests in the ostracization of other desirable females. Females increase this behavior when they are ovulating and will increase it further if a potential rival is also ovulating. Some studies have also found that women dress more provocatively when ovulating and are less likely to introduce their partners to other provocatively dressed females.

In other words, the most common type of mate guarding behavior in women is to either denigrate other women or prevent their partners from spending time with other women.

In general, the level of mate-guarding behavior a female will exhibit can be judged by how attractive she believes she is relative to her partner (more on that shortly), her level of Machiavellianism (more Machiavellian personalities engage in more mate-guarding), how liberally minded she is towards sex, and the level of intimacy in her current relationship (with more intimacy being tied to less mate-guarding).

While it is easy to separate genetically ingrained and socialized mate-guarding behavior in women because we can look at how their behavior subconsciously changes when they are more fertile, we cannot use this same pattern with men, whose fertility does not regularly fluctuate.

Men who see themselves as less attractive when contrasted with their partners engage in more mate-guarding behavior, such as public displays of affection and attempts to prevent their partners from interacting with other males. Simultaneously, females who view themselves as more attractive than their mates are more likely to resist these forms of mate-guarding behavior. Women with less attractive male partners have also been found to resist mate-guarding behavior more vigorously if they view their partner as less wealthy than their peers, be more likely to flirt with other men, and experience more frequent thoughts about breaking up.

Female resistance to mate-guarding behavior increases further when a woman is fertile. The more fertile a woman is, the less she will like having her current pair-bonded partner demonstrate to others that she is off the market, and the more she will fantasize about sex with individuals who are not her pair-bonded partner. When a female is fertile, she is even more likely to be drawn to events like parties at which she might meet non-pair-bonded partners. Resistance to a male partner’s mate-guarding behavior is also more pronounced in women who engage in abundant mate-guarding behaviors themselves. Finally, males who have higher digit span ratios (low testosterone males) will also receive much more female resistance to mate-guarding behavior.

This interplay of male mate-guarding action being met with female resistance and subterfuge suggests that mate-guarding subtly signals to females that the male to whom they are bonded believes that he “needs” to guard them. As a result, male mate-guarding behavior may lower a female’s estimation of her male partner’s value.

Studies have shown the more mate-guarding behavior a male partner exhibits (e.g., the more possessive and controlling he becomes), the more likely a female is to want to sleep with other partners, and ironically the more likely she is to successfully sleep with others. Alas, few studies look at female mate-guarding behavior—wish we could say if this was a two-way street, but we don’t know.

Mate guarding is not only a warning sign to a partner that they can likely secure someone better. Possessive behavior can also be a sign of shady behavior and dishonesty on the part of the mate-guarding partner. For example, people who utilize coalitional mate retention tactics (mate retention with the help of social allies, such as friends) are more likely to be dishonest (higher in extraversion, lower in conscientiousness).

Does theory on attachment styles interest you? Visit the chapter Attachment Styles on page 631 in the appendix. In short, the concept of attachment styles, which has become popular among relationship psychologists, strikes us as suboptimal for various reasons we will happily delineate in the appendix, but not bore readers with presently.

The Cognitive Effects of Birth Control Pills

Recent research has shown a significant, if small, effect on cognition by the standard hormone-based birth control pill. Specifically, women on the pill have a harder time recognizing emotions on other people’s faces. We don’t really think there are any takeaways from this—we just find it interesting.

The Genetics of Love

Another really cool study, this time out of Binghamton University, shows a correlation between the Oxytocin Receptor gene (OXTR) and martial strength. It appears that our perception of love—how much love we feel for our partner and how quickly we feel it—is impacted by our genes.

While neat, this genetic basis kind of sucks when you think about it. Some people may just not feel as much love as others as genetic factors make it more difficult for them to maintain relationships. We also suspect this same pattern carries over to romance displays, with some individuals just being born with a much larger impulse to make them.

The G Spot

While some early studies claim to have found the mythical G spot, a more thorough investigation has shown it likely does not exist as a real anatomical feature. Instead, the G spot appears to just be the location where the internal part of the clitoris, the urethra, and vagina all intersect, leading to more stimulation.

Length of Sex

In a Canadian study, women reported that intercourse usually lasted seven minutes and foreplay 11 minutes, while men estimated intercourse typically lasted for 8 minutes and foreplay 13, meaning that heterosexual adults typically think sex lasts between 18-21 minutes. Contrasts this with women’s ideal: 14 minutes of foreplay and 19 minutes of sex and men’s ideal: 18 minutes of foreplay and 18 minutes of sex (for those doing, the math the ideal sex session is 33-36 minutes, while the average actual session is 18-21).

Fancy all this random biology stuff? Explore it in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.

Avoid Partners Who Want to Be Happy

Our strong warning against partners who live lives dedicated to their own happiness has a biological—as well as ideological—basis (which we already covered).

A couple studies out of KU Leuven and the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences found that individuals who place more importance on personal happiness exhibit increased rates of depression and anxiety. They also show that surrounding oneself with individuals who push for happiness or motivational imagery meant to encourage happiness (imagine a “hang in there” cat poster) increases one’s perception of failure and makes it harder to move on. Admittedly the studies are a bit more nuanced than we are giving them credit for—specifically, they only show feeling pressured to not be depressed increased depressive symptoms and found that the presence of motivational posters in a scenario in which an individual fails makes it harder to move on from the failure—the rest is an extraction from those findings and other research.

To put it another way, caring about being happy will make it harder to personally be happy and put a damper on the happiness of friends, colleagues, and families. If one chooses a partner who lives a life designed to optimize their own happiness, their biology will conspire to rob them of the one thing they strive for and—plus rob anyone they allow to live in their vicinity of that thing. Happiness-obsessed people are like a black hole of positive emotional experiences.

We imagine this is why religious individuals consistently rate themselves as happier than non-religious individuals. Religious individuals are far less likely to live lives dedicated to maximizing their own emotional states.

This is not to say that one cannot find a partner who is both an atheist and dedicated to something other than positive emotional states. About a third of the bestselling first book in this series, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, is dedicated to helping people think through what may have value to them and to what they should dedicate their lives (be their inclinations secular or religious) and the vast majority of the secular options explored are not focused on personal happiness or the happiness of others.

The Effects of Chastity on Pair-Bonding

There is abundant research exploring how sexual partner count, quantity of sex, and quality of sex affect cognition. While we explore this at length in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, there is one specific finding uniquely relevant to relationships: That in women at least, higher sexual partner count alters the manner in which sex accelerates pair-bonding.

Having sex with an individual speeds up pair-bond formation (love) in women. We use the term pair-bond instead of the word love here, as the word “love” carries a lot of societal baggage that distracts from the larger point.

Sleeping with multiple partners appears to have a permanent effect on the neurochemistry of the female brain. When a female sleeps with a large number of people, the dose of oxytocin her body releases when she sleeps with a new partner decreases. In other words, the pair-bond a female automatically begins to feel for a partner as a result of sexual intimacy declines with each new partner.

This effect can be observed in broader statistics and not just in lower oxytocin levels. The more people a female sleeps with before marriage, the shorter and less happy her marriage is statistically likely to be (these effects exist for men as well, but at a much lower rate). Specifically, one study showed that women who had slept with 16 or more partners before marrying had a staggeringly high 80% divorce rate.

Note from the Research:

There are some bad actors in this research space, trying to massage data to fit an agenda. Should their studies be taken at face value, it would appear that this effect begins after just two sexual partners, but studies showing that do not remove individuals who have been in previous marriages from the dataset. Once amended to be more intellectually honest, the data suggests this effect does not actually kick in until after a woman has had eight or nine sexual partners.

We would be remiss not to mention that some of the studies show that while women who marry as virgins have longer marriages, those who report having only had only two previous sexual partners have shorter marriages than those who report three to nine former sexual partners (so once a women has slept with one person, sleeping with a few more before marrying actually increases the length of her marriage). Most of these studies control for religiosity: Religious people’s tendency to sleep with fewer partners and be happier in marriages would not explain this trend alone.

Not many studies have been conducted on the effect of high partner count on males’ ability to form strong pair-bonds, so it is difficult to draw any super confident conclusions for men. That said, from the data we have seen, any effect on men is less extreme than that experienced by women. This may be because sex does not facilitate pair-bonding in chaste males as strongly as it does in females. In other words, promiscuity brings a female closer to a male state in this respect, which is why we would not see the effect as strongly in men. All that said, while this specific effect is not shared in the male brain, more promiscuous men absolutely experience neurological changes tied to brain function (specifically, more promiscuous men produce more testosterone on average).

The studies exploring how sexual partner count affects pair-bonding of which we are aware of were conducted within Western cultures, so this may not be an inborn difference in males and females, but rather a product of some sort of acculturation. Cultural pressures can have a pretty big impact on neurochemistry.

This data may come across as both unpleasant and disturbing, but we don’t get to choose what is true based on what we wish were true. Enough studies suggest this effect is real for us to feel compelled to report it in the name of intellectual honesty. Fortunately—and we need to stress this as hard as we possibly can—the data does not support that women lose the capacity to feel love if they indulge in sexual experimentation. The data only suggests that sex loses its ability to facilitate/force pair-bonding faster the more a female engages in it, and this, in aggregate, leads to less love in married relationships and thus less happiness. We come to this conclusion based on the lowered oxytocin generated by more sexually experienced women during sex, which would explain the other correlating factors identified, such as shorter marriages and lower reported happiness in marriage.

Despite this, we still think that sleeping with multiple partners is an optimal long-term relationship strategy for women. The increased difficulty in securing a long-term relationship with a man or woman without sleeping with them—in mainstream society at least—is raised to the extent that it is likely not worth the tradeoff of insisting on waiting until marriage for sex.

Keep in mind the competition. Given that a third of women who engage in online dating have sex on the first date, a woman is at a huge disadvantage in her efforts to secure a good partner if she insists on being chaste until marriage outside of religious sub-communities. This is not to say that you should sleep with someone on the first date, just that if your competition is offering sex on first dates, not sleeping with someone until marriage becomes a less enticing pitch to many candidates. It is also far too risky a strategy to hope that one’s first serious long-term relationship candidate will be the best one to bond with for life. We could even argue that loosening the strong surges of love resulting from sex will make women more clear-headed in making decisions about who they marry.

It is ultimately a cruel trick that the body would attach someone to those with whom they have intercourse rather than those who are genuinely favorable long-term partner candidates. The strong pair-bond resulting from sex with early sexual partners can be toxic should a woman use the “spark” she felt in her earlier relationships as an indicator of a good long-term relationship match and avoid settling down with an otherwise good match, not realizing that she isn’t feeling that spark due to a change in the way her brain processes these interactions and not a product of any decline in partner quality.

We have a fascinating theory around this dynamic: That the decrease in oxytocin production resulting from higher sexual partner counts indicates a switch between polymorphic states in humans, with each state optimized for different tribal social structures.

Essentially, humans may be biologically optimized for both monogamous and non-monogamous tribes, using environmental cues (like partner count) to determine which sort of tribe theirs happens to be. Based on these cues, the brain shifts the manner in which it processes interactions to optimize for one’s likely tribal structure.

It would make a lot of sense that a person in a monogamous tribe would benefit from quickly falling in love with a sexual partner, whereas a person in a non-monogamous tribe would be harmed by this behavioral tendency.

We find this potential polymorphic shift to be fascinating, as many people are having sex in a manner that would trigger this system to say: “Aha! I am in a non-monogamous tribe. Better not get overly attached to anyone in particular.” and yet many of those same people intellectually expect to settle down into a long-term, monogamous relationship and be happy with it. This dynamic—plus a wealth of other factors—may be contributing to a rise in open non-monogamy in developed Western countries (especially large cities).

Non-Monogamy

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any relationship contracts allow one or all partners to enter into additional romantic and/or sexual relationships. Relationships with such permissions participate in the non-monogamy market.

To a certain extent, non-monogamy is becoming normalized within mainstream society. Already, 15% of married couples allow for extramarital sex—though wording like “extramarital sex” implies that the reason people open their relationships is motivated by a desire for “just sex” with others, which is rarely true.

In fact, of that 15% of couples who permit extramarital sex in their relationships, only 24% of men and 22% of women have engaged in extramarital sex during the prior year. Moreover, STD rates among non-monogamous couples have been shown to be no higher than those in the monogamous population. Allowing extramarital sex within a relationship contract does not mean that people are actually constantly having it. The shocking reality is that rates of extramarital sex in non-monogamous relationships are only slightly higher than those in monogamous relationships without these terms, in which partners merely cheat (22% of men and 15% of women).

If non-monogamy doesn’t lead to abundant extramarital sex, why do partners opt for it? Aside from the various contractual benefits of non-monogamy that we cover elsewhere in this book, polls show that non-monogamy is often motivated by a desire to spend time with people who have different hobbies and personalities in an intimate context.

Note from The Research:

Among millennials, favoritism of non-monogamy is even more extreme, with only 51% reporting that their ideal relationship would be monogamous and 20%-25% having tried a non-monogamous relationship in the past. For context, this is roughly equal to the proportion of people who have owned a pet.

That said, studies measuring rates of non-monogamy may be understating the popularity of non-monogamous relationships. Many in the non-monogamous community do not have a primary partner (one they value above others). This means they may not be captured in relationship survey data because, by not having a primary partner, common social conventions may not classify them as having any relationship at all.

This does not mean that a huge portion of the population is regularly having threesomes. Statistically speaking, the most common relationship structure in the polyamorous community is a “V” (in which one partner engages with two partners who are not romantically/sexually engaging with each other) and not, as is commonly assumed, a triad (in which a relationship has three participants and all members engage with each other).

Those unfamiliar with the non-monogamous community may read the above statements and think, “Nice! Relationships and sex without rules are being normalized—I want to try that.” Listen, people: Don’t open the airlock of a spacecraft looking for oxygen. The world of non-monogamy—including communities who claim to practice “relationship anarchy”—is plagued by more draconian rules than a Victorian dinner party. These rules spread like a disease through polycules (a spiderweb of intertwined relationships), allowing new and increasingly complex rulesets to quickly metastasize.

These rulesets play a crucial role in effectively managing the emotional states of multiple partners, but often are created assuming a liberal worldview among participants and can sometimes be exclusionary to individuals with a more conservative mind set.

While these rulesets make it very difficult for those with more extreme conservative inclinations to effectively participate within the poly community (particularly those inclinations tied to sex adjacent concepts like gender roles, consent, LGBTQ issues, etc.), these very rulesets appear to play a key role in the success of this community when contrasted against past attempts at normalizing non-monogamy in Western Culture. Specifically, these rulesets encourage people to develop effective methods for managing emotional and sexual interactions, which spread faster than our culture would normally allow—at the cost of picking up random political artifacts along the way.

Some hackles may be raised at the realization that we are discussing all forms of non-monogamy as though they can be roughly grouped within the poly community. Many identifying as polyamorous would point out that their approach to relationships is uniquely distinct from the approach taken by other non-monogamous people, such as swingers, and would furthermore highlight the significant differences between open and poly relationships.

We group all non-monogamous communities together because it is difficult to socialize as any sort of non-monogamous individual in an English-speaking metroplex for more than a few years without becoming entangled in polyculture (assuming one is under 40). Polyamory is just too prevalent these days to avoid. Those who realistically plan to have a sustained open relationship will be engaging with the larger polyverse.

Why is Non-Monogamy Not the Norm?

Statistically speaking, individuals in polyamorous relationships report higher relationship satisfaction rates than their monogamous counterparts (non-monogamous relationships also do not appear to have negative effects on children who grow up with their parents in them—but the research is pretty weak at the moment). That said, non-monogamy carries some huge drawbacks.

Jealousy looms high on this list and is hardly unjustified as within the world of non-monogamy; people often do lose their partners to paramours. Sharing a partner with other people requires a pretty high level of security with oneself and one’s partner in the best of situations, and just like any relationship, you can’t pretend like taking risks will always work out in the best interest of everyone involved.

As mentioned earlier, not all people appear to exhibit the same levels of jealousy when faced with the same stimuli (in the same way, two people will have different arousal reactions to the same image). It is likely that a portion of the population is too jealous in nature to experiment with non-monogamy.

That is not to say that people in polyamorous relationships don’t experience fear and jealousy. A fear of being replaced is normal. The fact that many monogamous people secretly experience some discomfort when they can’t engage in a relationship with an additional partner is not an indictment of monogamy. The fact that many poly people have some fear of their partner leaving them—and that this fear causes jealousy—is not an attack on poly lifestyles.

Time constraints are far more of a problem for non-monogamy, in our view, than the emotional pain experienced as a product of jealousy. Maintaining relationships with multiple partners simply takes far too much time. The maintenance of multiple sexual and/or romantic relationships is even worse than having friends as a time sink because romantic and sexual connections with others compromise your ability to think objectively and thus pragmatically deploy your time as a resource.

Consider how much of your time and effort casual dating consumes. Now, consider how much of your time and effort a long-term relationship takes up. Now, think about how much free time you would have if you did both at the same time. Also, keep in mind that managing two partners requires managing three and not just two relationships: You must manage each partner’s relationship to you as well as each partner’s relationship with each other (depending on the type of polyamory you are practicing). This VASTLY increases the emotional effort and time that must be spent to maintain these relationships in a stable context.

This time sink issue can be mitigated by joining pre-existing polycules featuring other partners who take it upon themselves to expend the lion’s share of the temporal and emotional effort required to manage and maintain the complicated relationship so you don’t have to. That said, attempting to save time by shirking relationship maintenance duties and acting as a free rider is hardly an ideal solution and will put you in a vulnerable position.

Though you might be tempted to attempt just dipping your toes in non-monogamous markets in an effort to save time, you cannot really half-ass participation in non-monogamous communities and gain their full benefits. While it is true that poly individuals show more relationship satisfaction than strictly monogamous individuals, poly individuals are not the only non-monogamous folks out there. People who identify as swingers show no improved relationship satisfaction, and people in open relationships show lower relationship satisfaction rates than strictly monogamous individuals. Just technically having an open relationship is not, apparently, a viable solution. While poly relationships are statistically better than their monogamous counterparts (if you judge “better” by relationship satisfaction), open relationships score the lowest on satisfaction of any relationship type.

Another drawback: Participating in non-monogamous communities, which sometimes by proxy leads to association with other kink-friendly communities, can have some negative social effects among those who also mix, either professionally or personally, in conservative communities. Association with a non-monogamous lifestyle or kink communities could easily kill a promotion or ruin odds of getting elected. For many with “larger” goals in life, this is reason enough to stick with monogamy and a less thrilling intimate life. One recent study that took its participants from Croatia, Italy, and Portugal found that consensually non-monogamous individuals were seen as less loving, less compassionate, and more remorseful than both heterosexual and monogamous same-sex couples.

Non-monogamy does not benefit each gender equally—or at least not in the same ways. While it is true that studies have shown that for men, sexual fulfillment in one relationship will spill over to other relationships they have (e.g., being sexually satisfied with a secondary partner increases sexual satisfaction with a primary partner), studies have also shown that the opposite effect is observed in women (the more sexually fulfilled women are by a secondary, the less they are by their primary partner). It is unwise to ignore research when it is inconvenient, and yet we have seen the first study quoted profusely in poly communities who conveniently leave out the second finding—despite it being found through the same methods and by the same team. It would be more prudent to accept the reality that, on the aggregate, there are certain ways a poly relationship can lower the quality of a primary relationship (assuming one is in a relationship that has a primary or a “hierarchy of importance” among partners; this is hardly a universal arrangement).

Roadblocks hampering the growth of polyamory are a shame, as polyamory, when executed efficiently, really could lead to massive cost of living reductions and time efficiency gains. Alas, the sourcing and vetting costs for both men and women are just too high to be worth overcoming the associated social stigmas in most geographic regions.

Note from the Research:

Thinking about Joining the Poly Community?

Are you thinking about building your relationship within the polyamorous community? We strongly encourage you to be intentional about how you go about doing it.

Ensure you understand the nature of your local polyculture. The sad reality is that even if you are inclined to non-monogamy, the culture in your local area may not be conducive to your goals or needs. The non-monogamy community is not a monolith. Even if some geographic iterations of it might suit you, others may not (the community in San Francisco may work great with what you are looking for while the one in Hangzhou may not).

Membership in a non-monogamous relationship in no way reduces the need for a relationship contract, though it does sometimes delay the creation of one. Just as people frequently forget to ask questions like, “Do you want kids?” and “How will raising kids work, logistically?” in the early stages of a monogamous relationship, many in poly relationships also have blind spots and neglect to broach potentially-deal-breaking subjects until it is too late. A choice to enter poly relationships does not mean life will penalize you any less for waiting to ask important-but-difficult questions until a relationship gets serious.

If you are in the poly community, we strongly encourage you to create a list of relationship goals you want to achieve in the next two decades and that you review these goals with your partners—along with the logistics that surround them. Even if poly works for you now, the long-term dynamics you desire may not be compatible with that sought by other community members in your area.

New Relationship Energy

New relationship energy is that feeling you get early in a relationship with someone you think you might really like. It can easily be as intense and salient as an emotion like love, and it is one of the driving motivators for a portion of the poly community.[[3]](#_ftn3)

New relationship energy is highly addictive. Research at Stanford has shown that new relationship energy has the same effect on a person’s brain as pain killers, like highly addictive codeine, and activates very similar pathways. It also appears a portion of the population likely is highly susceptible to new relationship energy addictions (in the same way someone can have a susceptibility to becoming an alcoholic).

Your comfort with the addictive nature of new relationship energy comes down to a question of whether or not you would be against a drug with no negative physiological effects, but that caused people to lose years of their life to an obsession with it.

People need to be aware of the risks before getting involved with a community peppered with enabling pockets that hand new relationship energy out like candy. Some sub-groups of the non-monogamous community seem hesitant to tell members they have a problem because the complicity of these new members is necessary in order for the existing community to access the drug through relationships with new entrants. That said, many groups in the poly community do have cultural norms in place to get individuals developing new relationship energy addictions the help they need.

If you have an addictive personality or suspect you may be susceptible to a new relationship energy addiction, we recommend caution and thorough vetting before entering a poly community sub-group that sees new relationship energy, the behavioral equivalent of codeine, as an unequivocal good. This is only necessary if you believe that addictive behavioral patterns without negative physiological effects are something worth avoiding.

What Monogamous People Should Learn from Poly Culture

Because polyculture must develop solutions to problems that are not as common in a monogamous society, and because the spread of cultural ideas is much more virulent within poly communities due to the web-like nature of polycules, there are many interesting takeaways that a monogamous person can gain through interactions with polyculture.

Consider how polyamorous people cognitively reframe the stories they tell themselves about their experiences in order to produce more productive emotional reactions. This is most commonly seen in the way some poly people address their feelings of jealousy. Jealousy need not be contextualized as a holistically negative emotion.

When feeling jealous about someone who has taken a husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever to a restaurant/event/movie, etc., search for the root of that jealousy. Does the jealousy…

In monogamous societies, we normalize complacency and stagnation in relationships. Is it really so bad to have an active motivation to improve our relationships, improve ourselves, and do all the things we really want to do with our partners while we have the chance?

Those active in poly communities often quote the widely read polyamory writer Franklin Veaux, stating: “Just because I’m hurt doesn’t mean that anyone’s done something wrong.” This particular lesson is critical when dealing with the more complex and mercurial interactions of polycules. This nugget of wisdom is also relevant in monogamous relationships, especially in a day and age in which we seem to have come to believe that never feeling hurt is a basic human right.

The statement: “Just because I’m hurt doesn’t mean that anyone’s done something wrong” can be just as critical in a monogamous relationship as it is within a poly relationship—especially when it comes to creating an environment that encourages open communication. It can hurt if a partner says “yes” when asked whether they find a co-worker attractive, but blaming or somehow punishing the partner for that hurt (given the fact that humans cannot control who they find attractive) discourages future open communication.

Poly culture has, out of necessity, developed more nuanced terminology dictating how relationship contracts work that clearly differentiates between boundaries and rules. If a clause in a relationship contract you propose relates to your own body and property, it is a boundary. If a clause relates to your partner’s body or property, it is a rule. Let’s go over some examples to get a better grasp of this distinction:

Rule: “Partner A cannot smoke”

Boundary: “If Partner A’s breath smells like cigarette smoke, they do not have permission to kiss Partner B.”

Boundaries are encouraged in polyamorous communities, while rules are not considered to be acceptable. Often people new to poly relationships miss this cultural norm and establish rules that they claim to be boundaries.

For example, Taylor may claim to have presented a boundary that requires Terry to not fall in love with a third partner (asserting that additional liaisons can only be about sex); however, this is actually a rule. To be fair, emotions are out of one’s control, and thus this commonly made demand is nonsensical at face value.

Finally, polyamorous relationships can help to augment appreciation of any one partner. Sharing a partner with someone else facilitates discussion of all the wonderful, colorful things about that shared partner that can shed positive aspects of this partner in a new and deeper light. Wouldn’t it feel great to gush about a partner to someone whose eyes sparkle in return rather than glazing over? Through an appreciation of this, monogamous couples may benefit from interacting with people who admire their partners and attempt to see their partners through the admirers’ eyes.

Compersion

While the poly community has developed a number of novel concepts from which any relationship can benefit, it has produced its fair share of duds as well. The most toxic of these involves a focus on extracting positive emotions through compersion. Compersion—the happiness you feel from seeing your partner happy—seems innocent enough. Essentially it is the joy your mirror neurons create at the thought of joy in another person—especially a person you care about. The poly community uses this concept to flip around feelings of jealousy tied to a partner being happy with someone else. While it serves that function well enough, its normalization has had incredibly negative systems-level effects, causing people who are unhappy or struggling in other ways to be lowered in value within the non-monogamous community even more than they otherwise might be.

The corrupting influences of glorifying compersion indulgence leads to “rich get richer” scenarios in which the happiest, most pleasure-inducing, and expressing individuals get all the attention. This triggers a snowball effect for the emotionally impoverished, in which their emotional poverty makes them less useful to the rest of the community, further worsening their poor emotional states.

One of the core values monogamous relationships claim to offer is to have someone who will be there for you in good times and bad. Whether or not monogamous relationships live up to their fulfillment of this promise is debatable. Anecdotally, we have observed that poly communities that tout the concept of compersion with uncommon virulence are uniquely unable to serve this function, quarantining the community’s Debbie Downers more during trying times (such as a depressive episode). Members who do not have a primary partner seem to be uniquely vulnerable to functional banishment when these members fall on emotional hard times.

We are not saying depressed people are immediately nudged out of polyamorous communities, but they do appear to find themselves discarded by some poly communities more quickly than they would have been from monogamous relationships (though the lack of initiative and general malaise that plagues many forms of depression may contribute to this, as poly community participation requires an immense amount of energy and personal initiative).

This only happens in some poly communities. Others have developed cultural norms that protect members who go through periods of depression. It is only natural for someone to spend more time around partners who make them feel good as opposed to those who make them feel bad, when given a choice—even if it is only a subconscious decision. The only way to counter this is with active social norms within the community dedicated to never leaving members behind. When you join a polycule, look for evidence as to how they have treated partners during hard times in the past for evidence of how they will treat you.

We may be highlighting our bias here. As you know by now, we believe pleasant and unpleasant emotions to be equally negative artifacts of human evolution. We do not believe people should enter and maintain relationships merely to maximize a certain emotional set to the exclusion of others. Thus, we are somewhat poisoned against the idea that the good feelings you get from a partner are differentially valuable and loath to condone compersion, as it is often contextualized an extension of that mindset. The fact that a partner being sad will make you sad is a good thing, whether or not you are non-monogamous, as it motivates you to improve their mood—and with it, their efficiency. It is difficult to resist the urge to shift attention to a partner who is more fun to be around when doing so is an option, hence community social norms and policing are needed to temper this temptation.

The Myth of Our Poly or Monogamous Past

A tedious bunch of pseudo-academics are under the impression that if they can argue humans used to be a certain way and are biologically compelled to be that way, then there is a moral mandate to go back to acting that way. Every few years, one of these moralizing hooligans will release a book in which they commit vulgar and obscene acts with data sets to argue that humans are either naturally poly or naturally monogamous.

Any honest look at cross-cultural anthropology and the data at hand makes it fairly obvious that, while early human tribes leveraged a variety of different relationship styles and social structures, the most common structure was violent, patriarchal, and polygynous[[4]](#_ftn4) (involving one man with many wives and not polyamory or monogamy). This historical norm does not give us permission to act that way within our own context.

There is also evidence suggesting that our ancestors commonly practiced systematic infanticide, and humans today still experience impulses tied to that practice. We review this evidence and its implications in excruciating detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality—and yet we are hardly about to call for a good old-fashioned baby stomp every time a single mother remarries.

Why are most major countries monogamous today? The data yields a very simple answer: Monogamous societies have lower rates of almost every major social ailment when contrasted with polygynous ones, including lower rates of rape, murder, assault, robbery, fraud, spousal abuse, and prostitution. This is presumably due to the high number of single men in polygynous societies—we call this “the free radical problem”—but the data doesn’t 100% match up.[[5]](#_ftn5)

Monogamous cultures simply outcompeted their polygynous counterparts once human social groups reached certain population levels, even though monogamy wasn’t necessarily our “natural” state. The mere fact that monogamous cultures appear to produce more stable societies does not set a moral mandate for monogamy, nor does it mean that monogamy is more efficient than polyamory. While the occasional description of a tribe or blip in a history book mentions social practices sharing traits of what our culture calls polyamory or “ethical non-monogamy,” such groups don’t provide large enough data sets to tell us how polyamorous-like models affect the rates of various social ailments. To put it simply, we lack data on how polyamory would play out at a societal level because no modern culture has practiced it at a societal level.

Even were we to hold proof that monogamy yields a more efficient society than polyamory, such knowledge would hardly grant us carte blanche to mandate it. A society in which non-contributing elderly are euthanized could also be argued to be “more efficient,” but that doesn’t mean we should introduce such policies.

To take another example: Suppose we could show that humans evolved to be prejudiced against outsiders. Suppose we could show that human societies that were xenophobic had fewer social ailments and spread faster. Would any of that mean we should embrace xenophobia within our current culture? Of course not. This whole argument about what is the “natural human state” is just silly.

Neither polyamory nor monogamy is “natural” and we don’t have the data to say which is more efficient on a societal level . . . but even if one were “natural” and even if we did have the data to show one was more efficient, such data would not represent a moral mandate to adhere to it. Were we to build our society to be as “natural” as possible, the result would be horrifying. Were we to build our society to be as “efficient” as possible, the result would be horrifying.

The perfect society is not hidden beneath the ocean, practiced by a remote tribe in a dense jungle, or detailed in a leather-bound, dust-coasted tome—it lies bare before us, clearly visible from the Mount Nebo of our minds’ eyes. Those looking to build the perfect society and discover the “correct way” to be a human must look to the future and not the past. The perfect society is something we will have to build ourselves.

How to Train Your Partner

P

eople say partners should not expect to change the people they marry. While we agree that some traits cannot be changed and that it’s bonkers to marry a poor match out of love and with the hope they can be fixed later, we also believe that training a partner to permanently transform themselves in a positive way is neither impossible nor difficult.

The notion that a partner—or any person—cannot be trained is absurd. We all see individuals transformed by those with whom they choose to associate. This is how people change when they “fall in with a bad crowd.” By interacting in specific ways (either intentionally or unintentionally), people can exert immense control over their peers’ personalities, outlooks, behaviors, values, and habits.

Like it or not, we will be transformed by those with whom we spend the most time. As most people spend the most time with their long-term partners, these partners are going to have a powerful impact on who we become.

Suppose Finley thoughtlessly brings cookies to Yael after every fight because Finley knows Yael likes cookies. While this mindless behavior appears sweet on the surface, it will subconsciously train Yael to initiate more fights, having been subtly “trained” by Finley that fights lead to cookies. This subconscious training is common, whether the inadvertent reward for bad behavior manifests as flowers, make-up sex, or even private time after a fight for someone who is otherwise granted very little solitude. While thinking through the long-term consequences of behaviors like this may appear cold and unromantic, it is patently worth sacrificing this societal cliché of romance if it is in the best interest of a relationship. Failure to think through the manner in which interactions with a partner subtly train them does not change the reality that interactions train people.

We would go so far as to say that the most critical skill ensuring a happy and productive long-term relationship—after an ability to recognize and end bad pairings—involves conscious, intentional partner training. A laissez-faire attitude toward training a partner is like a laissez-faire attitude toward training a pet dog. Not housebreaking a dog and letting it pepper a home with steaming turds is neither an act of kindness towards the dog nor an expression of love.

Marry Someone Who Will Work to Make You Better

While you may or may not spend the rest of your life with the person you marry, you will have no choice but to spend the rest of your life as the person into whom your partner transforms you. There is no greater tool for self-improvement than a long-term partner with a vision for your potential that aligns with your own.

A partner that is in all other ways perfect is probably still worth leaving if the vision they have for you significantly differs from your own vision of your ideal self—or even worse—if this partner loves you for who you are. There is nothing more terrifying in a relationship than the words, “I love you just the way you are—flaws and all.” Find someone who loves you for your potential while accepting your flaws.

Regard “self-love” movements with caution. Why would we ever want to learn to love ourselves as we are? If we must sit around all day celebrating ourselves, we should at least learn to love ourselves for the improvements we have made and are making instead of just who we happen to be.

It is not difficult to find someone with the same vision of your potential and who also conveniently agrees with your vision for their potential. The traits we don’t like in ourselves are almost always the same traits a partner would happily fight to address, such as laziness, negativity, lack of emotional control, cruelty, or lack of self-control. As long as a partner wants to improve themselves, finding alignment in visions for each other is really not that hard, even when moderately unusual goals are in play.

Once committed partners have agreed on an aligned vision for each other, the training may commence. Simply remember to always react positively or at least neutrally when a partner attempts to train you. While your partner will often be asking you to do challenging things (that make you want to snap at them), the last thing you want to do is train your partner not to train you. If you react negatively to your partner’s attempts to improve you, you are punishing them for behavior that should be rewarded and ultimately discouraging them from continuing important work.

Partner Training Tips

Training people is remarkably easy: Withhold positive stimuli when they do something undesired and bestow positive emotional stimuli when they do something desirable.

Bad Thing => No Praise or Attention + Disappointment

Good Thing => Praise and Attention + Pride

To create rewards and punishments when training someone, simply express pride or disappointment. That is it—though it helps to use more colorful and varying verbiage. If a person loves or respects someone, simple words from that person can raise their spirits to the moon or dash their emotional states to the dirt (and a relationship devoid of respect has already failed; terminate it and try again).

Positive emotional stimuli are not relegated to compliments and the like. Any attention given to a target can be a source of positive emotional stimuli. When a partner shares something they are proud of, taking the time to explore it and engage with them will train them to put effort into that work in the future, whereas ignoring them trains them to invest less time in the activity. This is often more of an issue with accidental negative training, such as consoling someone (thereby giving them attention) when they cry, which makes emotional composure more difficult for those who crave attention in the future.

Those who resort to anger or gifts for punishments and rewards will have to continually increase the magnitude of their anger and gifts to elicit the same response. The shouting tantrums will have to escalate in order to land the same impact. The gifts will have to get more expensive in order to yield the same delight. We have all seen relationships destroyed by individuals who attempt to use anger or gifts to guide their partners’ behavior.

Getting sad and angry for a day or even an hour in response to something a partner did is not training and not effective because a good partner will not reward such demonstrated lack of emotional control with a pleasant response, lest they encourage more of it. In other words, regular loss of emotional composure merely trains a partner to ignore these outbursts. An intentionally implemented negative stimuli should never take more than one minute to express—any negative emotional display that lasts longer is simply a failure at emotional control.

A simple and calmly delivered verbal affirmation or condemnation is the only reliable method of punishment or reward in the long term. This is also a better method because demonstrating emotional control increases respect, and increased respect makes words carry more weight over time.

Attempts to train partners to change in a way that only yields one-sided benefit lowers the effectiveness of all other training (at least if such attempts to do so leverage negative stimuli). Criticizing a partner for something that is self-serving—something that patently does not align with their goals for themselves—signals to the partner that they should ignore you. This takes the bite out of any expression of disappointment in them in the future, which in turn renders all training more difficult. When trying to train people in a self-serving direction, stick only to positive stimuli and reward pathways.

Partners must be extremely explicit about (1) the behavior they are trying to change, and (2) what the partner being trained could and should have done instead. Punishing a partner without making it clear why they earned said disappointment will teach them to expect punishment without reason and reduces the emotional impact of any disappointment or lack of affection granted in the future. Chances are that well over 50% of the time, partners have no idea what they did to elicit the statement: “You know what you did.” Such socially stunted statements only breed disrespect and distrust.

When To Begin Training

Training begins with the very first interaction. We have never seen someone successfully start training a partner from any point in a relationship other than day one, so we do not know whether it is possible. Switching a relationship devoid of intentional training to a relationship with intentional training may require a communal flux period in which all partners are removed from their normal routine and settings and able to explore new habits (see our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, for more info on this).

Not only should training, in general, begin as soon as a relationship starts, but training out a negative behavior pattern should occur the very first time that pattern is observed. This can often be difficult, as we are less secure in our relationships early on and thus scared to set boundaries but is nevertheless critical.

For example, at one point early in their relationship, Simone was tight on time and hung up on Malcolm in the middle of an unpleasant conversation. Malcolm made it clear that this behavior was not acceptable from anyone who wanted a relationship with him and talked through other ways Simone could have handled the situation with him, such as explaining why she had to rush off and setting a time to finish the conversation later in the day before hanging up—while also explaining why a behavior like that was bad for the relationship (because it allows one partner to unilaterally shut down unpleasant conversations and disagreements, lowering the couple’s ability to overcome meaningful challenges and problems). Annihilating negative interaction types early in a relationship spares partners from developing poor behavior patterns. Furthermore, the oxytocin released in the early phases of love makes it easier to rewrite even deeply ingrained behavior patterns.

Dealing With An Ex’s Training

Expect to find—and need to correct in new partners—negative behavior patterns trained into people by former partners, friends, and family.

A problem endemic in modern human casual dating and sex markets is that many males will do whatever young women want in order to date and/or have sex with them because young women are in such high demand.[[6]](#_ftn6) A guy in high school who has an attractive girlfriend willing to have sex with him regularly is not going to risk losing an immensely valuable source of personal validation in order to punish her for suboptimal behavior patterns.

This toxic dynamic does not necessarily represent something intrinsic to the male or female condition. It just happens to be that the sex market in western societies’ high schools grants women gatekeeping powers, as society rewards young men for being promiscuous while shaming promiscuous young women. This dynamic hurts both men and women by developing suboptimal behavior patterns in which men pamper women who lose emotional control instead of punishing emotionally manipulative behavior and removing it from their female peers’ behavioral vocabulary. If a hot female sophomore wants something and starts crying or complaining, a boyfriend who does not want to lose access to sex with her will find a way to give her what she wants or attempt to comfort her, thus subconsciously training this girl that whining is a good way to get a partner to do what she wants.

Conversely, women of this age, being sexual gatekeepers and living in a society that constantly slut shames them often accidentally and subconsciously train their boyfriends to see sex as both a reward and a woman’s core value in a relationship. Men with past partners who allowed this relationship dynamic to occur can become blind to things women bring to the table other than their sexuality. In adulthood, most of this training gets corrected in public, but scars of its effects linger.

The damaging effects do not end there. Because of this same dynamic, men who do not succeed in the sexual / dating market as teenagers often come to associate their number of sexual partners with their sense of self-worth as adults. This might lead men to contextualize women as tools for personal validation because that is the role women played in their early adolescence.

Fortunately, this outcome is largely avoidable should a man consciously decide that it is not wise to sleep around in youth or successfully sleep around while young and realize what a trivial and hollow accomplishment it is. An association between sex and validation only seems to take hold in guys who both wanted to sleep around while young—while they were still figuring out their identities—and failed to do so. It is neat that we are granted such a clear view into a guy’s past through the way he engages with others: If a guy brags about sleeping with a lot of women, we can almost guarantee he struggled to find someone who would sleep with him in his youth and begun to define is self-worth around the thing he valued due to its apparent inaccessibility to him.

At a societal level, something as innocuous as an unequal sex market for teenagers leads women to be perceived as tools for personal validation that lack emotional control and are inherently emotionally manipulative while men become perceived as sex-crazed cretins. This, in turn, creates a reinforcing cycle, fueled by societal expectations of masculine and feminine behavior. Interestingly, some of these behavior patterns we now see as intrinsically “masculine,” such as an insatiable libido, were seen as feminine before people dated around in high school (literature from the Victorian period frames women as the hypersexual gender). This further adds evidence to the theory that a lot of gendered behavior is trained by partners due to the economics of the sex and dating market.

It may be that much of the behavior we call “masculine” and “feminine” is not actually gendered behavior, but the manifestation of training patterns created by an unequal sex market people often enter when young. Moreover, this behavior can be easily trained out of a person in their adult relationships.

We must be extremely unforgiving when addressing behavior patterns—both in ourselves and others—that were taught by past partners. If a person believes that yelling, moping, withholding sex, whining, crying, giving the silent treatment, extended periods of negative emotion (more than half an hour), claiming offense, or losing composure will lead to them to get what they want, a previous partner (or friend, or family member) likely trained these behaviors into this person by giving in to their demands.

None of these behaviors are acceptable. The only way to end these behavior patterns is to not respond to them emotionally. Sit the partner down and ask: “Is this who you really want to be?” Should they respond: “Yes” or argue that they cannot improve themselves, end the interaction and give them time to compose themselves, then ask them again. If this partner still stubbornly refuses to attempt to improve their emotional control or acts as if doing so is an impossible goal, promptly end the relationship. Such behavior will only get worse and will likely balloon after marriage. If a partner wants to improve, develop a plan for improvement, and provide them with simple approaches to take the moment they lose composure in order to help them amend their behavior.

Accidental Training

Accidental training is discussed in greater detail in this book’s chapter on abuse. Abuse and accidental training are often integrally linked.

The most common form of accidental training involves not fully appreciating when someone is making a bid for attention through a negative behavior pattern and accidentally granting them that attention in response to said behavior pattern. Granting any attention, whether it be neutral, positive, or negative, is a reward that trains people to continue negative behavior.

Suppose a partner makes a hurtful emotional jab. Demonstrating to this partner that their comment succeeded in causing damage yields an emotional reward for the partner and encourages them to use such attacks in the future. Both parties in this exchange are partially to blame; one behaved poorly and the other rewarded the behavior. Suppose Sidney punches a hole in the wall and Skyler makes a great effort to calm Sidney down: This attention may also be reward—enough to lead Sidney to exhibit future violent outbreaks in the future by making such outbursts harder for Sidney to inhibit.

The key to handling a potentially explosive emotional indulgence on the part of a partner is to never ever indulge their emotional outbursts with consolation, validation, engagement, or attention. Disengage from the situation entirely—or better yet—engage an emotional partner in a way designed to snuff out the emotion instead of indulging it.

If a partner is steaming with anger, pull up two chairs, express disappointment in their loss of composure, and make it clear they can do better, but nevertheless invite them to sit down if they feel capable and—in a neutral emotional tone—talk through what made them upset, what they plan to do about it, and how those actions will benefit their objectives in life. You might also consider having your partner discuss and work through the problem in the third person (talking about themselves as though they were a removed, neutral third party); this third-person approach has been shown in several studies to help people address heated, personal subjects in a more logical, level-headed fashion.

After addressing the emotionally-triggering issue in a logical fashion, discuss a separate topic with your partner for half an hour or more before returning to the delicate subject (if it must be revisited at all). This enables you to demonstrate to partners that you care and are emotionally engaged, but in a way that trains them to not indulge in an emotion for an extended period of time.

Maintaining a Positive Relationship

Maintaining positive emotions in any relationship is often regarded in dating books as some kind of secret that requires hard work. We suppose positive relationships are hard work, just as not being a turd of a human is hard work. C’est la vie.

Humans relate to their lives through stories. When we are asked to determine whether we like our lives, we first construct a story about what we have experienced in life, then ask ourselves if we are the type of people who would like living that story. When asked if we like our relationships, we do the same thing: Tell ourselves a story about our relationships and, based on how we have chosen to see ourselves, decide whether that person is happy in this narrative we constructed.

To ensure a partner thinks positively about a relationship is to ensure the narrative they are telling themselves about that relationship fits their ideal narrative. Obviously, this isn’t always possible because we do not always know the nuances of these stories—there may be some backstory or subplots of which we have not yet been informed that powerfully color the narrative. Fortunately, there are several common elements in the stories people like to tell themselves that can be reliably hijacked:

  1. Belief that one got the better end of the deal
  2. Belief that one is in an exciting, special relationship
  3. Belief that one is a good person
  4. Belief that one is desired by a desirable partner
  5. Belief that the relationship moves one closer to one’s goals

Signaling That The Partner Got the Better End of the Deal

People want to believe that they are with a partner who is of higher value than themselves. Putting too much effort trying to demonstrate high market value to a partner stinks of insecurity. Conversely, failure to even attempt to appear desirable signals to a partner that they may have chosen a lackluster partner.

The key is to interact with partners in a way that highlights one’s best qualities without specifically drawing attention to those qualities. Find opportunities and utilize environments that remind partners what makes you valuable. Bring partners to events that reveal they are in a relationship with someone that others admire and value.

Just don’t cite romantic interest from others in an attempt to demonstrate high personal value to a partner (e.g., “That checkout clerk was hitting on me like crazy”). Such behavior is often a sign of low social intelligence. Low social intelligence may be a desirable partner trait to those who like to be able to easily manipulate their partners, but we generally do not celebrate it.

Making the Relationship Feel Exciting and Special

People want to believe that their partner likes being in a relationship with them and likes them as a person. Working this into a partner’s internal narrative about the relationship can be a little tricky, as showing too much affection early in a relationship can lead someone to believe that they are with a partner that is lower value than them.

The key to circumventing this problem while still building a strong positive relationship involves complimenting shared moments rather than complimenting that partner directly.

Instead of: “Your hair looks beautiful.”

Say: “The way the sun is shining off your hair right now is beautiful.”

Instead of: “You are a great bowler.”

Say: “That moment you got an all-time high score in the bowling alley and everyone applauded was unforgettable.”

Instead of: “That was the best sex I ever had.”

Say: “I really liked the way you did X; it blew my mind.”

Not only does this form of compliment have a very low risk of making a partner think less of the person delivering it, but it makes them think more of shared moments, which facilities the creation of a narrative in which the moments associated with the relationship are just slightly more magical and better than other moments (which conveniently happens to be another thing almost everyone wants from a relationship).

Once a relationship becomes well established, it becomes safe to add direct compliments to the mix. Focus on statements designed to make a partner better about themselves. All partners benefit from partners who enjoy positive internal narratives. A higher level of self-respect will lead to more happiness in a partner’s life and greater success in their career. There is, however, one exception: Relationships built around the Dominance Lure are compromised when dominant partners become overly affectionate.

Making Partners Feel Like Good People

People want to believe they are good. Partners are more likely to enjoy and want to stay in relationships that make them feel as though they are good people. To create this perception, reinforce narratives that highlight how the relationship has helped to make you a better person. For example, reinforce narratives in which they helped you accomplish something you would not have been able to do on your own, like quit smoking or cut ties with an abusive friend. Through these kinds of stories, the relationship comes to play an important role in the partner’s personal narrative of being a good person.

While it is tempting to show a partner how good they are as a person by demonstrating how much you rely on them in daily life, it is unwise to come across as weak and in need of a partner to be strong. While this may be a story that some people want to tell about their relationship, more often than not it is a negative story. Deep down, we all want to believe that our partners can act as a safety net if somehow our lives hurtle out of control, and having a dependent partner breaks that fantasy.

Making Partners Feel Desired (by a Desirable Person)

People want to believe they are sexually desirable, and yet according to some polls, one in seven adults is living in a sexless marriage. As 57% of people living in a sexless marriage report that, aside from sex, they feel they have the ideal partner, improving a partner’s narrative around a relationship’s sex life can nudge a relationship fairly close to perfection.

As we discuss further in the appendix, the biggest problem in a relationship with a dead bedroom—a sexless relationship—is not the lack of momentary sexual pleasure that comes from a lack of sex, but rather the story it causes people to create. Narratives involving someone not being sexually desirable can be quite psychologically damaging to many, especially for those whose sexuality comprises an important part of their self-identities. Expressing sexual interest in and satisfaction with a partner while focusing on all the magnificent things they do will do much to improve the story they tell about the relationship.

In long-term relationships, compliment a partner’s physical appearance at least a few times a day and express wonder at how attractive they are. In short-term relationships, these compliments can be less frequent and more roundabout in their delivery. In both short and long-term relationships, compliments shown through actions or facial expressions are far more valuable than compliments shown through words (i.e., a hungry glance up and down a partner is worth far more than the words: “You look sexy”).

The need for sexual validation often becomes greater in long-term relationships as more time passes since partners last received sexual validation from a third party. Without frequent validation and reinforcement, a partner may come to believe that the relationship is being held together by forces totally independent of sexual attraction (e.g., “maybe he is just with me for the kids”). This is not an issue if sexual desirability is not a core part of a partner’s core identity, but it is a huge problem if sexual validation is a core part of their self-image.

We realize some who buy into the prevailing social narrative are tempted to believe that most sexless relationships are the product of female partners withholding sex. While we couldn’t find hard data on this, a cursory look at the communities dedicated to helping people in sexless relationships suggests this isn’t true. Statistically speaking, female attractiveness declines with age faster than male attractiveness, males are subject to the Coolidge effect causing frequent interaction with the same partner to yield lower erotic output (though researchers have recently observed a similar affect in females), and studies repeatedly show that male testosterone and sex drive both decrease when they are in love and in long-term relationships. Many more dead bedrooms than one might imagine are comprised of men who are no longer motivated to sleep with their wives.

Reassuring Partners That The Relationship Helps Them Achieve Their Goals

People want to believe their current relationship is moving them toward their long-term goals. To ensure that a partner can tell themselves a story in which this is happening, establish long-term goals with them. Sit them down and have them paint an ideal life. Make joint plans detailing how this ideal life will be achieved and kick off conversations reflecting on all the progress that has been made—thanks to close collaboration and support—since the relationship started.

Focus on important elements of the partner’s narrative around which they have insecurities. A partner may want to believe that they are independent, but secretly they are not sure they can make it on their own. These features make up landmines in a relationship that are easy to unintentionally trigger, even through well-meaning behavior. If, for example, a partner is insecure about their independence, the relationship might incur serious damage through a gesture—if however kind—offering support should that partner ever fail, as this signals to them that their worst fears about their lack of self-reliance may be true.

Two great examples of this from Malcolm’s life:

  1. A woman who broke up with Malcolm because he complimented her intelligence more than her looks. While she was secure in her intelligence, she had insecurity about her appearance, and this led her to create a narrative in which Malcolm only appreciated her for her intelligence. This, in turn, made her feel ugly and ultimately contributed to the relationship’s demise.
  2. A woman told him that she felt negative emotions when he called her beautiful. She felt very secure in that she was classically beautiful in an elegant way, but what she really wanted was to be seen as “hot” and “sexy.”

The takeaway from these two examples is: Don’t ever assume all women want to tell themselves X story, and all men want to tell themselves Y story. Take time to get to know each partner’s insecurities to avoid stepping on landmines resulting from treating them as “Generic Female A” and “Generic Male B.”

Internal Communication

I

t is unarguable that communication makes up a core pillar of any healthy relationship. Just how central that pillar is may sometimes be exaggerated. We posit that poor communication is often blamed for other types of relationship breakdowns.

Communication problems in a relationship can typically be solved with one simple rule: Put 100% of the onus for bad communication on the communicator and not on the person who was supposed to be listening. The listener cannot know what important information is not being shared and therefore cannot ask for it, and a communicator can always ask for information to be repeated back to them in the listener’s own words if there is any doubt in the effective transfer of information.

Many schools of thought about relationships choose to say both partners are at fault when communication breaks down and blame communication for situations in which poor communication is merely a byproduct of a bigger problem.

For example, A partner caught cheating may attempt to deflect responsibility for their infraction by claiming that their cheated-upon partner was not properly meeting their needs. The cheated-upon partner responds by saying they did not know they were not meeting their partner’s needs, at which point these older schools of thought blame this relationship breakdown on poor communication.

A sober analysis of this chain of events nevertheless makes it clear that a lack of communication is not to blame for this breakdown. Even if there were better communication, cheating would still have occurred. Using poor communication as a scapegoat is just a tool for sharing blame in a failed relationship. In this hypothetical case, the actual cause for the breakdown may have been something like a lack of respect for the cheated upon partner, meaning that having sex with them no longer granted the cheater the validation they craved, hence they sought out an external source of validation to still feel virile or sexy.

There are two reasons we fall back on blaming communication:

It helps to share the blame for relationship failure because the type of person who is unilaterally responsible for a relationships failure is more likely to change their behavior and engage in discussion about that behavior if it is pointed out to them in a way that doesn’t make them seem like the “bad guy”.

We also see many situations in which a lack of communication exists because honest communication would damage the relationship. This is less of a communication issue and more of a core failure in the relationship, in which unpleasant truths are met with punishment. A man may find another woman to be sexy, have a strong compulsion to sleep with her and know that this other woman would reciprocate his advances, but may not communicate this to his wife because this reality would cause the wife to become livid. This is relationship failure caused not by a communication problem, but rather by a poorly designed relationship contract: One that prohibits attraction to other people (not a choice) instead of just infidelity (a choice).

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