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

TPG 47.4.4 · 36,095 words · 2.7 hr read · Great Chatting Again

Cataloging Voting (part 4 of 7)

For example, when Malcolm was at Stanford Business School and starting to date Simone, he made it clear how severe the opportunity cost was to him. Stanford’s GSB presented a pool of pre-vetted, intelligent, high potential earners he would only have access to for two years—he would only pass up access to a pool like that for someone he was extremely likely to marry.

Status

The perceived aggregate desirability of an individual—in other words, their status—can directly affect the individual desirability of that person among those who care deeply about how others see them (thus the archetype of the trophy wife). In other words, people who value association with prestigious things will put a uniquely high premium on partners that society as a whole puts a high premium on.

Signaling

Sometimes an individual will gain value from another by using a relationship with the other person to send a message about who they are. A Christian, for example, may choose to date a Muslim in order to demonstrate to either themselves or society that they are not biased by religion. Alternatively, an individual may only consider dating people within their own race, social group, culture, or class to signal their devotion to racial/group/culture/class purity.

One of the strongest effects of signaling can be seen with self-signaling, which prevents long-term relationships from dissolving. Someone who wants to see themselves as a good husband, good mother, family man, good Catholic, etc. may place a uniquely high individual desirability modifier on a relationship because ending the relationship would damage how they want to see themselves. While this effect can raise individual desirability to almost absurdly high levels within some religious groups due to the negative stigma these religious groups cast on divorce, more often this effect is felt when a person just doesn’t want to believe that they “wasted” the last fifteen years of their lives and therefore refuse to leave an ill matched-partner because doing so would require admitting their own mistake in choosing that partner and continuing to stay with them for so long.

The Four Core Markets

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he unpleasant shock of realizing that your value (your aggregate desirability) is much lower on one market than another is a tale as old as time. We all know the attractive woman who has no trouble getting guys to sleep with her but can’t find a guy willing to date her in public—or the guy who opened up his marriage with the expectation he would be able to go on a sexual rumspringa only to realize that no one wants to sleep with him, while his wife picks up a new lover every time she stops by a bar.

People looking for no-strings-attached sex look for totally different traits in a partner than those looking for someone to marry. There are different markets for every type of relationship you may seek, and your aggregate desirability may vary dramatically across these markets.

The four core markets are:

  1. The sex market
  2. The casual dating market
  3. The long-term relationship market
  4. The non-monogamous market

The Sex Market

This is the market for those seeking short-term sex and short-term sexual intimacy. The sex market is radically different from the other three which, while not perfectly aligned, feature some sense of parity. The majority of people on the sex market are really looking more for the short-term intimacy associated with casual sex or validation granted by an ability to easily secure sex. Statistically speaking, few people of any gender ever actively search for emotionless sex.

Men are incredibly undervalued on the sex market. The aggregate desirability of a man on this market is vastly lower than it is on other markets, and the aggregate desirability of a female on this market is astronomically higher than it is on any other market. As a result, many men who are only looking for sex will pretend to be on other markets, and many women who are actually looking for more serious relationships pretend they are only looking for sex.

This can be an effective strategy for men wishing to secure sex, but it is rarely an effective strategy for women keen to secure a long-term or casual dating relationship. This problem can lead to an enormous negative cognitive effect on a woman when a man using her for sex convinces her that they are actually casually dating.

The relative value difference between genders on this market is not an issue of mere perception and has been studied fairly extensively. In the often-cited paper, Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers, men and women asked strangers if they wanted sex. Not a single female ever agreed to a male’s request, whereas 75% of males in one study and 69% of males in another agreed to the requests—this is even more striking when you consider that in the same studies, when men and women requested a date, there was almost no gender difference at all in response rate (about 50% for each). These findings imply that the men observed in this research were more willing to go to a stranger’s house for no-strings-attached sex than they were to consent to a date with a stranger! (If this feels familiar, we mentioned these studies briefly when describing the Easy Lure.)

Follow-up studies have worked to find out just how high value an individual needs to be to get women to agree to no-strings-attached sex at a similar rate to men. While men would agree to no-strings-attached sex with celebrities like Jennifer Lopez at about the same rate as they would a stranger, once you get to the level of a celebrity like Johnny Depp, women will finally consent to no-strings-attached sex. In experiments like the first—but featuring incredibly attractive individuals—83% of men agreed to sex with a stranger, but this time, 3% of women did. To dissect this data another way: While women have an easier time on the sex market, a woman who is astronomically high in value (like a celebrity) is not of much higher value on this market than a woman who is merely moderately attractive.

The sex market is also unique in that a single individual on the market can pair with a large number of other individuals. A single man on the sex market can sleep with five females in a week, and vice versa. Moreover, it is not uncommon for an individual—especially a man—to value the number of his sexual conquests over the quality of those partners. Thus unlike in other markets, it is not uncommon for a man of high desirability within the sex market to sleep with a woman of low sex market desirability if he assumes there will be no cost in doing so. This leads to the Lazy Eight dynamic, in which a woman who is between a One and Seven (in that crass system people use to rank aggregate desirability) assumes that she is an Eight, merely because she was able to secure an Eight on the sex market (a market in which she is already overvalued).

The “Lazy Eight” problem can easily ruin a person’s life. By setting unrealistic expectations, it can render a person unable to secure a viable long-term partner and tempt them to repeatedly seek emotional validation on the sex market.

This is not to say that people with low aggregate value on the sex/dating/long-term relationship market are of lower value as human beings. Intrinsically, wood is no “worse” than gold and honestly has more utility, but this does not change the fact that people pay less for wood than they pay for gold. We live in a society in which people—especially women—are led to believe that their value as an individual equals their value on the sex or dating market; thus, there are inevitably large numbers of people who seek personal validation on the sex market.

Fortunately, both of the aforementioned market failures are fairly easy for women to avoid. If you are trying to find a guy who is actually on the dating market and not just pretending to date while really just looking for sex, inform prospective male partners that you have a rule whereby you do not have sex with someone until you have dated them publicly (as in you are seen as being in a real relationship on social media platforms, and/or within social circles, frequented by that partner and their peers) for at least one month. This rule will weed out cads and make it easy to know when you are actually dating people who are genuinely participating in long-term relationship and casual dating markets. (For more tactics on this front, see the chapter Female Template Strategies on page 471.)

Women employing these tactics must come to terms with the fact that that the male partners they succeed in securing will be of lower aggregate value once they filter out people using them for sex. Moreover, a male being filtered out by this method will not just quietly walk away; he will likely argue with you or insult you in one final gambit.

Despite what romance novels tell us, people do not randomly choose lower-value mates for long-term partnerships. When people do buddy up with lower-value mates, it is because they are not monogamous, they were tricked, or for some reason, they value something about that mate that the rest of society ignores (typically due to a kink). You can easily weed out a large category of people who are pretending to be on the dating or long-term relationship market, but who are really in the sex market, by asking yourself: “Would a stranger think this person is well out of my league, and if so, do I know specifically what they value so much in me?”

Counterintuitively, the sex market is rarely voluntarily entered by straight men. This is because a man’s value is so low on the market that it is unusual for men who are not in the top 20% of the market to enjoy any interaction within it. It is not uncommon for a man’s first honest interaction with the sex market to take place after he enters an open relationship and has to explain to potential partners that there is no real possibility of a casual or long-term relationship early in their interactions. The sex market is also the primary destination of those looking for kink-based interactions, such as hotwifing or husband trading.

If all of this seems rather depressing, keep in mind that your value on the sex market is not judged based on the same characteristics as other markets. Research shows that when searching on the sex market, people do not value characteristics such as intelligence or personality much and instead focus mostly on physical attractiveness.

The Casual Dating Market

Casual dating is different from dating in pursuit of a long-term relationship in two ways:

  1. You may ask someone on a date who has a trait you would see as making it impossible to seriously consider them for a long-term relationship (like marriage).
  2. You do not immediately break up with someone as soon as you realize it is highly unlikely that you will be spending the rest of your life with this person.

In general, the casual dating market is the sandbox in which those with monogamous leanings play while racking up major milestones they want to hit before they would seriously consider marriage or another form of a long-term relationship. In this role, it is a very useful marketplace for having practice relationships that can teach a person many of the skills they will leverage in subsequent, more serious relationships. While it certainly has its utility, the casual dating market also features its fair share of dangers and limitations.

In addition to playing this “practice relationship” role, the casual dating market features:

New relationship energy, often referred to as NRE, is a term used to describe the unique mental, emotional, and physical thrills one experiences when in a new, passionate romantic relationship, only just beginning to discover a partner, and not yet sure how things will turn out or what will happen next. New relationship energy is highly addictive and, in our experience, the most pleasurable emotional state emerging from human sexual interaction after love. New relationship energy far outpaces any pleasure that can come from an orgasm (in that an orgasm just feels physically pleasurable, whereas new relationship energy provides an intense, deep sense of psychological satisfaction—after your fifth time orgasming in a day, you are quite bored of it, but your fifth time drawing a sketch of someone with whom you are experiencing new relationship energy is just as magical as the first). New relationship energy has also been shown to have very addictive qualities, functioning on similar neural pathways to painkilling medication. New relationship energy leads people to make even dumber decisions than love does.

One major problem with the casual dating market involves the large number of people who “fake” being on it. As it is in between the sex market, where men are disadvantaged, and the long-term relationship market, where women are disadvantaged, a large number of men who really want sex will pretend to be in this market as well a large number of women who really want a more serious relationship. The second major problem with the market can be seen with its degradation after the age of thirty or so. Most individuals who are “catches” and interested in casual dating eventually get locked down, whether they want to or not, or transfer to the polyamory market, leaving an increasingly dry fishing pond for the average casual dater as they age.

The greatest hazard of the casual dating market involves settling into relationships without consciously intending to do so.

Imagine you end up going on a few dates with a woman or man you like. You neither find their personality or appearance actively offensive, so you fool around and have sex a few times. A few months later, you are having sex regularly. Now this person is asking to be “official” with you, posting photos with you online, and introducing you to their friends and family.

Should you resist these mate-blocking and relationship-solidifying behaviors, you will lose a source of sex (and it’s not like anyone else is lining up), plus you find it pleasant to spend time with this person, and you look forward to seeing them on nights and weekends—it is so nice to not be left alone and feel like someone is there for you.

Months turn into years that you spend with this person. You have gone through some hard times together. They lost their house at one point, and you ended up moving in together to save money. You even are beginning to feel like you really love this person sometimes. Then, one day they ask to get married. You know they are not a perfect match—not what you dreamed about as a kid—but getting back on the dating market would be hard, and you have been with this person seven years now. Figuring that this must be “as good as it gets,” you say yes. Now you are cursed to live your life trapped in mediocrity. Merely because breaking up with this person was never “convenient” or easy, you are doomed to live and die in the relationship equivalent of a beige office cubicle.

This horrifying trap consumes the lives of millions of people every year and is totally preventable. In fact—if you are over 23 and date someone for just three months, you are more likely to still be dating the same person in four years than not (this comes from a great study done by Facebook’s data scientists—see: Flings or Lifetimes? The Duration of Facebook Relationships).

There are a few strategies you can employ to prevent this from happening to you while still engaging in the casual dating that will help you hone your skills for an eventual, intentional long-term relationship. When dating in high school, create a rule for yourself whereby you will not extend any relationship formed while in high school into college. You must communicate this intention clearly to your partners early on in your relationships, saying that if you really do end up bonding, you will find each other again after college.

It is easy to set this rule given the salience of the trope of the high schooler who follows a boyfriend/girlfriend to college, only for that partner to summarily dump them or cheat on them once exposed to a much larger, more vibrant market. In other words—given the salience of certain cultural stereotypes among high school relationships, telling a high school partner you plan to leave them when you start college, as a rule, is less likely than it otherwise might be to cause offense and thus allows you to safely experiment with casual dating at that age (well, hopefully it won’t cause offense, but then again high schoolers love indulging in emotional reactions).

You can employ a similar set of rules during college or during any other phase of your life in which you know you will be leaving a location in a set amount of time (e.g., “while I can date you the relationship has to end in six months when I move/join the military/start my new job/etc.”). That said, if you are looking for a marriage partner with whom you will have kids, college is probably the best time to start searching for this person given universities’ large pools of single, pre-vetted candidates with similar educational attainment and socioeconomic status.

Do not underestimate how long it will take you to secure a suitable long-term partner. We estimate that if you dedicate an average of two hours a day to finding your optimal long-term partner starting in college, the process will take you a total of eight years. Do not be that person who plans to get married at 31 and neglects to begin looking for a partner until they are 26. As we discuss elsewhere in this book (see page 194), your market advantages shift significantly throughout life. What may have been easy three years ago can become nigh impossible (and vice versa) depending on age and gender.

Once you decide you have reached a point in life in which you are ready to begin systematically searching for a long-term partner, give up casual dating—unless you have chosen to join the non-monogamous community. Dump partners the moment you realize they are not people with whom you would like to spend the rest of your life.

Every day, month, and year you spend on a relationship with someone who is not an appropriate match for you involves foregoing hundreds—if not thousands—of opportunities to meet your optimal partner. Every second you put off an uncomfortable breakup with a suboptimal long-term partner increases your risk that such a breakup will never take place. If you find it hard to dump someone today, just imagine how hard it will be next year. The key to securing an optimal long-term partner involves breaking up with someone as soon as it becomes clear they are not a viable long-term candidate for you.

The Long-Term Relationship Market

You are on the long-term relationship market if you are dating with the intention of securing a long-term relationship—also known as an LTR. While on this market, a person will only date people with whom they can imagine spending the rest of their lives. Participants acting in their best interests will end a relationship the moment it is clear this will not happen.

More than any other, the long-term relationship market deprioritizes physical attractiveness while prioritizing features like education and wealth. While it goes against conventional wisdom, attractiveness (in so far as it does matter), affects the value of men in the long-term relationship market more than it affects the value of women. One study showed that while unattractive men were less likely to secure a university-educated woman, a woman’s attractiveness did not affect the rate at which she could secure a university-educated male. This is an interesting trend as more attractive males are statistically shown to invest significantly less in their relationships than less attractive men.

The long-term relationship market is also unique in that it heavily favors males—especially after a person reaches their mid-thirties. Because of this, many males falsely signal that they are in this market in an effort to secure better partners than they could in other markets, just as many women really looking for long-term relationships will signal that they just want sex.

The Non-Monogamous Market

Non-monogamous relationship models are rapidly growing in popularity. Searching for a partner while in a non-monogamous relationship or pairing up with a partner who is non-monogamous themselves gives birth to unique market dynamics, which only really kick in when you are looking for something more than sex from additional partners—otherwise the market dynamics are nearly identical to sex market dynamics.

Certain individuals’ aggregate desirability can vary wildly in these markets. The non-monogamous market participant with the highest value by far is the polyamorous unicorn: A single bisexual female not interested in being a primary partner in a relationship. If you fall into that category (or can pretend to be in that category), you will be able to secure astronomically better partners in this market than you can in any other market.

The non-monogamous market is unique in that it has not yet settled on well-known cultural norms and differs vastly among different cities and age groups. While in some cities the market is to a great extent comprised of vast, often co-living, ideologically motivated polycules (groups of people in a relationship with each other), the non-monogamous market in other cities is managed in a top-down fashion by a hierarchical cabal of matriarchs who choose which individuals are allowed into the metroplex-wide polycule—though these matriarchs may not contextualize their positions this way. In yet other cities, you will find a few core polycules dominating the market like an infighting aristocracy.

As fascinating as these communities are, they are evolving too quickly to pin down. Participants in these communities seem unaware of the geographic differences among non-monogamous communities. Between the cities in which we have lived recently: Seoul, Lima, Edinburgh, London, San Francisco, Dallas, and Miami, we can say that while these communities share a common literature and identity, they have evolved independently and are only superficially the same; hence, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about the market dynamics of each. For example, some of the markets we have seen place a strong positive value modifier on being a bi male, while others do not seem to care.

That is not to say that there is no research that elucidates some interesting aspects of the community. Some research suggests that men are valued more for their attractiveness in non-monogamous markets than in other markets, and that male social status and resources matter considerably less among non-monogamous markets than they do in any other market outside of the sex market.

One commonality among all non-monogamous markets is the importance of virtue signaling to an individual’s aggregate desirability. While we hope the community can get over its obsession with ethical virtue signaling, the obsession makes sense given that most non-monogamous market participants grew up in societies in which promiscuity has been categorized as fundamentally unethical. Since no one wants to believe they are a bad person, it is only natural for people to practice a behavior seen as unethical by some to seek out and build evidence of their ethical goodness or even moral superiority.

On Citations and Studies

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espite using science as our primary standard of evidence (the type of evidence we value above all others), we will rarely cite specific studies in this book.

It is all too easy to believe oneself to be a dispassionate lover of “science” and “rationality,” only to lean on studies like a crutch, cherry-picking findings, and conflating rationalization with rationality. It is a bad habit of countless writers and random commentators to make an outrageous claim, then cite a single study to back it up, putting the burden on the reader to look up the study and analyze its methodology, try to determine how it was funded, and look up the history of the researcher to determine whether the results are credible. We strongly disagree with this way of communicating.

If you see a statistic in a book and believe that statistic more because it comes with a study citation, we encourage you to rethink how you engage with information. We want to do our part in fighting against these sorts of dangerous mental shortcuts.

When we make a claim you find to be dubious, the last thing we want you to do is read the same couple of studies that lead us to our conclusion—especially if a subconscious bias could have led us to cherry-pick those studies. That is how bad information gets spread and pop-science comes to dominate. Our goal is to create new methodologies for relating to and interpreting data. When you want to sanity check something, we urge you to go online and dig into the topic. Ask yourself why we drew the conclusions we drew given the information available to us, then draw your own conclusions.

We understand this approach runs contrary to the manner in which many were taught to engage with science and ideas, but we ask you to give it a try. You may find our approach surprisingly empowering. If you give this way of writing an honest try and still hate it, just shoot us an email at Hello@Pragmatist.Guide letting us know. Should we get enough of these emails, we will include fastidious (rather than occasional) citations in future books.

In addition to consulting research on relationships when writing this book, we reached out to around a hundred professional relationship therapists to sanity check the new theories it espouses. The number of therapists who read the entire book in detail is debatable, however we incorporated the feedback each therapist sent, with the major criticism being we are too harsh in our views on when a relationship is doomed.

Why People Cheat Rather Than Leave a Relationship

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n individual will leave a relationship if they believe there are better, mutually exclusive options available to them. This is why married individuals have a higher risk of divorce when the adult gender ratios of their office present more members of the opposite gender (such office environments give them the impression that there are many better options). However, it is important to note the options tempting partners away from an established relationship must be mutually exclusive in order to increase the risk of relationship dissolution.

Not all people have the same view of when a relationship is mutually exclusive. Someone may, for instance, secretly marry a separate partner in another country and maintain a separate family with that partner. To most, this would qualify as a mutually exclusive relationship possibility—one that a normal person would likely leave their first family to pursue—but to some people (perhaps due to extreme wealth and/or a career that involves frequent, regular travel between two places), such opportunities are not mutually exclusive. To these people, it is fine to have two families.

This dynamic can be used to predict when someone may choose to cheat on a partner rather than leave their relationship entirely.

The most common barrier to cheating for most people involves the struggle to simultaneously believe “I am a cheater” and “I am a good person.” This is why once someone has cheated once, they are extremely likely to cheat again (300% more likely, to be exact). After someone cheats the first time, cheating again becomes very low cost (outside the risk of getting caught), as they have already come to terms with the cognitive dissonance of internalizing that they cheat on partners.

If you started your relationship with someone as “the other man” or “the other woman” with whom your partner cheated on an existing partner, be aware that your present partner will very likely cheat on you, as they no longer have to fight the cognitive dissonance associated with cheating. After all, cheating granted your partner their current loving relationship with you, did it not? How bad can cheating really be?

What to Do When a Partner Cheats

After someone cheats on you, what do you do?

There are six ways to maintain a relationship with a cheater:

  1. Alter your relationship contract to open your relationship, making sexual relations with others permissible. This may seem like a strange reaction as it “rewards the cheater,” but it is also by far and away the most viable way to maintain the relationship. Even with the below alternate strategies, it is highly likely your partner will cheat on you again or just leave you.
  2. Through heavy surveillance, increase your partner’s perceived probability of being caught should they cheat again. If the odds of being caught are near 100%, your partner will be less likely to attempt cheating, even if the punishment is fairly moderate. This is a feasible strategy, but not a smart strategy, as it will almost certainly degrade the relationship over even a short period of time and vastly increase the likelihood that your partner will cheat over any period during which they are not monitored. If your partner really wants to sleep with other people, they may also be pushed by this strategy to merely terminate the relationship.
  3. Decrease your partner’s opportunities to cheat. Consider a wife who doesn’t let her husband eat alone with a woman or drink at mixed-gender events without her present. In an increasingly equal society, such a strategy is seen as abusive and almost absurd to maintain.
  4. Increase the perceived cost of your partner being caught cheating. If you do not immediately leave a partner who cheats, you must keep in mind that you have almost certainly lowered your partner’s perceived cost of cheating, hence the crucial thing about implementing this strategy is that any punishment you threaten must be something you are genuinely willing to execute, and cannot involve breaking up with your partner (as you have already shown an inability to follow through with that potential ultimatum). Potentially effective threatened punishments include threats of releasing damaging information to your partner’s family or promising to release incriminating information about the cheating partner to the police or national tax authority (note this behavior is illegal in many jurisdictions). If you are going to threaten harsh punishment for cheating, you must also come to terms with the fact that the odds are well over 50% that your partner will decide that, given their high likelihood of cheating on you again, your relationship is not worth maintaining, so they will break things off. Some studies also show that when people are warned of clear punishments for infractions, such as fees for coming late to pick up children from daycare, they are more likely to commit those infractions—perhaps because they have been aware of the price and they still find their crimes worth it.
  5. Renegotiation of the relationship contract in some way other than just opening up the relationship could conceivably lower the possibility of cheating. This would likely be done through marriage counseling or “open discussion.” That said, we would not recommend this strategy as it is very likely to allow the cheater to displace responsibility (“I only cheated because X”). This strategy furthermore fails to change the underlying dynamics that caused the cheating but instead reinforces them. Really, the only way this ends up being effective is if the act of the discussions themselves increase partners’ attraction or dedication to each other.
  6. Getting your partner to agree to be surgically neutered. Few are likely to consent to this, but it can help to combat a desire to cheat in the future. It’s a crazy idea, but probably effective.

Cheating will not be halted by a slap on the hand and expectation that the relationship can go back to normal, free of cheating. The cheating partner will almost certainly cheat again. Why? Because now they have strictly less motivation not to cheat. If you do not leave your partner after they cheat and the world does not fall apart, was the cheating such a bad thing?

Any strictly monogamous relationship in which there is even a slight probability that your partner will want to sleep with someone is at extreme risk. The paths to repair the relationship after a cheating incident are extremely limited. It is far more efficient to create a relationship contract that states sleeping with another person would hurt your feelings but is within the rules as long as each partner informs the other partner of each dalliance in advance. This type of contract clause increases the cost of sleeping with someone else (as they will need to tell you first, knowing fully well that they are hurting you) without making them choose between your relationship and cheating. While someone still may attempt to hide their dalliance to avoid hurting their partner emotionally, doing so has a higher personal emotional cost, as it may be difficult to believe one is a good person and yet unwilling to adhere to such a simple, low-effort rule honoring a committed partner.

Men and women do not respond the same way to cheating behavior. This is likely a product of men historically assuming the role of breadwinner in our culture and women traditionally acting as sexual gatekeepers, which has led men, on average, to value a partner more for sex and a woman to value a partner more for resources. This has historically meant that sexually unsatisfied men can easily acquire more sex just by cheating, whereas for a sexually unsatisfied woman to fully benefit from another man, she must leave her current partner. This has contributed to making men more likely to cheat within a long-term relationship while simultaneously making them less likely to leave a sub-par partner. This is backed up by several studies on cheating behavior across men and women. In one study, 56% of men who reported to be cheating also reported being in happy marriages, whereas only 34% of cheating women reported their marriages to be happy.

Other Factors Contributing to Cheating

A study of eight million Ashley Madison users revealed that both men and women are more likely to have affairs when their age ends in the number nine; however, this effect is much more pronounced in men. Presumably, this is driven by a surging desire for validation as we approach symbolically meaningful age milestones. Weird ages are not the only time-associated factors increasing the odds that a person may be cheating: The so-called “seven-year itch” is really a thing. Both men’s and women’s odds of cheating increase approximately seven years into a relationship. Both men and women’s odds of cheating decrease after this seven-year mark, but male odds of cheating begin to rise again after the 18-year mark.

Older age, in general, seems to be a factor contributing to cheating—at least these days. Americans aged 55 and older are now more likely to report having extramarital sex than Americans under 55. This is a reversal of trends observed as recently as the year 2000, when older Americans reported having less extramarital sex. Today, most people who cheat are 50 years of age and older (21%). Only 8% of people between the ages of 18-29 admit to ever cheating.

Infidelity appears to be more common among people who have specific types of oxytocin and vasopressin receptor genes. Vasopressin is a hormone related to social behaviors, including trust, empathy, and sexual bonding. A whopping 40% of instances of infidelity in women and 62% in men have to do with genetics.

Other genetic factors, such as intelligence, are also associated with higher rates of cheating. Both smarter men and women cheat at higher rates, though smarter women cheat at disproportionately higher rates, especially if their intelligence has not led to the achievement of a high level of educational attainment.

Cheating is not always sexual. Emotional affairs also exist, with 5% of men and 35% of women having admitted to having an emotional affair. Those self-reported percentages (at least among women) are far higher than the 20% of people who admit to having a physical affair. We suspect the larger number of women having emotional affairs is either a product of women being more emotionally aware of what they are doing or women “getting more out of” emotional affairs than men.

Women cheat more now than they did in the past (or at least are more comfortable disclosing their cheating behavior in surveys). Rates of women cheating have increased 40% over the last half-century. Furthermore, 90% of women who cheat on their husbands do not report feeling guilty—instead, they say they felt entitled to their extramarital activities due to perceived failures on the part of their husbands. Of these women, 65% report enjoying sex with their lover more than their husband, and 70% claim their lover is the “opposite” of their husband.

Almost 70% of cheaters cheat with friends. Cheaters also tend to have more sexual partners than the average person: A median of 12 throughout their lifetime. Those who like spending more time in social contexts may be more likely to cheat, as at least one study we came across found extroverts are more likely to cheat.

Sex in a Long-Term Relationship

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ow do those in a long-term relationship keep their sex lives healthy, vibrant, and fresh? How do partners avoid the dreaded “dead bedroom” in which they almost never have sex?

The first key to understanding how to preserve sex in a long-term relationship is to understand that the core desire for sex in a long-term relationship is driven as much by a desire for personal validation as it is driven by a desire for pleasure.

Most human action and emotion is driven by attempts to align our positions in the world with our ideal selves—the internal models we have created describing who we are or who we want to be. Our internal models, especially those tied to sexuality, are mostly socialized into us at a young age, but can be altered (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life for detailed explanations on how).

A young man’s sadness resulting from the fact that he is still a virgin at 25 has nothing to do with an arousal impulse—nor is it really tied to any innate emotional impulse. That sadness stems from his internalizing that in order to be a happy 25-year-old male, he must be virile and desired. If this young man did not hold this belief, he would not feel sad. Instead, he is sad because the difference between his ideal self and his current self, as recognized by his subconscious, produces a negative emotional state.

This emotional state may drive the 25-year-old to attempt to have sex with someone in an effort to better align his actual self with his desired self-image. We refer to the process of matching one’s actual self to one’s desired self-image as validation.

While sex with a person does cause slight effects on happiness that cannot be secured through masturbation, these effects are insignificant when contrasted with the reported distress of dead bedroom relationships. A dead bedroom is not soul-destroying due to any shortage of orgasms. There is an abundance of methods, products, and tools that facilitate top drawer orgasms and require nobody else’s participation. Dead bedrooms torture those who begin to see themselves as no longer sexually attractive or desirable. Those with dead bedrooms stop getting validation as sexual, desired, beings.

The cessation of sex in long-term relationships differentially affects men and women. In general, Western men who are single or casually dating gain social validation from the number of attractive women with whom they sleep. Once western men are in long-term relationships, their validation is gleaned, to a great extent, from the continued desirability of their long-term partners and whether their partners still want to have sex with them.

A man loses that source of validation when either his long-term partner is no longer desirable on the open market or when this partner no longer appears sexually interested in him. A relationship can involve long periods of no sex at all due to something like forced long distance, but still be immensely validating to a man if he always feels desired by a desirable partner. A man who has sex three times every six months, but who feels that his partner is envied by others and extremely sexually interested in him is far less likely to feel sexually unfulfilled than a man who has sex daily, but feels his wife isn’t so interested in it or that she is not “hot” anymore.

To men, dead bedrooms are largely not about the sex, but rather a man’s self-assessment of his own virility and sexual desirability. If actual sex were the issue, we would see more similarities between dead bedrooms and long-distance relationships that don’t involve sex, yet communities that support these two groups of individuals could not be more different

We are NOT saying that a wife shouldalways consent to sex with her husband. Heck, sex when one’s heart just isn’t in it could leave some men feeling more invalidated than they would feel if they didn’t have sex at all. It is merely important for women with male partners to know that both the sexual interest they express in their partners, plus their overall desirability to the general population, will likely play a huge role in the average male partner’s validation, and that validation will have a profound effect on his happiness.

In women, validation is gained more from being desired by people they respect and admire (assuming one has succumbed to Western society’s socialization). This sense of validation can be lost when a woman loses respect for her partner or feels as though her partner no longer desires her. To the average western female, sex itself is trivial from a personal validation perspective. Sex with a partner who she does not respect has no validation value, whereas being desired by a partner she admires but with whom she cannot have sex, while frustrating, is still validating.

It is a failure to secure validation that the accusation of being “used for sex” emerges. Women commonly claim to have been “used for sex” by someone when said sex fails to grant the validation sought from the interaction—often because of a post-sex realization that the sexual partner had very little desire for them specifically or that they did not respect this sexual partner. We find the phrase quite humorous because it is used by those who do not get what they wanted from sex, but lack the lucidity to recognize that they, too, were hoping to use someone for sex but to gain validation instead of an orgasm.

At a young age, we are conditioned to believe that to be happy and fulfilled, women must be desired, and men must be virile. We subsequently spend the rest of our lives, attempting to fulfill these roles. Unlike with sexual arousal impulses, it is not any stimulus itself that leads us to feel happy when validated. Nothing is innate about these emotional outputs; they result from the analysis of measuring sticks that we built for ourselves. Most sex we have is motivated by an attempt to fulfill these self-images and not merely about orgasms or arousal; masturbation is just fine at fulfilling those particular desires (well . . . almost, there are admittedly some neurological differences between the effects of masturbation and sex).

Once we accept the importance of validation in long-term relationship sex dynamics, we can address that need far more adequately. To maintain a healthy sex life in a long-term relationship, you must make sure that either all partners have divorced themselves from societal socialization or that:

This distinction may seem nuanced but can play a big role in how relationships actually break down. For example, a male socialized in Western society can still gain sexual validation from a partner for whom he has lost respect so long as the partner is still “hot” and respectable to his social group, whereas the average woman cannot. Alternatively, if a female admires a partner and that partner desires her, she can gain validation from this even if her friends think the partner is gross. This is something much harder for a male to do if socialized in our society.

Recall that average male sex drive decreases with age and declines significantly along with testosterone when a man is in love or in a pair-bonded relationship. We emphasize that this is on average and not necessarily in every human—some men even supplement testosterone to counteract these changes. At any rate, this shift in male sexuality can often confuse women into believing that a man isn’t interested in her anymore. This shift might even lead some men to believe that they are simply less attracted to their long-term partner, specifically rather than being less attracted to everyone as their hormone levels change.

Female sex drive also fluctuates in various circumstances (which are far too diverse to succinctly summarize here, as they shift from a midlife pique to pregnancy, to menopause). These fluctuations can also be misinterpreted as a lack of interest in a way that makes a man lose the validation he gleans from the relationship.

Sex is an activity that requires time and physical effort. If a person is exhausted and overworked, sex drive drops. Stress and exhaustion-induced loss of sexual interest frequently occur after people have children—without money for childcare, dead bedrooms become very difficult for new parents to avoid. That said, a dead bedroom in which it is clear to both partners that each still finds the other sexually compelling (and is simply not acting on that attraction due to exhaustion) is quite different from one in which one or more partners feel as though another partner has lost sexual interest in them, specifically. We would go so far as to say a relationship in which partners are not having sex because they have children and full-time jobs is not nearly as emotionally taxing or crushing as a relationship in which partners have frequent “duty sex” that is devoid of strong passion and attraction.

Reminder: The science is unambiguous on this point: In human males, being in love with someone lowers testosterone production and tanks their sex drive.

Researchers have confirmed the obvious: That confidence, attentiveness, physical attractiveness, frequency of classically romantic dates, oral sex willingness, willingness to try new things, and prioritizing a partner’s pleasure over one’s own correlate strongly with continued sexual satisfaction in a relationship. The only research we found in this subject that piqued our interest (by making a novel point) was a study that found a strong correlation between talking through joint life goals on a regular basis (looking for alignment) and mutual sexual desire—so be sure to read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life with your spouse to ensure good sex. 😉

If a mutual sexual interest in each other is so important, what must we do to maintain it?

One factor contributing to the dead bedroom phenomenon involves some people assuming that the standards of attraction are lower once they are in a long-term-relationship. These people assume they can “let themselves go” a bit, put on a few pounds, stop putting so much effort into exercise, outfits, foreplay, and grooming, and generally work less hard to be charming, confident, engaging, and considerate. The reality is that between the Coolidge effect (a decrease in attraction to individuals with whom you have had sex before) and the decrease in testosterone-driven sex drive when someone is in love, the amount of effort required to keep the level of sex constant in a long-term relationship is dramatically higher than the effort required in a short term relationship.

Similar to the age-old question of: “How can I lose weight without diet and exercise?” we hear people ask: “How can I maintain my partner’s desire without constantly improving myself?” The real answer to maintaining a partner’s desire is to improve physical (and societal) appearance over time and work hard to increase your partner’s admiration for you. Perpetually improve the things your partner values most—be they looks, prestige, emotional control, knowledge, status, or anything else. Long-term partners have an advantage here, as they have had ample time to determine what their partner finds to be most attractive and endearing. Maintaining a partner’s attraction and affection is difficult and clearly not feasible for everyone. We live in a society that seems to have trouble accepting that some people are going to fail despite trying their hardest.

The fact that many fail and ultimately find themselves living with a dead bedroom is fine. The best solution to a dead bedroom problem may be to accept it and come to understand how you can work around it. After all, polls show that 57% of people living in a sexless marriage report that, aside from sex being absent, they feel they have the ideal partner. A relationship may still be worth having even without the validation that comes from feeling desired and satisfied by a partner. Besides, relationships can be renegotiated in a manner that allows one or more partners to use outside partners to satisfy both sexual urges and, more importantly, desires for sexual validation (though this is admittedly not possible in all relationships, especially those in which the very fact that one partner is searching for validation outside of the relationship is invalidating to the other partner—life doesn’t always have a win state).

Note from the Research:

Bonus Tidbits from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality:

Common Marriage Contract Themes

T

he easiest way to design a marriage contract is to start with one of the following themes and build terms around it. To choose among these themes, focus on the “point” of your marriage. Specifically, what are each of you trying to gain by entering this partnership, and how can the relationship be designed to maximize that benefit?

Common themes include:

Note From The Research:

Guide to Avoiding Crazy

T

here is truth to what they say: “Don’t stick your dick in crazy and don’t let the loon in your poon.“

The increase in life quality that can come with early identification of what will become systemic bad behavior (“crazy”) in a partner is monumental (by “crazy” we are not referring to mental health issues under treatment, but rather generic craziness—we address mental health issues in the false red flag section, mental health issues under treatment are usually not a big deal). The damage that an unstable and malicious partner can inflict upon your life includes (but is not limited to):

When you have a person who has decided to make your torment a permanent hobby of theirs, your life can become very challenging. This is doubly true when they have convinced themselves that their actions are somehow morally just.

No matter how hot someone is, no matter how rich they are, no matter how high their status may be, it is never worth the risk to hook up with a potentially “crazy” person—someone who shows any signs of mental instability, severe immaturity, or who threatens you in any way. The momentary pleasure you may glean from an encounter will never justify subsequent months spent looking over your shoulder, potential incarceration, physical harm, and reputational and/or financial damage. Stop, think, and internalize just how much harm a person can do if they decide to dedicate even just a couple hours a week to making your life miserable. Think through the significant monetary and emotional cost of neutralizing a threatening, unstable person with whom you have had some sort of sexual encounter.

Be warned: Even someone who does not act “crazy” in public and among friends can have a different internal ruleset governing appropriate behavior with a sexual or romantic partner. Mentally unstable partners can be surprisingly difficult to identify.

We will help you spot individuals prone to behavior patterns that can be deleterious to your wellbeing, with a focus on behavior patterns you can’t easily predict. What follows are some tactics you may use to identify “crazy” early on.

We have organized red flags into two categories:

  1. Signs that even a single sexual encounter with this person could ruin your life.
  2. Signs that a date is bad material for a marriage.

How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Sexual Partners

Because the negative consequences of sexual engagement with dangerous and unstable partners are so extreme, it is best to err on the side of caution when you are unsure as to whether a target is or is not a potential threat.

In general, and erring on the side of caution, avoid the following:

People who associate their identity with their sexuality

Those who strongly identify with their sexuality, whether that sexuality involves being a super manly heterosexual patriot, a flamboyantly gay force of nature, or a captivating BDSM dom, can be dangerous. Because sexuality is so core to how these people see themselves, you, as one of their sexual partners, must properly follow a complicated set of rules in order for them to feel secure in their identities. It can be nigh impossible to predict the nuances of these rules. The consequences these people deem appropriate for breaking them can be extreme.

In general, mentally sound individuals understand that sexuality is a garnish that sits on top of a person’s identity. If you walk into a restaurant and a waiter serves a plate of nothing but maraschino cherries, that should be an immediate flag that something is seriously wrong in the kitchen.

Tied to this red flag are people who allow their politics to define their sexuality. An example of this might be someone so sex-negative they believe that certain otherwise-mainstream sexual positions are immoral because they are degrading to the participants. While these people might seem safe in theory, one can never know exactly what is going to set them off. When someone has non-normative views on sexuality, it is difficult to fully probe those views through limited and brief interactions. If you don’t know the exact line across which something turns from an innocuous interaction to an extreme faux pas in someone’s mind, you are likely to get in big trouble.

Imagine you are an explorer who has just happened upon an undiscovered tribe. The chief’s daughter is clearly interested in you, but you actively avoid her. Why? You don’t know the rules of this new, strange culture. You don’t know if dancing with the chief’s daughter will bond you in marriage or whether accepting a gift from the chief’s daughter without sleeping with her is punishable by dismemberment.

Just as our imaginary tribe would likely assume that you know all of their unique rules, political extremists will assume you know their esoteric rules—and you may be very surprised by what they deem to be appropriate punishments. Things that might be a normal part of a sexual interaction for you might be seen as justification for extreme retaliation to them. Infractions may involve one partner reaching orgasm while the other doesn’t, failing to have a written consent form ready, using one form of birth control over another, or telling this partner about a sexual fantasy of yours involving them. When you can’t even predict what lines in the sand a person may have, it is not worth walking into that particular sexual minefield.

There is one exception to this rule: Most people involved in a polyamorous community have weird political views on sexual relationships. If the person hasn’t been kicked out of a “sane” poly community, they are normally very safe for sexual interaction, so long as you know the rules of that poly community. That said, be sure it is a “sane” poly community, as some polyamorous communities have rules that are difficult to predict. Fortunately, these communities are fairly easy to spot and broadcast their craziness very loudly. If, for instance, senior members of a poly community demand you pay for things or otherwise attempt to extract money from you, stay away. Depending on the regional culture of your poly community, it may not have clear “thought leaders” making it harder to vet, but we might go so far as to suggest doing online checks of any clear leaders of a poly community with which you might become involved to search for potential warning signs.

People Who Are Visibly Unstable

We are not telling you to avoid potential partners just because they suffer from a mental illness. People with a wide variety of disorders, such as bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, or Asperger’s can make spectacular partners, even in long-term relationships, so long as they don’t lean on their disorders as excuses for personal failures (in which case you will find yourself in a, “it wasn’t my fault; X made me do it, so I am actually the victim,” dynamic whenever they do something shitty).

We merely recommend avoiding anyone exhibiting strange speech behavior (e.g., repeating the same things over and over, use of made-up words, rhyming words without meaning, difficult-to-understand speech), engaging in absurdly reckless activities (like provoking a law enforcement officer or hitting on a random homeless person during your date), or scarily narcissistic behaviors around service staff. This might seem obvious, but all judgment calls become difficult when a person is hot enough. Be aware that these warning signs often represent tips of very, very large icebergs.

People Addicted to Hard, Highly Addictive Drugs

In this case, we are referring to drugs like meth and heroin. No matter how “good” a person may be, certain addictions can make even the best-intentioned people do truly terrible things. An addicted partner’s knowledge of your home and its contents is not… ideal in such scenarios. It is also not great if you come to mind as a blackmail target for someone with a serious addiction. There are very few effective methods for neutralizing an individual addicted to a hard drug that sees you as a potential source of resources.

Vengeful People

Avoid anyone who mentions having punished an ex for a perceived slight on the first couple dates. Anyone who does this is signaling to you what they do to people who cross them, which implies they are vindictive and likely to take the time and effort required to screw up other domains of your life after being dumped.

People Out of Your League Who Make The First Move

If someone way out of your league eagerly engages you, it is too good to be true. In such instances, you are almost certainly being subjected to some sort of scam and simply have not figured it out yet. The only exception here is if it is clear you have a really high individual desirability for some unique reason that is not valued on the market (for example, if you are an amputee and this person has a devotee kink—a kink for people with disabilities). If this is the case, high-value individuals will certainly signal clearly to you what that thing is.

Desperate People

Upon encountering a target who is obviously extremely desperate, you may think to yourself: “This will be easy; I am way out of their league, and no one will sleep with them anyway, so this will be a low-investment endeavor.” You are almost certainly extremely wrong.

People far below your league often become very high-investment liaisons because they are uniquely scared that you will leave them or not follow through with whatever fantasy about your relationship they create in their minds. Desperate people are also much more likely to have very little relationship experience and thus can also act hurtfully without realizing it.

People Who Clearly Do Not Like You Or Your Kind

Sex with someone who you know to not like you—or sex with someone who is associated with a group or organization that does not like you (or your race, gender, social group, company, family, whatever)—is extremely risky. People do not randomly decide to have one-night stands with people they hate, despite what stories depict. Giving someone who hates you access to your life, body, and reputation is risky.

Emotionally Manipulative People

Avoid anyone who attempts to use some form of emotional manipulation to obtain sex. A common example of emotional manipulation manifests as someone goading you into consenting to sex with them by eliciting a sense of pity (i.e., pity sex). Anyone willing to engage in emotional manipulation to gain sex has demonstrated they are willing to attempt to emotionally blackmail you into sex. Any concession to this behavior is an admission on your part that their tactics are effective on you.

How to Avoid Dangerous and Unstable Long-Term Partners

Avoiding dangerous, unstable long-term partners is much easier than avoiding risky sexual partners and has a far more profound impact. To give you an idea of the damage that a risky long-term partner can cause, recall that it is common for abusive partners to threaten to murder their own kids if their abused partner leaves them (and some follow through on these threats).

What follows is a clear list of warning signs exhibited by hazardous long-term partners. Obviously, not everything on the following list of red flags indicates that someone is crazy enough to murder children, but each of the following characteristics nevertheless indicates life-destroying levels of danger.

Avoid with all your power:

Partners Who Demand Money or Gifts

Anyone who demands—or suggests that their affection is dependent on or given in exchange for—money or gifts, is a dangerous partner. A person poses a significant threat even if the gifts/monetary sums they demand are very small. The hedonic treadmill effect will only lead initially modest demands to escalate. If you rescue someone from poverty and give them a spectacular lifestyle, they will acclimate to it fairly quickly and expect more. Such partners will pressure you to make stupid business decisions that may ultimately lead you to lose everything.

At one point, a visiting speaker in one of Malcolm’s Stanford Business School classes was asked: What is the number one reason why Stanford Business School grads lose their fortunes? His reply was that—by a long shot—wives and husbands drove his classmates’ financial downfalls. They married people who pressured them to make dumb business and investment decisions because they were not content with what they had. These partners always left them after they lost their money and just married other rich people. They had no qualms about pressuring their spouses into making risky business decisions because the cost to them was lower than it was to their partner.

Stay away from those who measure their self-worth by their wealth or ability to signal wealth—unless they plan to be the individual in the relationship generating and accumulating that wealth and expect absolutely no contribution from you (though in that case, you yourself may be a status signal to them—a trophy wife/husband—and will be discarded the moment you cease to function as a flattering accessory, assuming they think they can do better).

Partners Who Would Be Vindictive in a Divorce

Do you think your prospective partner may be vindictive in a divorce? Would this person ever attempt to punish someone for leaving them? Someone who even subtly demonstrates this capacity should be avoided like the plague. Vindictive behavior is not acceptable, no matter how much someone may attempt to convince you it is. Taking time to hurt someone that could otherwise be spent on self-improvement or looking for the next partner indicates poorly ranked priorities in the extreme.

If you suspect your partner may be prone to vindictive behavior, even if everything else about them is perfect and you love them, we still strongly recommend you leave them over just this one sign. You will likely regret ignoring our warning if you maintain your current course with someone exhibiting these risk factors.

Partners Who Keep Score and Hold Grudges

Anyone who refers to past slights in current arguments is a liability. Someone willing to bring up your past wrongdoings in a current argument before you initiate a long-term relationship will likely escalate such behavior down the road (they will have more fodder with time, after all). Such behavior is uniquely toxic because it creates an environment of fear around bringing up grievances, specifically a fear that airing grievances will trigger defensive behavior in which an old fight is unearthed. Not only does this mean every argument you have becomes this argument plus all arguments you have had throughout the course of your entire relationship, but it also means perceived grievances often are not aired until after they have reached an explosive point.

Fortunately, the problem of grudge-holding and scorekeeping in arguments is easy to address as long as you can come to a point at which all parties agree that such behavior is unacceptable and sub-optimal and that the team must work together to end it. This is often a necessary discussion early in a relationship, as many people grew up around this kind of behavior and thus must unlearn it. Just don’t commit to anything long term with a partner until they show both willingness and capacity to quit their grudge-holding and scorekeeping habits. We would go so far as to make this a red line for proposing to someone or accepting a proposal: No proposal should be accepted until you have trained your partner to permanently scrub this behavioral pattern from their life.

Partners Who Are Inherently Suspicious

Beware of anyone who is inherently suspicious of you, especially if they are suspicious of your cheating on them. There is no greater sign that someone is breaking the terms of your relationship contract than the demonstration of clear suspicion. If your partner ever secretly accesses your texts, phone, or email without your permission, consider it a severe warning sign.

An equally bad sign is if, during the normal course of your relationship, you need to access one of your partner’s online/social media accounts (maybe they are overseas without an internet connection and would benefit from you handling their account) and your partner refuses to let you do so. This is just as much a demonstration of lack of trust as snooping (or a sign that they are hiding something from you). Some limits on partner account access are entirely justified—especially if one partner is prone to accidentally deleting information, forgetting which account they are logged into, etc.—but it is nevertheless a bad sign if a partner does not even allow supervised entry into their accounts.

While this isn’t a big deal in short-term relationships, someone that does not trust you or who you do not trust is unlikely to make a strong long-term partner. The statement, “I am willing to commit to spending the next few decades with this person,” and “but, I fundamentally don’t trust them,” are not congruent. The voice in the back of your head telling you not to trust a partner with your email password should also be telling you not to trust them with the power marriage gives them over you. In general, partners in a healthy long-term relationship should expect to have full access to all of each other’s social media accounts, phones, email accounts, etc. You should be able to trust the good judgment and respect of any long-term partner you would accept into your life.

The exception: Privacy makes sense when you know someone is a good partner for you, but openly disapproves of some aspect of your life of which they are aware (maybe the type of porn you watch). Such cases are common and relationships can still function fine with them, so as a society, it makes sense to set up moderate expectations of privacy even within a long-term relationship.

Partners With Significantly Different Worldviews / Values / Objective Functions

If you and your partner subscribe to two different religions, or if your partner wants kids and you do not, you are already shouldering significant opportunity costs. A partner with congruent values and/or worldviews would likely help you maximize your objective function (the thing(s) you want to maximize in life) with far greater efficiency and ease than a partner whose values and worldview are different. A partner with different values and objectives in life may even actively hamper your ability to pursue and align with what matters to you most.

If your partner is aware that your worldviews, religions, values, or objective functions do not match well and behaves as though this is not a serious problem, beware. Such behavior indicates that they are willing to overlook and downplay large potential problems in favor of relationship stability. In such cases, be vigilant of other problems that this partner is downplaying.

In a worst-case scenario, your partner may assume that your philosophical mismatch will not be an issue because they expect you will eventually “come to your senses” and learn to see the world their way. A person who does not care at all about vastly different views, but otherwise cares about you, likely expects to convert you to their beliefs on a subject. These are issues that absolutely must be resolved before you initiate a long-term relationship with a clear plan of action.

All of this becomes 1000% more pertinent if a partner adheres to a religious tradition that believes in hell or some form of eternal punishment for not adhering to it—and yet they aren’t constantly attempting to convert you. An individual who literally believes your soul will be tortured for all eternity, but who is willing to ignore that for the chance of a relationship with you, clearly does not care about you as a person; instead, they primarily value the chance at a relationship with you. Someone who values a relationship with you over your own best interest is a terrible choice for a life partner.

If you look broadly at relationship research, you will find that people are far more willing to date those of different religious leanings than they are to marry them, implying that if you are dating someone from a different religious tradition, the odds of the relationship ending in marriage are much lower than they otherwise might be. In the US, 85% of marriages are between people of the same faith, while 72% of unmarried relationships are.

Also, keep in mind that for certain religious traditions, in-group marriage is more critical than it is for others. If you look at the stats on this, Mormons and Sikhs have very low rates of marrying outside their faith, whereas Jews marry outside their religion quite frequently.

To clarify: We are not saying that interfaith relationships do not work or should be seen as a major red flag. What we mark as a massive red flag are relationships with people of different religious backgrounds who downplay it as a complete non-issue and a topic to be avoided—especially on important issues like how children will be raised.

Partners Who Do Not Value Emotional Control

Beware of anyone who does not understand that a failure to control their emotions is a bad thing. A person who sometimes explodes with anger or sadness and apologizes shortly afterward can be fixed over time through careful training and conditioning, but only if they are willing to label emotional outbursts as negative, unproductive, and unacceptable.

A person who yells at you over something and subsequently refuses to admit they were in the wrong to lose emotional control, even if they were right about what they were mad about, makes a very suboptimal long-term relationship prospect. If challenging your partner about losses of emotional control—whether those losses of judgment entail yelling or sobbing—means broaching a “touchy subject,” either succeed in convincing this person that it is not appropriate behavior and gain their commitment to fixing it or do not enter a long-term relationship with said person.

Partners Who Make Threats or Impose Ultimatums

A person’s habit of getting what they want through threats or ultimatums (e.g., “Do this thing for me or I will humiliate you/punish you/hurt you/deprive you of something/falsely accuse you of something”) dies hard. Whereas we have found that some behaviors can be changed if an intervention takes place in time, we do not consider this red flag behavior to be worth the risk unless it can be fully erased before engagement.

Partners Who Seek Constant Sexual Validation from Strangers and Acquaintances

Beware of individuals who fish for sexual validation, such as men who boast about their number of sexual partners or women who frequently mention or solicit interest from others for no particular reason. If, for example, your partner’s Instagram feed is comprised mostly of flirty, “sexy” pictures of them, you must acknowledge that this person has a nontrivial drive to secure sexual attention. Such people are not posting randomly; they are posting in pursuit of a certain emotion and trying to create a certain public image.

People seeking sexual validation are typically poor partners in long-term relationships for two reasons:

  1. As we age, libido can change. This leads to different levels of sexual interaction throughout a relationship. If your partner gains a large amount of their personal validation from those sexual interactions, this can be devastating to them emotionally and create very high odds of cheating.
  2. As we age, our value as a sexual object decreases in the eyes of society. If sexual attention and validation comprise a huge source of self-worth for an individual, their “sex display” behavior will increase over time to a point at which it will become counter toward a productive adult life—or this person will have a major emotional breakdown and begin to define their self-worth based on something else. This could end up being something positive like “being a good parent,” or it could be something negative. Whatever it is, the fact that you cannot predict it makes this individual a risky long-term partner.

Partners Who Incorporate Negative Character Traits into Their Core Identities

Anyone who self identifies with a negative character trait is worth avoiding. Those who take great pride in being sassy, being a drama queen, drinking too much, getting a little wild, losing control on occasion, or being prone to passionate rages are dangerous and make for dangerous long-term partners. Any attempt to improve such partners will be received as a personal attack, as these improvements would also require that these people shed an aspect of their identity that they treasure. These issues might be easy to overlook early in a relationship, but with time, the damage caused by a partner’s apparently unassailable bad behavior will snowball.

A Call for Introspection

Be acutely aware that you are just as likely as a potential partner to exhibit any of the red flags listed above. Your present personality, behavior, and motivations may make you a terrible sexual and/or relationship candidate and a genuine danger to others. If you find you have trouble maintaining human relations over time or the majority of your exes dislike you, the most likely source of your problems is you.

The best place to begin troubleshooting is with your own personality and behavior. It would serve you well to re-read through the red flag behaviors listed above from a strictly introspective perspective in hopes of identifying toxic behaviors you can correct.

False Red Flags

We have all picked up many sets of “default red flags” from society that we are supposed to use to identify potentially dangerous partners. You may notice that while the red flags listed above have some overlap with societal defaults, some that you may have expected might be missing. Society has done a terrible job of judging how a relationship should be structured in the current age; this failure extends to societal labeling of potential red flags in partners.

Do not mark the following as automatic triggers to reject a potential partner:

Partners Suffering from Mental Illness

While we already mentioned this in passing, the mere presence of mental illness is not a red flag by any means. Pharmacological and psychiatric treatments have advanced considerably over the past half-century, making many previously untenable conditions entirely manageable. Mental illnesses are only really dangerous if an individual refuses treatment or is prone to flippantly going off their meds when life seems back on track. While working in psychiatry in his early career, Malcolm observed that this was always a huge problem with patients who had more severe conditions: Often when the treatment was working, and their problems went away, people suffering from severe mental illnesses would incorrectly assume that they didn’t need the treatment anymore.

However, while mental illness itself is not a huge red flag, we would strongly recommend caution when considering a long-term relationship with anyone who identifies strongly with one. Some people like to make mental illness a major aspect of their self-identities. This can be a big problem because it means they are likely to use their mental illness as an excuse for bad behavior and see a request to improve bad behavior as an attack on their identity. A mental illness is never an excuse for failing to realize your goals for an ideal self; mental illness is just another small roadblock, and we all have roadblocks.

Partners Suffering from Addictions

While we strongly caution against relationships with individuals who have addictions to hard drugs that frequently lead to thievery and other violent acts, we often see individuals leave partners for lower-order drugs and habits that do not significantly affect their lives outside of shortening their personal lifespans. Nicotine, pot, video games, and even alcohol can be fairly innocuous, yet are often cited as red flags.

We are not encouraging you to marry a drunk (someone who allows being intoxicated to interfere with their career and relationships), but there is a huge difference between an alcoholic and a drunk. Marrying an alcoholic is OK; marrying a drunk is highly ill-advised. It is possible to drink way too much alcohol (Winston Churchill, for example) while still not allowing it to negatively impact your life in a way that makes lofty goals or a successful relationship all that difficult to achieve. The same holds for other lower-order drugs. So long as they do not completely control a partner’s life, self-identity, or behavior, they do not warrant, per our calculations, the termination of a relationship based on them alone—though they are certainly a negative.

You may argue that someone who drinks a lot but doesn’t allow it to affect their life is not an alcoholic. We would argue anyone who clearly has an addiction to the consumption of alcohol is an alcoholic. This is a semantic differentiation people use to not address their failings. You also may argue that Churchill was not an alcoholic; we would point you to the historical record, which shows he drank 1.5 bottles of champagne or wine daily along with five to six ounces of whiskey or brandy. It is very possible to be addicted to alcohol or any other drug without it having a massive negative impact on one’s potential; do not use this as a free pass to ignore the health effects of an addiction.

All that said, it is a huge and immediate red flag if a partner ever blames behavior on an addiction. Saying, “I only did this because I was drunk/high,” and believing that such an excuse clears one from responsibility for the behavior should be a huge red flag. Such a person can easily justify any behavior.

Partners with Controlling Behavior

Controlling behavior, such as advice that you dump your current friend group and limits on when you may leave the house to go “partying,” is often contextualized as being a red flag or toxic. In some cases, this is textbook abusive behavior, but in many cases this behavior can be quite healthy. Behavior that would be described as controlling is common within most Pygmalion relationships and often plays a necessary role in permitting another individual to work with you to improve yourself. If you decide you want to improve your life with the help of your partner, you must be willing to accept controlling behavior from a partner who is willing to act as your coach.

Why are the strict regimes Olympic trainers set for the athletes they train not categorized as abuse? The athletes consent. The discomfort caused by these regimes is a product of a strategic, thoughtful effort in pursuit of a shared goal. Having a partner who pushes you hard to improve yourself in ways you want to improve can “appear” like extreme controlling behavior. The difference lies in consent and a shared vision for who you want to become.

Partners Who Do Not Conform to Societal Ideals

Do not let general societal hang-ups—which may have nothing to do with your personal needs or preferences—dictate which partners are and are not viable. In many cases, relationship types that are seen as suboptimal by society may be highly optimal for you.

Examples of this include:

The fact that society may have a strong negative reaction to your relationship does not mean the relationship itself is inherently negative or toxic. So long as your relationship has an internal, logical consistency to its rules and those rules work to the ultimate benefit of both parties, we would consider it to be good.

Notes from the Research:

Relationships in Which One Partner Voluntarily Surrenders Power to Another Partner

There appears to be a weird—one might even argue unnatural—fetishization of power in Western society.

Even groups that celebrate the fact that people want different things from a relationship express discomfort with the idea that some individuals enjoy surrendering power or operating under others within a dominance hierarchy. For example, polyamorous communities frequently belittle the concept of someone “belonging” to someone else. This discomfort even appears in the BDSM communities of all places, which often go on and on about how the sub is really the one with the power (a sub is the subordinate partner in a dominant-submissive coupling).

Power is not intrinsically good or bad. In fact, there are many logical—even enlightened—reasons why a person may decide they would prefer to not have power. Power is inversely proportional to responsibility. If you have power and you fail at something, then it is your fault. If, however, someone has power over you and you fail, then it is their fault.

Even if society stigmatizes the choice to relinquish power to another, many people possess the mental maturity and self-awareness required to admit to themselves that they would rather surrender power than risk having to take responsibility for failure to achieve their goals—either over their entire life or specific portions of it (such as their career, their kids, their style, etc.). This manifests not only in relationships, but also in careers: Many people who have the skills, opportunity, and resources to start their own companies or climb higher in their careers choose to remain in a comfortable position within other organizations, leaving bigger problems and more responsibility to the professionals above them in the ranks.

In addition to granting one a “get out of responsibility free” card to a certain extent, the surrender of power allows you to turn off some taxing and unpleasant aspects of your cognition, which in turn unlocks new tiers of emotional states not available to individuals who choose to assume power in life.

The idea that all humans everywhere are always better off being their own masters seems to have originated in the Western cultural tradition and come into being fairly recently. This bias certainly did not yet exist at the time of The Great Chain Of Being, a belief that all beings existed in a hierarchy (God -> King -> Nobles -> . . . -> father -> mother ->child -> animal) common throughout all Western cultures only a few hundred years ago. Favoritism of self-determination also does not seem to have been appropriated from Eastern traditions or indigenous populations during the time of colonialism.

Society’s present phobia around the surrender of power appears to be tied to the emergence of capitalism in the West and an association between power and wealth. This general phobia of power relinquishment could also be a reaction to chattel slavery, but we doubt this, as the ideas spread aligns more with the spread of capitalism than with chattel slavery.

Humans evolved to thrive in a world of servants and masters, serfs, and lords. It is likely that to some extent our cognition has mechanisms in place that are meant to help the serfs, servants, and conquered people survive and breed. The selective pressures on these cognitive mechanisms were likely stronger than the mechanisms meant to assist the cognition of rulers and conquering people (especially considering that throughout history, there have always been far more servants than masters—and a servant messing up is more likely to cull them from the gene pool than a master messing up). Even in present-day situations with strict dominance hierarchies, the only way to gain a position of dominance is through becoming skilled at holding a subservient position (think of military hierarchies, for example). This would further increase the pressure on humans being more cognitively optimized to be servants than masters.

In other words, the mental state a human enters when they are able to accept a position of servitude may be more cognitively optimized and “natural” to the human condition than the power-hungry mental state Western society forces on us. This would also explain why both men and women prefer to be submissive in some surveys of dom/sub kink participants (but not all)—this is something we discuss in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality where we frame it as a question of whether or not humans should be thought of as a “slave race”.

Personal diatribes aside: A relationship in which one individual unconditionally submits themselves to another in every aspect of their existence because they judge the other to be worthy of that submission is not necessarily bad.

Right now, such relationships are relegated to small kink niches such as the Goreans, Taken in Hand, and 24/7 Total Power Exchange.

Partners with Strange Kinks

So your partner is into weird stuff… Like really weird stuff. This must be a sign of psychological damage, right? A giant red flag?

In The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, we conducted a fairly large study, among other things, we checked for a correlation between unusual arousal patterns and abusive behavior. This relationship simply didn’t appear in the data. What turns a person on is for the most part not their choice.

Limiting your partner pool to only those with vanilla sexual interests will significantly limit your options without improving the average quality of your now-more-limited pool of candidates. Filtering out those with strange kinks only makes sense if you have a specific religious motivation for doing so or if a partner insists on living out their strange sexual fantasies with you, and that is not something you want to make a part of your life.

Hurting People in Relationships

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etting good at relationships and keeping a partner happy is like getting good at anything else: We will all fail a lot initially and learn from those failures. Failing in a relationship usually involves hurting someone—even when doing everything right and bending over backward in an attempt to not cause harm.

This does not mean we shouldn’t try to minimize the damage we do while on our sexual and romantic escapades—if not for others’ sake, for our own. Not only may a hurt partner try to retaliate in some way, but most humans who lack the good fortune of being born as psychopaths feel tremendous pain when they realize they have hurt someone. That pain can linger for years, emerging every time something triggers reflection on the incident.

How To Avoid Hurting Relationship Partners

We could write volumes about the various precautions one can take to avoid hurting a long-term partner. Rather than waste precious minutes regurgitating common sense into readers’ mouths like a mother bird, we will share three tips that are considered by our friends to be less obvious.

First, compliment partners when they achieve things they value (e.g., get good grades, break a personal record while exercising, exert emotional control, etc.). Only complimenting a partner on things you value can come off as self-interested and may not create the same emotional reward in them as being complimented for something they value. Relationship satisfaction improves on all sides through consistent and frequent deployment of gestures that improve a partner’s mood. That said, this tactic will not work among those who use a Dominance Lure to secure a partner, as regular compliments and attempts to do nice things for your partner will undermine the lopsided balance of power that makes the relationship appealing to the target.

Second, if emotional investment or attention from a partner is important, request it clearly and directly. To subtly signal needs to a partner is to demand that they always monitor and analyze even the slightest of mood fluctuations. This sets people up to be hurt when they mistakenly assume they are being ignored (when in reality a cue is too subtle to be noticed, or the partner expected to pick up certain signals is too busy with their own problems to notice it one day), Such behavior ultimately leaves one partner hurt and the other confused.

Finally, it is easy to get into a pattern of romantic gestures that ultimately feel routine and hollow. Romantic gestures can sometimes begin to be more a sign of your financial success or leisure time than a celebration of your partner’s dreams. An easy way to remedy this is to note major milestones related to a partner’s goals and reward each milestone that is achieved.

How To Avoid Hurting Sexual Partners

Just as you will inevitably hurt people with whom you have longer-term relationships, it is almost surprisingly easy to hurt someone through a short-term sexual encounter. Let’s review a few ways this can happen and discuss how such damage can be avoided.

If someone comes off as emotionally unstable, especially if they have extreme political, social, or religious views, avoid sex with them no matter how eager they are. Anecdotally, we have observed that these people often have a habit of finding ways to convince themselves that someone else hurt them because victimhood reinforces their understanding of how the world works. In many cases, social, political, and religious extremists can raise their social status within their extremist communities’ dominance hierarchies by claiming that an outsider hurt them. Their convincing themselves that you did something that hurt them can cause almost as much pain as you actually hurting them. Do not give such people ammunition to shoot themselves in the foot.

Assuming that a guy has not indicated that he likes being humiliated, it is best to always pretend that his penis is on the larger side vis a vis those of your past sexual partners—unless this would be an obvious lie. This way, even if he is a bit smaller than average, he can still think he has the largest penis of men with whom you have been intimate (assuming that is believable—otherwise just don’t draw attention to it). Remember that for most guys, sex is as much about validating their own sense of virility as it is about any actual pleasure gained from the encounter. Sexually inexperienced women sometimes try to brag about the large penis size of previous male sexual conquests in an attempt to raise their own perceived value through an association with higher-value men, which will needlessly hurt their present male partners.

On a related note, those not actively trying to humiliate a partner for sexual reasons (some partners clearly request humiliation, explaining it yields sexual gratification) should not comment on any part of a partner’s body being abnormal after they are naked. If someone has taken off their clothes, they have let their guard down. Judgmental comments in this context will not aid a dominance-based sexual strategy. For those attempting to implement a Dominance Lure: Do not “neg” someone after they have consented to sexual interaction—it will cause them to feel unsafe making themselves vulnerable in the future and will not help odds of enjoyable or future sexual encounters.

When using dating websites, ask to connect with targets on another image-heavy social media platform before meeting them in person (especially a platform like Facebook where other people can post and tag photos of this person, which may be more realistic)—this makes it far easier to weed out cases of catfishing. This method is only part of a complete screening investigation, as someone can have many photos of themselves online and still look entirely different (and categorically worse) in person, but it still weeds out a non-trivial percentage of cases.

Not all catfishing happens intentionally. Sometimes people simply think they look best in photos that didn’t show how physically unfortunate they may happen to be. Ultimately cutting a date short after it comes out that one (or both partners) mislead each other about their physical or social realities can really hurt all parties involved, so don’t skimp on diligence, but also plan for a soft landing should, despite doing plenty of preemptive homework, the first date be a bust and require early termination. Meet in a public space and make first dates intentionally short and brief (with room for expansion should all be OK). Propose to meet over evening drinks and not dinner, late morning coffee and not lunch, and at locations close to public transport and other activities rather than remote places that might require a humiliating, long, lonely ride home.

Consensual sex that later comes to be regretted can cause as much emotional pain as some non-consensual sex. While this reality does not fit into the political agendas of some people, it is an apparent fact. Avoid casual sex with colleagues, employees, teammates, and those connected to important friends. High schoolers deciding to date early would be best served by avoiding sexual interaction with classmates entirely, sticking to their age group but focusing on isolated summer camp flings or students attending nearby—but not integrated—schools.

Finally, bear in mind that first-timers need (and by many measures deserve) more attention and caution (and should exercise far more caution themselves when selecting a first sexual partner). Avoid sex with virgins—especially virgin females—should there not be time or interest in investing in at least a few months of casual dating afterward.

Virgin females’ brains react differently to sex than the brains of more experienced females and males. The studies we cited on oxytocin release declining in females after the first partner explain why this happens and how a female will experience an unusually high release of oxytocin with her first partner. Even a totally logical woman who really only wants sex has a high likelihood of developing an emotional attachment to her first sexual partner, especially if said partner makes an effort to make it a good experience for her (which, by the way, requires a bit of research; sleeping with a virgin requires different techniques). Sleeping with and summarily dumping a virgin female could hurt her in a manner that leaves a long-term impact on her life.

Abuse

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buse is one of many topics that society refuses to engage with honestly. What we are allowed to say about abuse (without suffering severe social consequences) is quite limited. For example, we are socially compelled to say that the only acceptable response to abuse is to leave a relationship.

This childish virtue signaling is extremely destructive when it happens on a societal level. The uncomfortable reality is that sometimes it is better to stay in an abusive relationship than it is to leave one. Someone living with an emotionally manipulative partner who threatens to kill their kids should the relationship end—and may just be unstable enough to follow through on that threat—is better off maintaining the relationship and enduring abuse long enough to set up protections for their kids before terminating the toxic relationship.

The platitude stating “the correct answer is always to leave” helps no one but the person saying it, who feels good about the fact that they live in a fair world with easy answers. Sometimes people really do follow through on their threats. Real people really die because virtue-signalers want to feel good about themselves and give these victims thoughtless, politically correct advice. Leaving a highly abusive relationship is risky and a lot of work, especially if the abused partner is financially dependent on the abuser, if the abuser has power in society, and/or if kids are involved.

The world isn’t a kind place. Many abused people look at the dangers of leaving versus staying in an abusive relationship and recognize that each alternative is fraught with danger. Pragmatists accept that sometimes life involves a choice between two bad options with no clear answer.

Optional Thought Experiment: A good case to look into if you want to think deeper on this is Dina Ali Lasloom. What action would you have pressured her to take?

Politically correct, societally condoned views of abuse can leave people trapped in abusive relationships for longer-than-necessary periods of time. If you think you might be in an abusive relationship, but everyone to whom you turn for help insists that you immediately leave your partner, how can you move forward? By reflexively giving victims the same answer without thinking through their unique situation or internalizing the long-term damage the advice may cause victims, many sources of potential help inadvertently train victims to not seek assistance. We learned from one victim of abuse—who stayed in her abusive relationship for years—that many of the women’s shelters to which she turned refused to take in abuse victims unless they promise to leave their abusive partners, (at least this was her personal experience and she blamed the length she stayed in the relationship partially on this). This policy, be it informal or formal, means these victims do not even get the sanctuary needed to think clearly about whether or not it is really worth the risk to leave their partners permanently, which, especially when kids are involved, is often a very real risk.

Talking with victims of abuse when writing this book really helped us better understand just what a tricky and nuanced situation, it can be to find oneself in an abusive relationship. Abuse is not like other relationship pitfalls and not something to which one can offer glib, one-size-fits-all solutions. That said, thinking on this topic and some of the one-size-fits-all answers presented in response to abuse cases inspired us to explore why people are abusive and investigate the prevailing narratives around the topic.

The Control Theory

The belief that abuse is about control—and specifically that people become abusive because they want more control—has attained significant purchase in popular consciousness.

We do not buy this theory at all. So far as we can see, there is just not much statistical evidence to back it up, and this theory around control feels like the kind of just-so story invented by someone attempting to explain a behavior they don’t understand.

We agree that sometimes people are classically abusive with the goal of control, but we see no evidence that control correlates with abusive behavior any more than a myriad of behavioral patterns that correlate with hurting others in the name of self-service.

Classical abuse appears to fall into four broad categories:

  1. Learned/trained behavior patterns
  2. Fetishistic behavior (See The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality)
  3. Self-validation (the individual associates abuse with a character trait they want to embody, such as masculinity or power)
  4. Intentional strategies to prevent a partner from leaving

We will focus on the fourth instigator of abuse, as it dovetails several concepts discussed in this book.

Abuse as a Relationship Strategy

Some adopt abusive behavior as an outright relationship strategy. Unpleasant as it may be to admit this, some forms of proto-abuse and abuse are effective at extracting certain elements of value from a relationship. Some people genuinely do not care whether their partner likes them—or at least they would rather be in a relationship with a partner who hates them than to be in no relationship at all.

Abusive relationship strategies typically fall into one of a few categories. The five core “game plans” common across most intentionally abusive relationships frequently involve:

  1. Attempts to lower an individual’s self-assessed market value
  2. Attempts to lower an individual’s actual market value
  3. Attempts to introduce an externality to a breakup
  4. Attempts to emotionally drain a partner
  5. Attempts to prevent an individual from meeting or interacting with other potential partners

Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Perceived Market Value

A common strategy we have already addressed involves lowering a partner’s perceived aggregate market value. Essentially, the abusive partner will attempt to make you feel as though other people would not want to date you were you to leave this abusive partner, suggesting that you are of lower value than you really are. If your partner ever suggests other people would not want you, be aware that this is not normal behavior: This person is willing to hurt you emotionally—not in order to improve you, but in order to reduce the odds that you will leave them. A partner demonstrating a willingness to hurt you in an attempt to keep you with them is an early and easy sign that much worse things are to come and that your feelings fundamentally do not matter to this person.

Attempts to Lower a Partner’s Actual Market Value

Intentionally abusive partners may also increase the costs associated with leaving them through tactics that actually hurt your market value by ruining your looks, forcing you to quit your career, etc. This strategy can be harder to spot because often these tactics can have more innocent explanations (i.e., you, independently, let your own appearance slide, or you decided to quit your job to become a stay-at-home parent for the best interest of the kids). A good way to catch a partner leveraging this tactic is to look for instances in which your partner has hindered your attempts to quit a bad habit or cast off a vice. Consider an alcoholic trying to quit whose partner keeps asking if they want drinks. Imagine someone trying to lose weight whose partner keeps presenting them with unhealthy dishes. This is not normal behavior in relationships. This behavior is intentionally designed to cripple the victim and is most commonly performed by individuals with incredibly low self-esteem who find comfort in the idea of “bringing their partner down to their level.”

Attempts to Introduce an Externality to a Breakup

It is easy to spot when a partner tries to introduce an externality to the act of leaving them. This means they try to increase the “cost” of leaving them through something, usually a threat. This threat can be self-focused, “I would see no reason to go on living if you left me,” or externally focused, “I will ruin your life/beat you if you leave me.” It is not normal for a person to say: If you leave me, I will do X. Even if X = something flattering, such as “never love another woman again,” this partner is still trying to make any decision to leave them hurt you more. And this is the key to not separating out classical definitions of abuse from proto-abusive behaviors—if we ignore proto-abuse and only focus on “classical abuse” we may not raise the red flags when we hear “I will never love a woman again” that we would over phrases like “I will kill myself if you leave me” even though they are different levels of output of the exact same behavior pattern with the exact same intention, to make leaving them hurt you more.

Attempts to Emotionally Drain a Partner

Draining one’s partner as a strategy is different from the others discussed here. Most abusive behaviors are primarily implemented to prevent a partner from leaving the abuser, while this one can actually just be to help the abuser “get off,” win arguments more often, or in rare instances, just feel powerful.

Attempts to emotionally drain or demoralize a partner typically fall into two categories. The first is just straight up hurting a partner, either physically or emotionally, for the sake of the emotional impact hurting them will have—this one is pretty straightforward, so we won’t wax on it. The second involves getting the victim to begin to question their sanity and the validity of their emotions. The most common technique used here is gaslighting, getting a person to question their own memory by systematically disputing its validity but can extend to other areas that are not as commonly labeled as red flags such as systematic sleep deprivation.

Attempts to Block a Partner from Meeting or Socializing With Others

Attempting to prevent a partner from meeting other potential partners can manifest in many ways. Such attempts may involve either directly exerting editorial control over a partner’s friends removing any that are too attractive or the wrong gender, but may also involve spying on their email, monitoring how they spend money or demanding access to their phone—all with the intention of “catching them” interacting with people “they shouldn’t be with.”

The intent behind this kind of intentional abuse is to either prevent a partner from realizing that there might be other options, prevent a partner from interacting with temptations due to a complete lack of faith in even a basic level of impulse control, or intent to prevent a partner from discovering their partner is not “that great.”

Still, there is a big difference between a partner who says: “I don’t like that a friend keeps giving you meth and therefore if you want to date me, you can’t hang out with them” and saying: “You can’t hang out with a friend because they are too attractive,” or even just a blanket demand that you not spend time alone with the gender you find attractive. Don’t confuse a partner’s attempts to improve your life with a partner’s attempts to prevent you from meeting with perceived competition.

The key takeaway regarding these intentionally abusive strategies is that, while they may be implemented by someone who loves you, they will never be implemented by someone who cares about your personal wellbeing, and that is what makes these behaviors such important tells.

Lying in Relationships

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eople lie in relationships and when dating—a lot. Most partners lie for convenience, to inflate their perceived value in the eyes of a target, or to convince a prospective partner that they are in a different market than they are. Statistics show us that lying differs across genders: Women lie more about their weight, age, and interest in long-term relationships, whereas men lie about their height, income, and interest in casual sex.

Intentional Misrepresentation in Relationships

Almost everyone tries to put forward their best foot early in a relationship. Does it really matter if a prospective partner knows that you had fairly serious cosmetic surgery? Should a prospective partner really be informed that you do not share their religious beliefs? Is now really the right time to tell a target that you used to work as a prostitute? How important is it that a potential partner knows you are already in a polyamorous relationship on a first date? Is it really unethical to not tell a partner that you enjoy masturbating to yourself while crossdressing?

Misrepresentation is totally normal, and a tool used in the following dating strategies:

Misrepresentation Because You Are Primarily Looking For Sex

If both you and your partner are both primarily looking for sex, outside of disclosing sexually transmittable diseases and infections, misrepresentation is the norm and is unlikely to lead to significant negative consequences unless you make an enormous misjudgment about your target’s values. Misrepresentation is less benign if you are looking for sex and your target is looking for a relationship, but given how ineffective this strategy is, it is not terribly relevant, because a person looking primarily for a relationship will take significantly more time, money, and emotional investment when contrasted to someone looking for sex—relationship seekers are not worth the time of a Pragmatist looking primarily for sex.

Misrepresentation of facts presented to short-term sexual partners can yield enormous negative consequences in rare circumstances—specifically, circumstances in which something you think is insignificant is identity-shattering to your target.

Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Tell Your Partner Later

This strategy entails increasing your individual desirability in the eyes of your target by waiting to increase the emotional cost of leaving you before you drop bombs that you expect will negatively affect your desirability. While we would not recommend this strategy for more than a few secrets, it is fairly common and normal. In fact, we encourage anyone who has been with their present partner for less than three months to expect there are at least two significant individual-desirability-modulating personal details that this person is intentionally occluding.

This strategy is only stupid if you wait for a huge individual desirability increaser—like getting married or having children together—before you reveal something that could drastically affect your value in your partner’s eyes. Waiting until after you are married to tell your spouse that you do not want to have kids, or waiting until after you are pregnant to tell a partner that you never really enjoyed sex with them, is beyond idiotic. Such unpleasant reveals decrease each partner’s individual desirability.

When you tell a partner that you deceived them, there is a possibility that their opinion of you will decline significantly. Should that happen, this partner may come to regret ever meeting you. It is possible for both of you to hate each other and still have individual desirability to each other above your differential aggregate desirability and thus have a “good relationship,” but certainly not a good life (this can happen through something like having kids together). We would never encourage someone to build a long-term relationship on false pretenses by withholding potentially damaging personal details for more than a few weeks.

Misrepresentation Because You Plan To Maintain The Lie Indefinitely

While deciding to hide a personally damning detail permanently is less patently stupid than waiting until after you are married or expecting children to reveal whatever it is you are hiding, we would not call this an optimal strategy. While living a lie is not the worst thing in the world (certainly not as bad as Western society likes to pretend), doing so is not something worth opting into without very good reasons, and there are few legitimate justifications for such drastic measures.

The one exception here is anything that makes you non-viable as a partner in your society or any personal detail which would be dangerous for you to disclose. For example, if you get aroused when watching people die, you should probably keep that to yourself (not as uncommon as you would think; see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality for more info on this). Even in this scenario, you are still strictly better off if your partner knows this about you and accepts it.

Misrepresentation of Intended Relationship Lifespan

In this strategy, one partner misleads another to believe that a relationship will last longer than planned. The classic example is the young trophy wife whose husband intends to discard her for a new model as soon as she is no longer physically attractive. This form of misrepresentation is easy to circumvent; simply avoid relationships in which you are of a much higher individual desirability to your partner earlier in your relationship contrasted with later in the relationship. In other words, do not marry someone who primarily values your looks, youth, physical fitness, or fertility unless you have a strong reason to believe they will stay with you once these things inevitably fade.

Unintentional Misrepresentation in Relationships Due to Unanticipated Changes

It is entirely possible to represent yourself as a certain type of partner, absolutely believe you will always be that type of partner, and be completely committed to being that type of partner all your life, only to be hit by unexpected circumstances later in life that completely change you as a person and break the representation you had originally made to a partner.

A person may genuinely be emotionally available during one period of their lives only to, through no fault of their own, experience an extended period of clinical depression after marriage and lose this availability. A person may lose their sex drive as they get older while their partner does not. A person may even have a deep sexual or personal awakening and come out as gay after years of marriage.

Such situations are inconvenient and require a reevaluation of the relationship when they arise. Changes may need to be made to ensure all partners still benefit from the relationship. In some cases, the relationship will need to be dissolved entirely.

Fortunately, it is typically easy to update the (often implied) contracts that define our relationships to ensure that all parties still benefit. For example, a person who loses their sex drive may be willing to consider opening a previously closed marriage to ensure the marriage is still beneficial to their partner. Through these contract renegotiations and adjustments, you may even find yourself in a much better relationship than you would have had otherwise, without any life changes forcing such renegotiation.

Unintentional misrepresentation of your characteristics as a partner is more problematic if unexpected changes are at least partially your fault. If, for example, you decide to stop eating in moderation and exercising after getting married and subsequently become overweight, breaking a representation you had previously made to a partner to always be as attractive and fit as you can be, you should have warned your partner you might not always work hard to maintain your health and appearance. The same goes for those with addictive tendencies they thought they had under control and neglected to mention (e.g., a shopping or gambling addiction), and those who cannot resist sex with an attractive, willing third party outside of the rules of the relationship.

If your misrepresentation in a relationship stems from a failure of self-control, you should have warned your partner that you had reason to expect future changes related to this lack of impulse control. People fail at self-control all the time. Most overweight people do not want to be overweight, and very few smokers want to be smokers. Those who succumb to suboptimal temptations are largely at the mercy of their partners and how they decide to react to this failure.

While “semi-unintentional” situations are still potentially remediable through contract renegotiation, they build significantly more resentment than totally unintentional changes. This is because they demonstrate to your partner your willingness to act in bad faith, something they now have to expect during contract renegotiation. In these circumstances, it is also extremely common for the partner who lost self-control to take a pre-emptive offensive stance to avoid having to address their personal failure. This will lead to them being unfairly aggressive in contract negotiations, pushing for a contract even more in their favor than it had been before, and attacking their partner with perceived slights to remove personal accountability for their failure.

The most optimal resolution to such situations involves the offending partner accepting complete responsibility for their offense. Any relationship that survives a negative change without the offending party taking responsibility for their failure is likely to become a miserable affair.

Defense Against Misrepresentation

As a social species, we are designed to detect lying. You will therefore likely catch most liars through small social tells. Still, it helps to know what you have in your “anti-deception” arsenal.

You may circumvent most lying entirely by teaching your partners that they do not need to lie to you. If a partner has decided to lie about looking for a long-term relationship instead of just sex, they are more likely to drop the charade if they believe you would be just as happy with either scenario. Should you exercise emotional control and do not blow up (either with anger or sadness) when a partner fesses up to mistakes and personal shortcomings, you will not train them to withhold such confessions out of fear there will be an emotional explosion. Obviously, this is easier said than done; even if you are able to completely control your emotional reactions, you will still likely want to demonstrate to your partners that bad behavior yields consequences. Even if you don’t explode at a partner for going on an un-sanctioned spending spree, you will still have to lock their card, return what can be returned, and have them walk through with you how they will prevent this from happening again, and alas, these consequences which give them a reason to lie about such actions.

You may also compromise your partner’s cognition. Lying is much harder to maintain in a compromised condition. The human default is to tell the truth; lying requires suppressing that instinct then performing the cognitively taxing task of coming up with a believable story in its place. Anything that exhausts inhibition is going to make someone less likely to lie and lie more sloppily.

Lies can also be detected through contradictions in a partner’s narratives. If, for example, you suspect your partner does not actually want a long-term relationship despite having expressed such desires, ask them questions about where they see themselves in ten years. Doing so will create a situation in which they find it difficult to model a fictional set of desires based on a proposed path (the long-term relationship) that they never intended to walk down. They may either visibly mentally stumble or describe their actual intended future, which has nothing to do with you.

By getting your partner to make decisions that are costly if they are lying, you may also detect lies. An example of this might be asking someone who says they plan to stay with you forever to marry you. Such a decision bears little cost if they are telling the truth and a high cost if they are not. That said, this tactic often backfires: Consider all the people out there who have the names of their ex-partners tattooed on their bodies.

Should you have access to them, you might also interview a partner’s exes. We frankly do not understand why this practice is not more common. This is an entirely logical way to determine how a person will act in a relationship. Besides, the practice is common in the professional world, in which prospective employers ask for references all the time so they might evaluate the potential value of relationships with far lower stakes. If someone has mostly negative relationships with their previous partners, you can safely assume there is something wrong with them—even if they will not admit it to themselves. If reading this makes you defensive, if it leads you to think: “It’s not my fault all my exes hate me!” then please try to picture the most incredulous-looking face your imagination can conjure—that is the face you should imagine us giving you right now.

Attachment Styles

H

umans have a strong impulse to sort themselves and others into categories. The world just feels more “right” when people fall into neat little boxes. This is likely because social class played a much bigger role in early societies than it does today. If you were a butcher from a family of butchers, that particular classification and status impacted not only the relations you were expected to have with other types of people, but also the personality you were meant to exhibit. By meeting societal expectations for “your kind,” you could increase your group’s support of you. Thus, humans have a natural inclination to both want to determine their “type” and the expectations of behavior patterns from that “type.”

There is presently a discrepancy between what may be an inbred desire to see the world through a group and class-based lens, and our current society in which there are stigmas against sorting people into groups and classes, be they be based on race, wealth, education, religion, occupation, or social class. These stigmas, combined with our vestigial longing to belong in clear groups with “natural” positions in the world, have given birth to a myriad of products and services that sell us stories about who we are and where we belong.

Clever entrepreneurs have invented totally new arbitrary categories into which their voracious customers may be comfortably nestled. We can find our places in the world by consulting astrologers, discussing our blood types (common in Asia), taking out an online quiz to find out what [Insert Show/Movie/Book/Whatever] character we are, or finding our Myers Briggs profiles.

The world of relationship psychology has even come up with its own special set of categories called “attachment styles,” which it lifted from early childhood research. This fact gives it the added bonus of being one of the many concepts in pop psychology that allows you to take no responsibility for your own failings and blame your parents.

Obviously if you give someone a quiz to test their attachment style, you will find that it correlates to certain behaviors, but the suggestion that someone who answers that they feel very protective of their partner will show higher mate-guarding behavior is hardly revolutionary. The attachment style school of thought also serves the underwhelming finding that certain behaviors cluster—that someone who is a bit of an inconsiderate jerk in one category is likely to be an inconsiderate jerk in others as well. We are especially amused that many assume their reported attachment style grants them permission to deflect their own failures of character onto their parents (though we can see why such claims make a concept more convenient to market).

Despite our obvious disdain toward this way of categorizing people, the popularity of attachment theory necessitates some discussion in this book. Basically, attachment theory divides people into four categories based on self-esteem (thoughts about self) and sociability (thoughts about others): Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant, and Fearful-Avoidant.

Secure

Those with a secure attachment style have high self-esteem and high sociability and hence are comfortable with both intimacy and independence. They agree with statements like: “It is relatively easy for me to become emotionally close to others,” “I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me,” and “I don’t worry about being alone or others not accepting me.”

Basically, those with “secure” attachment styles are normal, healthy adults—the type of people anyone could choose to be. Alas, because bad behavior is normalized through frameworks like this (which do not even hold true cross-culturally), we have to deal with the three other types of people.

Anxious-Preoccupied

Those with anxious-preoccupied attachment styles have poor self-esteem and positive sociality. They agree with statements like: “I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like,” and “I am uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don’t value me as much as I value them.”

Basically, these are people who try to secure emotional validation from their partners, and instead of just attempting a new strategy when that fails, they keep attempting the same strategy with higher levels of desperation. Look, if you are going to use your partner as a field from which to harvest validation, intentionally build your relationship with that goal in mind and clearly communicate the importance of your validation needs to your partner.

Dismissive-Avoidant

Those with dismissive-avoidant attachment styles have positive self-esteem and negative sociability. They identify with statements such as: “I am comfortable without close emotional relationships,” “It is important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient,” and “I prefer not to depend on others or have others depend on me.”

Basically, this category exists so people trying to sell this model can still market their services to people who are happy not being in relationships—because clearly those people are broken. We love how the literature on this group often notes how defensive they act in the face of the relationship psychologists who built the model and were apparently mentally unable to accept that someone could be happy and fulfilled without a relationship. People in this category also tend to be better at controlling their emotional states because they rely less than any other attachment style on other people for validation, but don’t worry: People trying to sell this model have found a way to spin this as a bad thing.

Fearful-Avoidant

These are people with both low self-esteem and low socialization. They agree with statements like, “I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to trust others completely, or to depend on them” and “I sometimes worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to other people.”

Like the anxious-preoccupied group, these guys are desperate for validation and have a low opinion of themselves. Unlike the anxious-preoccupied group, they accept that they won’t get the validation they crave easily through relationships with others and that relationships with others might not be worth the effort or emotional risk. Of course, this is not seen as a sign of emotional intelligence and maturity, as a sane person would see it, but of trauma and abuse within this model.

A More Effective Way to Approach Attachment Styles

Instead of leaning on classifications, we recommend focusing on what, specifically, you need and how you will ensure that need is satisfied. If you think that you need more validation, spend less time classifying yourself and more time putting together a sound strategy for receiving that validation you so sorely need.

There are all sorts of ways to achieve emotional validation—many of which do not require other people. Humans appear to be born with different sensitivities to the validation others grant. One person may receive far more emotional output from the same validating statement than another, and this variance in response need not necessarily be the result of childhood trauma.

If feeling validated and achieving emotional actualization is important to you, focus on easy-to-secure sources of validation that yield a large and lasting emotional impact. Organize your life and relationships in such a way that you receive validating stimuli regularly. Identify a vein of emotional validation, then harvest that source as sustainably as possible. Of course, you could also decide that luxuriating in another person’s validation is just a subjective state of mind and that this state of mind may not be that important in the grand scheme of things. Ironically, accepting the latter significantly lowers most non-clinical anxiety—sadly, it also involves accepting that what other people think of you genuinely doesn’t matter, which is both difficult and objectively not always true.

There is one small useful piece of relationship strategy that can be gleaned from the attachment model: If your partner is relying on interactions with you as a source of personal validation, grant them the validation they so desperately desire when they come to you looking to harvest that resource. Why? If you are not forthcoming with validation when partners request it, one of two things will happen: Your validation-craving partner will find another source of validation to harvest (likely ending in their cheating on you and/or breaking up with you), or their mental condition will deteriorate, making them less effective as a partner, and generally annoying.

Conversely, if you rely on your partner for validation when you are otherwise emotionally compromised, take measures to ensure that (1) your partner knows this is part of the role they are signing up for in the relationship, (2) you clearly signal to your partner when you need validation (no subtle bids for attention), and (3) you have mutually recognized and perfected interactions that will provide you with this validation. For example, you may feel a very consistent flush of happiness when a partner compliments you on your cooking. If this is the case, communicate to your partner that those compliments are important to you, make a point of cooking some meals your partner can enjoy, and make a point of improving your culinary skills.

Keep in mind that building controls to ensure consistent delivery of desired validation among partners is not the only solution for dealing with anxiety or a desire for validation. This is merely the only solution that attachment theory recognizes. When one of us (Simone or Malcolm) is feeling like we need validation or are anxious, instead of seeking validation from the other, we articulate this illogical desire while noting its lack of utility and request help being talked down from our emotional state, having our anxiety put in context by a more sober mind, and being reminded how the person we want to be would react (with grace, dignity, and calm) to the same environmental stimuli.

Because we are emotionally attached to each other, our gut desire is not to highlight the illogical nature of certain feelings and divert attention from indulging in them. Like most humans, we feel an innate desire to comfort someone when they express vulnerability. That said, we understand that taking the emotionally indulgent path is not in anyone’s long-term best interest. By not rewarding pleas for validation and moments of anxiety, we can actually decrease instances of both overall.

With practice on both sides, you and your partner can arrive at a place where you understand that emotional indulgence is not in anyone’s long-term best interest. By not rewarding pleas for validation and moments of anxiety—and instead showing support for each other by bringing focus back to your values and logical solutions—you can actually decrease hunger for validation and waves of anxiety overall.

Bear in mind this approach does not involve partners emotionally shutting each other down and preventing each other from expressing vulnerability. Quite to the contrary, this approach requires greater vulnerability and emotional honesty than any attachment-theory-based solution. It takes a huge amount of intimacy, love, and trust for partners to not only acknowledge each other’s anxieties and discomforts (and their own), but also help them ride those emotional waves in a manner that serves their personal values and logical long-term best interests.

We have said it before and will say it again: Behavioral research makes it clear that indulging in an emotional state (e.g., punching a punching bag to “let out” anger) usually heightens that emotional state, increases the expression of that state in the future, and makes it more difficult to control. This is well backed in the literature. While suppressing emotional states compromises an individual’s cognition in the short term (like suppressing any idea does), doing so decreases expression of that emotion overall. If it were true that suppressing/redirecting an emotional impulse made it stronger, then counting to ten when you are angry would make you much angrier and yet we all anecdotally know of the “count to ten” method as an effective tool for lowering a negative emotional output. When you encourage negative emotions and indulge in them, you train yourself to express those emotions more (in adults at least; this is not quite as clear cut in children).

Beware that suppressing the outward expression of an emotion is different from successfully choosing not to indulge in an emotion. Merely suppressing the outward expression of an emotion can cause a physiological stress response, which may be damaging over time, as has been found in longitudinal studies of professions where this is a common requirement (such as elementary school teachers who must often mask their anger with a smile). In general, there is a large body of research around this—don’t suppress the expression of an emotion, learn to suppress the experience of it. If you need help with your emotions, read the third chapter of our first book, The Pragmatists Guide to Life, which focuses on this topic.

Wait . . .

Hey, reader, what are you doing here? Did you actually read the whole appendix? The book was not supposed to be read that way . . . what a slog that must have been.

If you are indeed a true completionist and you’d like to make our day, please drop us a review on Amazon and Goodreads. We do not take money from these and are motivated by the validation those reviews provide us.

[[1]](#_ftnref1) Reminder: TradCon stands for a “traditional conservative” and is a style of relationship that apes the model common in a few Western countries from the short period between the 1900s to 1970s, during which households were made up of a tiny nuclear family, consisting of a single breadwinner and a single individual who raised children and kept the home. We do not use the full term “traditional conservative” as these relationships are neither traditional nor conservative, but rather a radical and failed social experiment enabled by a period of extreme affluence. This is not to say there are no benefits to the model as it has been reimagined by the 21st century TradCon movement, though it certainly has its flaws.

[[2]](#_ftnref2) With regard to cheating stats: We had trouble pinning down actual numbers, as they differ so much between studies. Some studies showed cheating rates in men being as high as 50%. The one thing that is consistent is that men cheat more often than women in almost every circumstance, except in one study that found married women in their twenties cheating more than men, likely due to their aggregate desirability on the market being astronomically high.

[[3]](#_ftnref3) We suspect a key factor in new relationship energy involves not yet having a complete picture of the person inducing it or how they think about you. These two mysteries dissolve in longer-term relationships. This would explain why new relationship energy seems to last longer in long-distance relationships and cyber relationships.

[[4]](#_ftnref4) About a quarter of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality is dedicated to using historic data, comparative physiology, genetic data, and kinks (otherwise unexplainable desires like getting aroused by seeing someone transform or being immobilized that cannot be accounted for by socialization, but which vestigially appear in large chunks of the population cross culturally and thus were likely selected for in our ancestors) to attempt to ferret out a clear picture of early human social structures, mating displays, and marriage types.

[[5]](#_ftnref5) Again, this discussed in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but we also heartily recommend referring to a 2009 study titled: The puzzle of monogamous marriage.

[[6]](#_ftnref6) Malcolm voted to remove this discussion, referring to it as sexist, reductionist, and probably wrong, but was overruled by me (Simone). Fully correct or not, the dynamic presented holds a kernel of truth that may help people to consider some elements of dating in a new light.

[[7]](#_ftnref7) For more info on this see Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

[[8]](#_ftnref8) We took a deeper dive because we found this data so shocking and wanted to make sure we were not misreading it: On average Black women responded to 34.1% of messages sent to them—but only to 28% of messages from Black men. In contrast, Black men responded to 46.9% of messages sent to them while responding to only 37% of messages from Black females. Black women responded to Black men more than any other ethnicity did, while Indian, Middle Eastern, and Native American men responded to Black females as much or more than Black men did.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality

What Turns People On, Why, and What That Tells Us About Our Species

By Simone & Malcolm Collins

http://Pragmatist.Guide

Copyright © 2020

Simone & Malcolm Collins

All rights reserved.

As with our last book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, you may request a free audio version of this book by visiting our website: Pragmatist.Guide/SexualityAudio

And as with all books written by The Pragmatist Foundation, the proceeds from this book will go to non-profits.

Contents

An Introduction to Sexuality 1

Society’s Corrupted Framework for Human Arousal 2

The Minnesota Popper 13

Dispelling Common Sexual Myths and Misconceptions 14

Myth: Internet Porn Inspires Strange Kinks 16

Myth: Godless Societies Foster “Deviant” Sexual Interests 20

Myth: Irregular Arousal Patterns Are a Product of Poor Parenting 21

Myth: Humans Get Aroused by Random Things 22

About the Ideological Perspective that Informs this Book 23

Citations and Research Presentation 29

A Supplementary Tour of Our Own Research 31

The Basics of Sexuality: Attraction & Aversion 32

Developmental Distance 38

Songbirds & Boobies 41

Responsive vs. Spontaneous Desire 46

Inhibitory Systems & Libido 48

How Do People Develop Varying Levels of Attraction and Aversion to Stimuli? 51

The Human Mating Season 54

Writing on Eggshells—Human Sexual Dimorphism 55

Things that Cause Arousal 68

Breeding Targets 70

Why Do Gay People Exist? 76

The Fallacy of a Gay-Straight Spectrum 80

Sexual Aversion, Looking Under the Hood 88

Categorization and Volume Systems 91

The Nature of Asexuality 94

Supernormal Stimuli, Group Sex, and Gender 97

The Nuanced Female Detection System 98

Genital Size 99

What’s up with Foot Kinks? 100

Inverse Systems 102

Zoophiles 109

Emotional States & Concepts / Dominance & Submission 112

Dominance in Self vs. Others 124

The Non-Sexual World of BDSM 124

One Way We Could Be Wrong 126

Transformation 128

Signs That our Framework May Be Wrong 130

Emotional Connections to People 133

Sex Without Emotional Attachment 138

Laughter & Attraction 139

Why Do Humans Laugh? 141

The Westermarck Effect & Sex with Siblings 145

Roleplaying Relatives 147

The Common Practice of Marrying Cousins 148

Tropes 150

Novelty 151

Pain & Asphyxiation 155

Warning: Choking Hazard 161

Basic Instincts 163

Physical Stimuli 164

Conditioned Responses 165

Things That Do NOT Cause Arousal 171

Socialization 171

Parental Screw-Ups 179

The Myth of The Childhood Abuse Cycle 181

Social Taboos and Rule Breaking 183

The Impact of Gender Differences on Human Sexuality 186

Inconvenient Things that Arouse Females 186

Inconvenient Things that Arouse Males 192

Suppressing Inconvenient Arousal Patterns 195

Female vs. Male Erotic Material Preferences 196

Do Men Really Have Higher Sex Drives? 199

Ovulatory Shift Hypothesis 202

Using Sexuality As A Looking Glass Into Our History 205

The Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology and Worshipping Past Cultures 205

Using Kinks to Find Clues Into Early Human Cultures 208

Were Early Humans Monogamous? 209

Gender Relations of Early Humans 220

Chad & The Myth of the Alpha Male 227

Early Human Warfare 229

Smashing Babies on Rocks 232

Female Promiscuity 234

Why Men are Aroused by Dominance 238

Polymorphism 241

Bonobos 243

The Slave Race? 247

Human Sexuality’s Advanced Settings 254

Olfactory Cues in Arousal and Pair Bonding 255

Gender Displays 258

Is Being Trans More Common Than We Think? 269

The Mating Party Impulse Hypothesis 277

The Effect of Attractiveness on Moral Judgments 278

The Role of Validation in Human Sexuality 279

How Kinks Express Themselves 284

The Omegaverse as an Erotic Genre 289

Sex, Masturbation, Orgasms, & the Brain 295

The Effects of Sex on the Brain 295

The Effects of Intelligence on Sex 298

Masturbation 299

Female Orgasms 314

The Mechanics of Love 316

Love for Our Children 326

Love for Our Social Groups 331

Love for Romantic Partners and Concepts 334

Do All Three Love Systems Really Yield the Same Emotion? 343

Behaviors Motivated by Love 345

You Don’t Love a Person 352

The Genetics of Love 353

Leveraging Arousal for Fun & Profit 354

Strip Mining Positive Emotional States 354

Using Sexual Arousal, Sexual Aversion, & Love to Increase Efficiency 360

Sexuality & Morality 365

Conclusion: Relationships, Sex, & Society 368

Slut Shaming & Impossible Double Standards 377

The Future of Sex & Relationships 388

A Theoretical Solution 398

Thanks for Reading 402

Supplement: A Tour of Our Research Findings 404

The Hall of Arousing Art: An Exploration of Sexual Fantasies 408

Erotic Material Exhibits 409

Arousing Dioramas 414

Wealth & Sophistication 422

Popular Pairings 424

Plump Proclivities 427

Random Kinks 427

Non-Human Participants 429

Forbidden Sexual Partners 432

BDSM Scenes 434

Baby Making 438

From Housewives to Crying 440

Grab Bag of Kinks 442

Should I Be Scared? 446

Interpersonal Dynamics 451

Japanese Imports 452

Arousing Practices 455

Trans Erotic Art 457

Roleplay & Fantasy Scenarios 458

The Wonderland of Sex: An Exploration of Sexuality in Practice 460

BDSM Land 461

Hurtsville 466

Danger Drive 467

Character Court 469

Tooth & Nail Avenue 470

Mount Ass 471

Crazy Country: The Land of Love, Jealousy, Sex, & Lust 472

Love: More Common Than You Would Think 472

Jealousy: Not Such a Big Deal 473

Sex & Lust: Overrated? 474

The Magical Forest of Turn Ons and Turn Offs 477

Rape 483

Slave Meadow 486

Cuck Creek 487

Incest Point 487

Olfactory Valley 488

Mammary Mountain and Phallus Peak 490

BDSM Tribal Lands 499

The Bondage Hut 502

The Pain Market 503

Correlates to Arousal Patterns 505

Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence 507

Bucolic Childhoods & Their Surprisingly Violent Connections 512

Strict Fathers 516

Diversity Land 518

The Colosseum of Sexual Influence & Big Four Show 520

The Political Promenade 530

The High-Net-Worth Extravaganza 540

The Sexy Beauty Pageant 547

The Dog and Cat Show 554

What the Hell Did I Just Watch? 563

Why Do People Participate in BDSM? 566

Remembering the Journey: A Recap 572

An Introduction to Sexuality

When putting together The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, we decided to include a short chapter on arousal—what turns people on. That single chapter eventually became longer than all of the other chapters in the book combined. As we explored the available research and data on arousal systems, it became clear to us that the data does not match the social schemas into which researchers are cramming their findings. Study after study seems to be shoving a square peg into a round hole. To really make sense of how humans process sexual stimuli, we had to distance ourselves from common social conventions explaining how human sexuality works and rethink arousal pathways from the ground up.

To that end, we put together this book. It features data-driven theories on how human sexuality actually appears to operate while avoiding ideologically driven research and lines of thought. We reached out to around a hundred professional sex therapists to sanity check our findings and either added notes when their experiences conflicted with our theories or updated our theories to incorporate additional information they presented.[[1]](#_ftn1)

Society’s Corrupted Framework for Human Arousal

Many inaccurate assumptions regarding human arousal stem from an idea that is now deeply ingrained in the Western consciousness: The concept that, to some extent, a person’s arousal patterns reveal something about their personal identity—who they are deep inside.

It is no mystery how this concept came to be. Individuals with non-socially condoned arousal patterns found themselves oppressed. In response to this oppression, these people found solidarity in each other’s company, forming communities around shared life experiences of oppression. Through ostracization, unique cultures began to evolve within these communities.

This type of cultural drift is common within any ostracized or oppressed that manages to congregate in private.[[2]](#_ftn2) Through involvement in these unique cultures, people began to identify their arousal patterns with their cultural identity and that cultural identity with their personal identities—leading to the unfortunate societal shorthand in which an arousal pattern is seen as a major part of a person’s identity.

The largest and most influential of the communities referenced here is the lesbian/gay/bi community[[3]](#_ftn3), however a similar phenomenon has occurred within a number of groups (such as the BDSM community)[[4]](#_ftn4). Essentially, these communities were ostracized long enough that they formed distinct cultural norms, which allowed individuals to associate their sexuality with a cultural identity. By proxy, society then began to associate sexuality in general with personal identity.

This is all fine and good when a guy who is aroused only by male characteristics fits into the category of “gay” and feels socially compelled to make gay community affiliation part of his identity, thereby gaining a feeling of acceptance in an otherwise hostile world. But what about a woman who is so physiologically aroused during her own rape that she orgasms? As it happens, this is a fairly common occurrence, with 4% to 5% of reported rape cases citing it, and with estimations of the actual frequency of physiological arousal during rape being even higher (to put that 4% to 5% in perspective: A Gallup poll in 2007 suggested that 4.5% of Americans identified as gay). It is also not unheard of for a woman who has been raped to find herself mentally aroused when reflecting on the experience. Do these occurrences mean the rape someone experienced was any less traumatic and awful? Of course not. Do women who orgasm when being raped—or who become aroused while reflecting on the experience—need to incorporate that aspect of their arousal pathways into their identities? Of course not.

**Pragmatically speaking, the fact that something arouses a person neither indicates that they want that thing to happen nor necessitates that they must ideologically approve of it.** Some people choose to incorporate their arousal pathways into the way they conceptualize their identity and that personal choice is often something to be lauded. Nevertheless, we run into problems when we treat it as a cultural mandate that a person’s sexuality must indicate something about their identity.

Denying a person’s sexual identity can lead to depression and even suicide, however flippantly mandating a person’s sexual identity based on their arousal patterns can trigger the same outcomes.

The cascade of problems caused by people conflating arousal patterns with personal identities does not end with the suffering of those pressured to accept identities they do not feel fit them. Any exploration of human arousal patterns that grants special treatment to specific patterns of arousal just because large oppressed communities exist around them is bound to create a lens that distorts the underlying mechanisms driving human arousal.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people’s arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns.

The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum.

Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups).

Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.”

This apparent blind spot in our understanding of human sexuality stems from a phenomenon pervasive in the scientific world. Concepts are developed from a male perspective because, historically speaking, most researchers and individuals in positions of authority have been male. The very concept that attraction to a particular gender must make up the core of a person’s sexuality may have emerged because sexuality has (historically) been almost exclusively researched through a male lens. Had our concepts of sexuality been developed in a female-dominated society, our data shows it is not wild to think that sexuality would be viewed from the perspective of a preference for dominant versus submissive partners and not gender preference in partners (in such a world, there is a chance that gender preference would be as much of an afterthought as preferences for dominance or certain hair colors are today).

The relative importance of our sexuality to our identity is largely a social construct. Had we been born in different timelines, we may see entirely different aspects of our arousal pathways as important while contextualizing aspects that seem critical to our identities today as relatively banal. If society had a long history of killing, driving to suicide, and otherwise ostracizing submissive people instead of gay people, it is not wild to think the way we contextualized the relative importance of these two pathways to our self-identities would be wildly different. How our sexuality influences our identity is a product of our society and life experiences, not our arousal pathways themselves. Forgetting this leads us to ask the wrong questions when investigating the inner workings of our arousal pathways by placing undue weight on the pathways that have the most salience in our current societies. To have a sober discussion of the underlying arousal patterns affecting almost every aspect of the human condition, we must discuss them in a manner that is totally divorced from their impact on our identities.

A helpful analogy:

A different light source would yield a different pattern, but the same can be said about the stained glass. To study a light source by only asking about the pattern it creates on a wall would yield a suboptimal understanding of the light source.

That our sexual identity—and the impact that identity has on us—is shaped by our culture and beliefs is not conjecture but rather a measurable phenomenon. Those who grow up believing masturbation is a normal and unremarkable drive to have experience few measurable negative effects from engaging in the practice and rarely contextualize it as reflecting on their identity. Essentially, when your culture frames masturbation as unremarkable, you will not think of a desire to masturbate as a notable character trait.

In contrast, masturbation practiced by those who are raised to believe masturbation is deviant or representative of a lack of self-control has major negative effects on mental health (including increased irritability, anxiety, depression, and anger), causes frequent rumination, and works its way into personal identity (as measured by people who believe they have debilitating porn addictions and/or see their masturbation as a major source of shame). We address the relevant research in this book’s exploration of masturbation—suffice to say that the manner in which a person answers the question: “Is being a masturbator a major part of who you are?” tells us more about their culture and beliefs about the world than their underlying desire to masturbate.

This phenomenon isn’t relegated to negative cultural norms. For example, if a society glorifies stereotypically masculine hetero males and a person’s natural proclivities align with this identity, they are likely to incorporate it into their sexual identity.

The more a society regards underlying proclivities related to romantic attachment and arousal as notable, the more likely a person will be to incorporate those proclivities into their sexual identities. How sexual identities affect those who adopt them is dependent on whether society and/or the people themselves contextualize them as positive, negative, or neutral in nature. Alternatively, if society sees a pattern of sexual or romantic proclivities as unremarkable, people are unlikely to incorporate that pattern into their sexual identities.

Long story short: A person’s sexual identity is a product of how that person’s underlying arousal and romantic proclivities have impacted their lives and self-perceptions. As such, sexual identity is totally dependent on an individual’s culture and beliefs and thus outside the scope of this book, which seeks to explore our more immutable arousal and romantic impulses.

The idea that our sexuality reveals some truth about the way we are supposed to act was picked up by individuals with other agendas and has clouded public and academic understandings of sexuality even further. For example, people somehow got it into their heads that if they could prove that early humans were polyamorous or monogamous, they could prove that such human pairings were the ideal and “correct” way for us to live today because it would be our “natural state.” In this book, we will review evidence that early humans practiced infanticide and that we still have some deeply ingrained genetic tendencies tied to that practice. Does that mean we should bring back the tradition of a good-old-fashioned baby stomp? Of course not. This idea that our “natural state” is a societal mandate is absurd.

A Pragmatic approach to arousal patterns requires that we shed all the aforementioned preconceptions.

There is not much evidence to indicate that people have significant influence over what arouses them. The only thing over which people have a choice is how they feed or deny the arousal pathways they experience. Even while an individual’s arousal patterns say nothing about them as a person, humanity’s patterns of arousal, in general, may grant us insight into the conditions under which our species developed.

To understand what arouses someone is to merely understand which stimuli will create a positive sexual feeling in that person’s brain (as well as what stimuli will disgust them—but more on that later). On a less granular scale, to understand stimuli that arouse most humans is to understand (1) how our brains work and (2) the conditions and social structures of our early ancestors. These are the elements of sexuality that this book explores.

| | | | --- | --- | | | This is a book on sexuality. We will not spend much time addressing gender identity outside of subjects in which factors like hormone treatments affect arousal patterns. We understand that that gender identity often gets conflated with sexuality, but a person of any gender identity can have any sexuality. Even when we stray from sexuality, our tangents will either explore the implications of sexual arousal patterns or focus on other basal impulses associated with mate acquisition (such as the “love system”). |

The Minnesota Popper

In 2009, a man in Minnesota was caught breaking into buildings and slashing the large fitness balls used in workouts . . . again. He was first caught in the act in 2005, when he went on a spree slashing 72 fitness balls in three different incidents after breaking into personal fitness centers. When questioned, he said he did this at the behest of a strong sexual urge.

The natural reaction to reading this is to dismiss the guy as a creep and give the topic no further thought. Fortunately, we are weirdos. When we stumble across a human acting in a way we don’t understand, we see an irresistible puzzle. Every piece of bizarre online pornography, impossibly strange, sexualized fanfiction, and story tied to a weird kink presents another Gordian knot of the human condition. How did systems that evolved to get us to breed lead to this? These are not random systems; there is some method behind the madness. When human arousal pathways fire in unusual patterns, they often fire in the same unusual patterns—patterns that are certainly not explained by the lazy hand wave that claims all taboo things are arousing (a persistent myth).

If we do our job well, by the time you are finished reading this book, you will never be confused by a weird kink again. Even behaviors as bizarre as those exhibited by the Minnesota Popper will strike you as fascinating case studies, full of valuable insights into the inner workings of the human psyche, rather than just bizarre tales of weird pervs.

Dispelling Common Sexual Myths and Misconceptions

If you are sitting there, smugly telling yourself that nothing weird arouses you and that you are just here to figure out what is wrong with the “deviants” of the world, we have some bad news: The surveys we ran when putting this book together suggest that you, dear reader, are in fact the strange one. Apparently, the vast majority of humans find wacky, seemingly random (or at least non-socially condoned) things to be arousing. Our research survey, the data of which actually skewed conservative vis a vis most peer-reviewed research on the same subject, suggests the average person finds 22 weird things arousing: 23.1 for men; 20.8 for women. The average person doesn’t just have “a kink,” but rather a menagerie of turn ons many would consider to be risqué.[[5]](#_ftn5) (See the supplement for more information on these results on page 404.)

If, in the course of reading this book, you find something to be X-phobic or shaming toward Y-kink, you clearly misunderstand our intention. In constructing this book, we perused humanity’s proverbial internet search history. You all are a bunch of ghoulish pelicans. Being human is something that merits at least some shame. The fact that we are burdened with stinky, sticky, goo-producing genitals is punishment enough—and yet some of us slam them together . . . and even put our mouths on them. What is wrong with our wretched species???

If humans were not collectively brainwashed by our neurology to find the prospect of recreationally sticking penises into vaginas while making silly faces and noises to be arousing, we would find the whole process just as absurd as any so-called “kink.” Finding penis-in-vagina sex to be arousing doesn’t make a person any less ridiculous just because our society has categorized the act as “vanilla.”

If we must live in this fallen state, we might as well make an effort to understand its nuances instead of attempting to evade them. One cannot simply slice through the Gordian knot that is human sexuality with one blow. We don’t want our readers walking away because they think all sexual mysteries can be easily explained, so let’s start by exploring a few common explanations for why weird things are sometimes arousing.

Myth: Internet Porn Inspires Strange Kinks

Unusual arousal patterns are categorically not caused by internet porn. We know of such patterns existing well before internet porn. Consider this excerpt from a letter James Joyce wrote to his girlfriend in 1904:

I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fk I gave you your shameless tongue come bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fk than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fk a farting woman when every f*k drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.*

…

F*k me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy, either straddling across my legs when I am sitting in a chair and riding me up and down with the frills of your drawers showing and my cock sticking up stiff in your cunt or riding me over the back of the sofa.*

…

Fk me on the stairs in the dark, like a nursery-maid fking her soldier, unbuttoning his trousers gently and slipping her hand into his fly and fiddling with his shirt and feeling it getting wet and then pulling it gently up and fiddling with his two bursting balls and at last pulling out boldly the mickey she loves to handle and frigging it for him softly, murmuring into his ear dirty words and dirty stories that other girls told her and dirty things she said, and all the time pissing her drawers with pleasure and letting off soft warm quiet little farts behind until her own girlish cockey is as stiff as his and suddenly sticking him up in her and riding him.

There you have it: James Joyce, the author of Ulysses and a man considered one of the greatest authors in human history, was aroused by farts, overweight women, sweat, roleplay, and anal—plus, in his letters, his pet name for his girlfriend is “fartling,” which we find to be the most delightful pet name ever.

Honest discussions about human sexuality throughout history, ranging from My Secret Life (an anonymous sex life memoir written in 1888) to the writings of the Marquis de Sade (who lived from 1740-1840), show a similar pattern. Humans have always been kinky.

What is really interesting is that the kinks these historic sources mention are still seen in online pornography today—be it in the form of fart porn or sadistic gore. Heck, even porn of cartoon characters has been distributed since the very first cartoons of the 1920s in Tillie-and-Mac books (for more on this, see: “Emotional Connections to People” on page). We have yet to find a set of “historic kinks” that are not still seen in our modern population. This is really cool, as it suggests that the unusual arousal patterns we see in some portion of the current population are not a result of contemporary culture and that weird online pornography exists to fulfill an innate, enduring arousal pattern experienced by a portion of the population.

There is a surprising amount of data to back up the assertion that unusual arousal patterns are not caused by porn; we will explore the research in greater detail in the book’s chapter on masturbation. It suffices to say individuals who consume large amounts of weird internet porn do not show lower arousal rates (vis a vis the general population) when engaging with more “vanilla” porn—despite persistent myths to the contrary. The data indicates that when someone develops an obsession with weird internet pornography, it is more likely that they found a set of stimuli that more perfectly fits a preexisting arousal pattern, like a key in a lock. Arousal from unusual types of pornography does not increase dramatically with use and it does not diminish arousal from other sources; it just activates the same pathways more acutely as it is a more perfect arousal trigger for some.

Weird internet porn is not the cause of unusual arousal patterns, but rather a symptom of weird arousal patterns engaging in an anonymous environment.

Myth: Godless Societies Foster “Deviant” Sexual Interests

Some claim that all arousal patterns not tied to penis-in-vagina sex between a married couple arise when a society “loses God.”

There is an element of truth to this. When surveyed, religious individuals claim to consume porn at lower rates than non-religious individuals (though claimed porn consumption by religious individuals has been increasing rapidly since 1995).

This is as far as that element of truth extends, as all other data indicates that these individuals are lying. In fact, when Harvard-educated Microsoft economist Benjamin Edelman investigated porn site subscriptions and Google searches for porn on a regional basis in 2009, he found that more religious regions consume more porn than less religious regions (with the highest rates of all being in Utah).

Specifically, Edelman found that subscriptions to porn sites and online searches for sexual content were higher in states that had enacted laws to defend marriage and in which statements like, “I never doubt the existence of God,” “Even today miracles are performed by the power of God,” “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior” were more prevalent.

This finding isn’t limited to this one study; in a 2015 study, Canadian researchers Cara MacInnes and Gordon Hodson found that states with a higher percentage of individuals who self-identify as very religious and consider religion to be important to their daily lives also have higher rates of searches for sexual content on Google.

Long story short, society isn’t getting aroused by “unnatural” things because we “lost God.”

Myth: Irregular Arousal Patterns Are a Product of Poor Parenting

“It’s because their parents screwed them up” is such a common and easy way to dismiss unusual behavior patterns, it has become a cliché. To be honest, we originally suspected parental influence might be a major factor shaping human arousal patterns; however, our data do not suggest that much of what happens to individuals before puberty has a meaningful effect on their adult arousal patterns (to explore the data, please skip to “Childhood Sexual Assault vs. Sexual Assault in Adolescence” on page 507). That said, there is research that suggests possible pathways through which such an effect could occur. For example, goats raised around sheep will become sexually aroused by them, and people who grow up with younger siblings are slightly more likely to find pregnant women arousing. We merely couldn’t find such patterns in our own data.[[6]](#_ftn6)

Given the information we have at the time of this book’s publication, we can comfortably say that parents probably don’t have to worry that if they accidentally loudly fart in front of their kids at a particularly unlucky time during their mental development, the kids will develop a permanent arousal pattern tied to farts that is all the parents’ fault.

Myth: Humans Get Aroused by Random Things

“Look, dude: Humans are weird and get aroused by random things” is something we hear frequently and once said ourselves.

This might actually be a reasonable approach to this question . . . if it were valid. As it happens, one can identify clear patterns in the things that frequently arouse people. The idea of being thrown off the edge of a cliff or burned alive arouses almost no one, while something like being eaten or choked to death arouses non-trivial portions of the population. There are patterns in the human arousal system that cannot be explained by a desire to reproduce or socialization—but that are also not random.

Furthermore, these arousal patterns are often highly gendered. For example, a woman is much more likely to be aroused by having a needle pushed through their skin than a man. When there is a pattern to something, it is unlikely to be random; there is likely some underlying cause. The shadows we see on the walls of this cave are being created by something, and while some individuals are content to say: “Ignore those shadows; just think of them as random patterns, they have always been there and we have gotten on just fine ignoring them,” we just aren’t wired that way. We need to at least try to find the source.

About the Ideological Perspective that Informs this Book

There seems to be a trend among books investigating this topic (books that present a wider thesis about human sexuality) in which they argue that their theses prove one ideological team’s perspective on sexuality to be more “natural” and thus somehow more true. This is not one of those books.

Our society seems to have sorted itself into teams. One may be tempted to read a book like this and try to determine whether or not we are on their team.

We believe that approaching new ideas from a tribal viewpoint leads people to instinctively categorize data as “supporting their team” or “attacking their team,” which compromises their ability to piece the data together into a novel, holistic picture. All we want to do is collect the most accurate understanding possible of how humans think and behave so that we can systematically leverage this understanding to our advantage and develop a deeper understanding of the human condition.

You may wonder, dear reader: “Isn’t that what scientists do? Aren’t you just saying you have decided to take the position of academic consensus?”

In an ideal world, we would answer: “Yes.”

Malcolm, one of the authors of this book, started his life as a neuroscientist. While he has a deep respect for the scientific method, he finds the manner in which it is deployed by the academic bureaucracy—as it is currently structured—is optimized for building answers to specific questions. When it comes to synthesizing these discrete data points into holistic models, the academic bureaucracy lacks a process that sufficiently protects these models from the biased values and viewpoints of the individuals who stand at the top of academia’s hierarchies. While academic bureaucracies are not terrible at stringing together independent data points into a holistic picture, they are also not great at doing this due to systematic bias, which creates a lens altering the manner in which they see the world, especially with regard to politically sensitive topics like sexuality. To put it another way: We generally take peer-reviewed studies at their word, but we don’t give unique credence to the models of arousal processing these studies claim to reinforce and instead try to think of other explanations for the patterns they show.

At this point, you may be thinking that we are going too far in saying that the mainstream bureaucracies of psychology in academia are tainted with bias. If so, consider a study of 335 social psychologists conducted by Buss and Von Hippel, which found that well under 1% voted Republican in the last election cycle. This specific fact doesn’t bother us. Perhaps something experts in this field learn makes them more likely to vote liberal. Perhaps conservatives in academia choose degrees with more earning potential. What does bother us is that the resulting lack of diverse perspectives has led the field to alter, through small, individually inconsequential decisions, the manner in which academics present their findings to support a specific ideological agenda. Science should be about looking at evidence to find what is true, not looking for evidence to argue what one already believes is true. Ideological hegemony can lead a field to the latter.

One example demonstrating the consequences of this academic bias can be seen with the study of evolutionary pressures on sexual dimorphism, which certain facets of the conservative movement, such as the men’s rights movement, have begun to discuss in mainstream materials. In reaction, a few subgroups within the liberal movement began to demonize evolutionary psychology.

The same study by Buss and von Hippel found that while most of the researchers surveyed believed in evolution, a significant percentage were unwilling to apply it to the field of psychology. Worse, a substantial portion said that if researchers found a biological basis for sex differences, it would be bad if the findings were widely reported (well over 50%).[[7]](#_ftn7) To put that more directly: It has become normalized in the field of sexual psychology to suppress evidence that does not align with a political “team’s” view—or at the very least have far less motivation to promote it in the public eye.

Humorously, Buss and von Hippel point out this corruption of the scientific bureaucracy stems from an evolved human tendency to form teams and move up within a social hierarchy by signaling ideological commitments to your coalition. This behavior evolved because the ancestors of these academics that exhibited it had more surviving offspring. Academics are essentially refusing to look at how evolution affects cognition because of an aspect of their cognition molded by evolution.

When one is “doing research” but knows that they may be motivated to occlude some potential results before the data is even collected—perhaps due to political leanings, out of concern related to the impact on society those findings might have if shared, or due to fear for one’s professional reputation and livelihood—they are not “doing research.” It is irrelevant whether this person has good intentions or if they get lucky and their data happens to support a position they can publish.

We are not sexually conservative by any measure, but we also won’t go out of our way to argue that any non-standard sexualities or sexual behaviors exist for the betterment of society. Moreover, we won’t put much effort into not offending politically delicate sensibilities. Our goal is to systematically understand how the human brain works so we can exploit that understanding to our advantage. The more fidelity our understanding contains, the better we can utilize it to harvest what we want from the world.

The political and philosophical skew we observe in academia is merely in addition to another, perhaps equally large problem within this realm: The replication crisis in the wider field of psychology, with some sources estimating 50% of studies being unable to be replicated.[[8]](#_ftn8) We did our best to take the replication crisis into account when constructing this book. Whenever something seemed off to us and was only reported in a single study, we made a point of running our own survey to sanity check it. Mainstream academics do not have the freedom or flexibility to make informal, back-of-the-napkin calculations using quick, few-hundred-people surveys, but these informal checks have played an invaluable role in helping us piece together a holistic sketch of human sexuality from hundreds of individual studies that are no doubt peppered with false positives.

Citations and Research Presentation

Despite using science as our primary standard of evidence (the type of evidence we value above all others), we will not fastidiously cite every study we reference in this book.

It is all too easy to believe oneself to be a dispassionate lover of “science” and “rationality,” only to lean on studies like a crutch, cherry picking findings and conflating rationalization with rationality. It is a bad habit of countless writers and random commentators to make an outrageous claim, then cite a single study to back it up, putting the burden on the reader to look up the study and analyze its methodology, try to determine how it was funded, and look up the history of the researcher to determine whether the results are credible. We strongly disagree with this manner of communication.

If you see a statistic in a book and believe that statistic more because it comes with a study citation, we encourage you to rethink how you engage with information (again, remember that by some estimates, 50% of psychology studies are not replicable). We want to do our part in fighting against these sorts of dangerous mental shortcuts.

When we make a claim you find to be dubious, the last thing we want you to do is read the same couple of studies that led us to our conclusion—especially if a subconscious bias could have led us to cherry pick those studies. That is how bad information gets spread and pop-science comes to dominate. Our goal is to create new methodologies for relating to and interpreting data. When you want to sanity check something, we urge you to go online and dig into the topic. Ask yourself why we drew the conclusions we drew given the information available to us, then draw your own conclusions—heck, maybe even run your own informal studies and share your findings with us!

We understand this runs contrary to the manner in which many were taught to engage with science and ideas, but we ask you to give it a try. You may find our approach surprisingly empowering. If you give this way of writing an honest try and still hate it, just shoot us an email at Hello@Pragmatist.Guide letting us know. Should we get enough of these emails, we will include fastidious (rather than occasional) citations in future books.

A Supplementary Tour of Our Own Research

The first half of this book’s draft featured a tour of our own research on this topic: A comprehensive survey investigating correlations between specific arousal patterns and various personal attributes (wealth, childhood conditions, political affiliation, self-confidence, etc.). Early reviewers of the book found this section to be more of a “bathroom read” better suited for casual reference. We, therefore, shifted this exploration to an addendum at the end of the book, titled: “Supplement: A Tour of Our Research Findings.” You will find it on page 404. This supplement is something you should be able to quickly jump into and out of at any point while reading other chapters. As the main chapters of this book primarily focus on the “why, how, and so what?” of arousal, our supplementary tour of research findings will be of unique interest to those more excited by the “who, what, when, and where” questions surrounding arousal.

The Basics of Sexuality: Attraction & Aversion

We propose an alternate framework for discussing sexuality in this book. We find this framework maps to the research better than many common approaches to sexuality with which you may be more familiar.

When the average person talks about their sexuality, they typically list their position on the Kinsey scale—a spectrum from 100% gay to 100% straight—and then give a list of kinks, paraphilias, and/or fetishes.[[9]](#_ftn9) Someone may say, for example: “I am a gay male who is into rope play and BDSM.” Someone steeped enough in specific sub-cultures may go so far as to add some ultra-specific modifiers like “demisexual.” This larger framework for describing one’s sexuality leads to statements that are more descriptions of community affiliation than underling arousal patterns.

For just one example of why community affiliation is such a bad representation of arousal patterns, consider the data we collected on arousal patterns, which suggests that despite being dramatically more likely to identify as straight, male conservatives report watching roughly the same amount of porn featuring two males having sex (8% of conservatives versus 7% of liberals). When we focus on labels instead of underlying arousal patterns, the data gets completely scrambled.

If this is not an optimal way to describe sexuality, how should we be looking at sexuality?

The brain creates an “arousal impulse” when exposed to certain stimuli, the strength of which is modulated by environmental and hormonal factors. Our sexuality should be defined as a list of the stimuli that cause us to become aroused and the relative “volumes” of those arousal outputs to each stimuli type—with a caveat.

Arousal pathways should be thought of as existing in one of three states: positive, neutral, and negative. Negative arousal is experienced as a “gross” sensation. One person may find the idea of sleeping with an elderly individual arousing, another may find this concept deeply “gross,” and yet another may be completely indifferent to the concept. Regardless of the ethics of such an involuntary impulse, all of these are different and equally valid expressions of a person’s sexuality.

In other words, arousal is a sensation that our brains evolved to draw us toward something. Arousal makes us want to look at something longer; it dilates our pupils so that we can take in more of that thing, it compels us to move closer to the target and inhale deeply. Disgust is a sensation that our brains evolved to get us away from something. It makes us want to leave the room, look away from the thing, linger as shortly as possible, and hold our noses. Disgust is not just another emotion; disgust is the manifestation of arousal with a negative modifier attached (we go into the evidence for this in detail later).

Society’s inability to accept the fact that sexuality is comprised of both involuntary attraction to some stimuli and involuntary aversion to others has left people without a way to categorize aversive—“gross”—stimuli in their heads. This lack of understanding has led many to conclude that disgust they feel upon considering certain behaviors is a sign that those acts are somehow inherently bad, immoral, or unnatural.

Consider an extremely old person having consensual sex with a 25-year-old. There is nothing inherently unethical about this pairing, but in most people, such an imagined scene incites feelings of disgust strong enough to make one feel like there must be something morally wrong with the imagined act.

When the majority of the population’s sexuality outputs disgust to a stimulus and a minority feel strong arousal from that same set of stimuli, it is almost inevitable that society will begin to label individuals who indulge in the stimuli as “disgusting,” which is a very short distance from “immoral.”[[10]](#_ftn10)

Yet, if disgust is using the same underlying mechanisms as our arousal system, telling an individual to just “get over” their disgust is as unproductive as telling a person to try not to find something arousing. Instead, people are best served by recognizing the emotion as an innate reaction without logic behind it. (That said, like arousal, disgust can be oversaturated, so being around something that activates a disgust reaction for a long period of time will desensitize that particular pathway.)

It is easy to grandstand on issues like this, but as you are human, we anticipate your ability to empathize. When a person can’t explain where disgust comes from, it becomes very hard not to assume it means that people involved in a disgusting act are themselves disgusting as well. Were we to accept that the disgust we feel is just something to which we are arbitrarily and involuntarily subjected—just as we are subjected to our often-inconvenient arousal impulses—it becomes easier to separate emotional reactions from judgments of morality.

From a Pragmatist’s perspective, a person’s sexuality is defined by a list of stimuli and the impulse each stimulus generates in their cognition. To put this in the form of an equation:

**[Specific Stimuli] -> [+1, -1, or 0] [Volume Multiplier] = [Arousal or Gross Impulse]*

Let us explore each factor in turn.

[Specific Stimuli]

These make up all things capable of eliciting a positive or negative arousal impulse (with a positive arousal impulse being a feeling of arousal and a negative one being a feeling of disgust) and range from visual representations (e.g., breasts) to emotions (e.g., humiliation), physical and sensory stimuli (e.g., rubbing an erogenous zone), and concepts (e.g., “sluttiness”).

[+1, -1, or 0]

Stimuli associated with a positive modifier are experienced as sexually arousing—being attractive, compelling, and desirable—while those with a negative modifier are experienced as sexually aversive—being gross, disgusting, or icky. This variable can also have a null state in which something is blocked or nonfunctional about a particular pathway. In this case, neither disgust nor arousal is triggered by a particular stimulus.

[Volume Multiplier]

This is a multiplier that determines the power of the impulse created by specific stimuli. For example, the average human likes having their nipples touched a little, but the arousal this category of stimuli generates may be uniquely strong or weak.

Developmental Distance

We treat the volume multiplier and attraction versus aversion as two independent variables in an equation—instead of presenting an arousal and aversion spectrum with a neutral reaction being the mid-point—because we believe there is copious evidence indicating that these two factors (volume and attraction/aversion) are developmentally quite far apart.

Developmental distance is a somewhat confusing topic. Should you want a quick refresher on the concept, consider this analogy:

Imagine a mayor whose intern comes into the room and says two government buildings just burned down. The mayor’s first question to that intern is going to be whether or not the buildings were adjacent to each other—as that would indicate a fire just spread from one building to the other—or if the buildings were on other sides of the town, as that would indicate some sort of planned arson that is unlikely to happen naturally. The volume and the aversion/attraction modifiers are buildings on different sides of town.

The biggest practical implication stemming from the separation of attraction/aversion from a volume multiplier is that it is unlikely for both the volume multiplier and aversion/attraction sign associated with specific stimuli to be “abnormal” in the same person. This enables us to more accurately model the manner in which other people experience their sexuality. Imagine sitting in the same room as a bloated rotting corpse. Imagine how strongly compelled you would be to get out of that room. Wouldn’t it be a stronger stimulus than almost any form of attraction you have? A person attracted to rotting corpses likely has just as strong an attraction as you feel an aversion because their volume is working “correctly,” but their aversion/arousal impulse is functioning “abnormally.”

If sexual arousal existed on a spectrum, we would see some people with a moderate attraction to corpses. We do not see this in practice. When most people find something very repulsive, there is generally a small population that finds it extremely arousing and almost no population that finds it mildly arousing (though there will be an indifferent population in which some part of the pathway that usually outputs either arousal or disgust is non-functional). Likewise, small niches of our population find typically arousing things to be utterly repulsive (here you can think of people who report finding genitals or power differentials between sexual participants to be repulsive).

This pattern of near (but not complete) consensus regarding aversion/attraction is visible both in our own surveys and in broader peer reviewed research on sexuality. It can almost be thought of as a core facet of human sexuality. If something is strongly aversive to most of the population, a small portion will find it strongly arousing. If something is strongly arousing to most, a small portion will find it strongly aversive. (We present our theory around the mechanism causing this in the “Inverse Systems” subchapter on page 102.)

Finally, the arousal pathway we are talking about here is only tangentially connected to the love / pair bonding pathway. These pathways are connected in that arousal appears to lower the activation threshold for forming a pair bond with an individual and being pair bonded to someone seems to lower the threshold for arousal from stimuli associated with them, but other than that, these pathways are separate. The way a person’s pair bonding system works should not technically be thought of as part of their arousal system (though we do investigate the pair bonding system in this book—see: “The Mechanics of Love” on page 316). It is much less common for the pair-bonding pathway to behave atypically when contrasted with the arousal pathway, meaning this pathway is much more “robust” from a neurological perspective. That said, atypical pair bonding does happen—like in the case of Erika Eiffel, who married the Eiffel Tower.[[11]](#_ftn11)

Songbirds & Boobies

Supernormal stimuli play an important role in our understanding of sexual arousal so let’s take a moment to review how supernormal stimuli work.

Imagine a songbird that lays blue-speckled eggs. They likely evolved blue-speckled eggs because that pattern differentiates the eggs from other things in their environments, such as random rocks, making it easier for these songbirds to know what to sit on. They also likely evolved an impulse to sit on objects with blue elements to ensure they properly care for their eggs.

What happens if you put a nest full of bright blue marbles next to this bird’s nest? The songbirds abandon their real eggs for those marbles! Why? Because stimuli like these bright blue marbles did not exist in the environment within which the songbirds evolved and thus the impulse they evolved that shouts: “SIT ON THE THING WITH THE MOST BLUE” never needed a modulating filter for something that is too blue. (Supernormal stimuli are seen all over the animal kingdom—if you want to read about specific instances of it, just Google them like a normal person.)

What does this have to do with human sexuality? Suppose you have trouble understanding why someone is sexually aroused by bakunyū pornography (pornography of women with inhumanly large breasts—breasts half the size of their bodies). Now you know! In the brains of bakunyū aficionados, there is a system that says: “Breasts = female, so even larger breasts must = extra female—and what do I do with females? I breed with them, of course!!”

Just like those silly birds that feel compelled to sit on round, super-blue objects that couldn’t possibly be eggs of their own species, some humans feel a compulsion to sleep with women whose breasts cannot possibly be human . . . and so they draw porn of them.

“But wait,” you may be thinking: “Why aren’t all people affected by supernormal stimuli?”

Good question! We don’t really know.

Perhaps one of two things is happening: Either normally functioning arousal systems have a range of normalcy and begin to inspire negative, “gross” reactions when overstimulated or, more likely, there are separate opposing reactions that push people in the opposite direction. Specifically, a person may have a system for detecting whether something looks inhuman and generate an aversive “gross” reaction, which overwhelms any additional arousal the larger stimuli would incite, preventing most individuals from finding gigantic breasts sexually arousing.

In other words, either when an arousal system is functioning normally, it begins to output an aversion reaction when it is overstimulated, or the reason most people find things like giant breasts aversive is because of a completely separate arousal/aversion system that is outputting an aversion response to things it identifies as monstrous/inhuman—and this aversion overrides the arousal created by the sight of overly large breasts.

We are in favor of this second explanation: That there is a separate counterweight system that outputs aversion when something veers too far from an average human form. If systems existed to elicit a gross reaction when seeing something “monstrous,” we would expect such systems to occasionally break and generate a high level of arousal in a portion of the population (we explain why you would expect this in the “Inverse System” chapter on page 102). This would explain the popularity of monster hentai, a form of erotic art that caters to people aroused by uniquely inhuman forms engaging in sex with a human. In another portion of the population, we would expect this system to “break” in a different way, simply not outputting the normal aversion reaction, but also not outputting a unique arousal reaction, which would lead to the arousal some experience upon seeing giant breasts, but which would mean the same individuals would be equally aroused by anything else giant that otherwise arouses them (e.g., if they are aroused by penises, they will also be aroused by giant penises).

We decided to test this theory with our dataset. If our theory is correct, individuals who are into bakunyū do not have an overactive attraction to breasts, but rather the system in their brain meant to output disgust upon exposure to monstrous images is producing either no output or a positive output. When we looked at males in our data set that were aroused by inhumanly large breasts, we found that 22% of them were also aroused by inhumanly large penises while 0% of the men not aroused by inhumanly large breasts were aroused by inhumanly large penises. This is meaningful because this is not that far from the percent of men who find penises arousing in general (17%), indicating the same phenomenon happening with breasts is happening with this separate arousal pathway as well, exactly as our theory would predict and something that would not be predicted by current arousal models.

But wait—there’s more. Let’s call men who are aroused by bakunyū (16.5% of our data set) B and men who were not N and look at a few other categories of arousal we would expect to be affected if our theory were correct:

The real kicker is arousal from amputees, as the correlation is extremely strong (with 0% of N being turned on by amputees). We cannot think of any mechanism other than that which we proposed, which would connect arousal from inhumanly large breasts to arousal from amputees.

Not only does our data support that disgust is being used in normal human arousal systems to modify the things that arouse us and shape our sexuality, but that our responses to supernormal stimuli are specifically kept from going out of control by a system that is supposed to create disgust in response to things that don’t look like a “normal” human.

Note from the Research:

Responsive vs. Spontaneous Desire

Arousal and interest in sex do not emerge spontaneously in everyone.

To deal with this reality, some therapists have divided arousal patterns into “spontaneous desire” (i.e., when a concept or image is immediately arousing to a person) and “responsive desire” (i.e., when a person begins to feel arousal only in response to various stimuli, like a back rub, a relaxing evening, a romantic setting, or watching porn).

Discussions of responsive versus spontaneous desire appear to be in vogue these days. We understand why. The concept is immensely helpful to sex therapists who regularly have to explain that one partner isn’t disinterested in the other just because they are not keen to have sex at the drop of a hat. It is helpful for partners to understand that one person may reach a state of arousal merely upon seeing the female form while another person may need prolonged, tactile arousal sources in order to feel strong sexual arousal. That said, we do not think it is groundbreaking to acknowledge that different people (and different genders on average) get aroused by different types of stimuli and require different lengths of exposure in order to feel sexually aroused.

The concept of spontaneous versus responsive desire nevertheless facilitates interesting research exploring arousal patterns, especially in women. Suppose a woman is showing an increased blood flow to her genitals, but not claiming to feel any mental arousal. How does one code such signals when studying things that arouse people? While this question seems like quite a sticky wicket in theory, it is fortunately next to irrelevant in practice.

Why? We couldn’t find a single study that showed any sort of stimulus that was much more likely to end up in one of these two states (well, except for the monkey sex study, which showed women experiencing increased blood flow to their genitals when watching monkeys having sex—something we doubt many women would admit to finding mentally arousing even if they did). In other words, both self-reported surveys and blood flow detection offer reliable systems for measuring what proportion of a given population finds something arousing because they typically come to the same conclusions (except in cases in which a person is culturally pressured to not find something mentally stimulating).

Inhibitory Systems & Libido

Some people add a third category to discussions of responsive versus spontaneous desire called “contextual desire,” which essentially highlights the fact that environmental factors, such as stress or knowledge that kids are in the next room, can affect one’s ability to become aroused. Essentially, there is a system that detects specific environmental scenarios and downregulates arousal when in the presence of these stimuli, which we will call the Sexual Sublimation System (we use this term to differentiate it from the concept of the “Sexual Inhibition System,” a fleshed-out theory that conflates specific aversive stimuli with sexual sublimation).

Knowledge of this system can aid understanding of those who rarely feel arousal, as their lack of arousal may be the product of one (or more) of the following four factors:

  1. Their general arousal systems are set to a low output level (some call this having a low Sexual Excitation System)
  2. Their Sexual Sublimation System is overactive, creating a ton of inhibition in response to low stimuli levels
  3. Their Sexual Sublimation System responds to more/different stimuli types than an “average” configuration of this system would (i.e., for whatever reason it activates in response to indoor spaces)
  4. Something that triggers their Sexual Sublimation System is very common in their daily lives (such as stress or kids)

This system is fairly simple to understand, and it makes perfect sense that we have it. Most of the things that dampen arousal are clearly tied to environments in which it may make sense to downregulate the production of additional children (such as hearing children in the next room, interacting with a baby, uncertainty, ugly environments, insecure environments, or high stress). These systems appear to be more active in women than men, which also makes sense and can help one troubleshoot an apparent low sex drive (e.g., maybe stress reduction needs to come before attempts to improve one’s sex life).

Sexual sublimation systems are not the same as aversion systems. These systems merely downregulate how much arousal you will feel from anything. On the other hand, aversion systems create explicit disgust. To understand the difference, consider the lower sexual output you feel when super stressed or when kids are playing in the next room versus the acute “ick” emotion you experience when imagining sex with someone you find disgusting (maybe a really old person, a really ugly person, or a really unhygienic person).

At any rate, reactive and contextual desire explain the trope of needing to take one’s wife out on a luxurious feeling, romantically lit date followed by lots of foreplay to be able to enjoy a decent sex romp as a married couple. This is because both inhibitory systems and reactive arousal patterns are stronger in females, and adult, married females may have more arousal-dampening factors in their lives (such as jobs, kids, dependent parents, and the stress of juggling these often-conflicting responsibilities) than a relatively unattached, typical young woman.

How Do People Develop Varying Levels of Attraction and Aversion to Stimuli?

The first question you may ask having reached this point in the book is: “Could it just be that we are born with a specific sexuality?” The answer is a strong: “Maybe . . . ”

Here is what we can say: Attractions and aversions that appear early in our development (e.g., those that manifest right at puberty or even before puberty) appear to be the strongest and do not appear to be traits we can easily alter in adulthood. People have gone to great lengths to alter certain attractions and aversions (e.g., due to the negative stigma some social groups applied to “gayness” conversion therapy has been extensively experimented with in those communities) and there are no foolproof methodologies for intentionally switching out one set of stimuli that arouses an individual for another, intentionally selected set of stimuli (e.g., conversion therapy does not work).

That said, an absence of means by which we might intentionally and permanently alter aspects of our sexuality that appear in early life as adults does not mean that sexuality does not shift in adulthood. A hearty 20% of young adult women and 5% of men report changes in their arousal patterns tied to the genders they find stimulating over a 5-year period, so clearly some attraction/aversion patterns shift. However, we don’t know what causes these changes, plus they seem to happen much more often in people who start by reporting attraction to both men and women.[[12]](#_ftn12) Specifically: Women attracted to both men and women who experience a change in their arousal patterns are more likely to drift toward identifying as heterosexual with time, whereas men who report attraction to both men and women split, with about half of those who change their sexual expression drifting toward being more heterosexual and half more gay. (For more on this phenomenon see: “Prevalence and stability of self-reported sexual orientation identity during young adulthood” in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.)

One method shown to lower arousal to sexual stimuli for a period involves desensitization through overexposure. In other words, if you binge on one sexual stimulus, you will ultimately require more of it to get the same reaction. At extremes, overexposure can completely desensitize a person to a stimulus in this category, though this effect will wear off with the cessation of this overexposure. In other words, gay conversion camps could lower “gay thoughts” for a period if they provided nothing but all the gay sex a person could want, all day every day, though we doubt those running gay conversion camps would be comfortable with this treatment method.

Raw text for machines: .txt · .md · cite as TPG 47.4.4