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You, like all people, are not perfect. There is plenty of work you could do to raise your value on the open market.
Relationships in which both partners believe they are getting the better deal are extremely stable.
One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function
These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns.
the “I am Great at Sex” lure comes off as desperate and makes a person seem emotionally unstable, leading many targets to conclude that the person is not worth the risky lay. This is true for both men and women.
It is common for some young women to not recognize that the attention they are getting stems from the fact that they are inadvertently signaling that sex with them will be low cost.
Such attention can easily subconsciously train some young women to signal that they are sexually available when doing so is far from their intention.
those with histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and in manic stages of bipolar disorder, are uniquely susceptible to this subconscious conditioning, and it affects them more severely.
subconsciously trained to believe that strategies involving a direct approach simply do not work, whereas strategies involving an indirect—sneaky—approach might work. They may even delude themselves into thinking that various “subtle cues,” such as body language, hints dropped in jokes, and innuendo act as sufficient notice of their intentions to their targets. (For the record, they do not).
no point should a pursuer using the Pygmalion Lure even be telling their partner what to strive for or how to see their objective function realized. Pygmalion relationships are not about you imposing your values and goals on another person.
help the target think through their own values and goals—and to stick to plans they independently develop.
Pushing a partner toward your own goals or belief set instead of helping them unfurl their own will backfire on those hoping to deploy the Pygmalion Lure; the moment a target feels like their pursuer, rather than they themselves, are dictating who they become, the pursuer has lost any chance at a successful relationship.
by rewarding negative emotional states with attention, you can actually train a person to be more unhappy in the long run
Pygmalion Relationships involves valuing your partner’s long-term mental wellbeing over the immediate catharsis and support of consoling them—and more importantly, having your partner recognize and appreciate those
In False Pygmalion Relationships, an individual may trade up for someone who is more arousing, more prestigious, or more successful.
Hypergamy is only a threat to partners who are stagnant, which is why it presents such a threat to individuals who lean on Dominance Lure tactics.
People talk up happiness, but consistently fail to make the hard choices necessary to chase it,
Even when executed by a local celebrity, Dominance Lures crush Status Lures in their effectiveness at securing sex.
a target sees themselves as rebellious or as the type of person who breaks societal conventions, a pursuer can leverage that aspect of their identity subtly to push past points on a date at which the target might otherwise turn them down—in
Once you accept that most humans are just blindly stumbling through life trying to fulfill some vision of who they are, you will begin to notice how easy it is to manipulate this vision to get them to do what you want.
Is my primary value to the target (in their eyes) my advice, labor, money, security, or emotional support? If your value to your partner consists of anything other than your advice, you are just their “hero.” If you still aren’t sure, think through how often they seek your advice and how often they take it.
When a person is objectively smarter and further along in their career than their partner and intelligence and career status comprise the things they value most in life, how can they honestly show admiration for that ‘lesser’ partner? If they are someone who is objectively highly successful in the domain they value most, yet they still yearn for a happy relationship with a dominant partner, we strongly recommend that they explore admiring different domains of achievement, specifically domains in which they are weak.
Learning how to admire other people and believably show that admiration is far more useful than getting good at something like sex if a person wants to secure a healthy relationship with a high-quality partner.
securing an optimal spouse takes around seven years of work on average).
What ?!!
However, even though women are disadvantaged when looking for a long-term relationship, simply being direct about it can still be one of the best strategies available to them with a few caveats. The
This shift in dynamics can leave one feeling hopeless, but there are actually a lot of decent guys out there waiting for a woman to pursue them. The key words here are “decent guys” and “waiting for a woman to pursue them.”
A woman implementing this strategy will have the most success if she remembers that a male of average attractiveness is liked by only 1 out of 115 women on Tinder.
men below the top 10% in terms of physical attractiveness receive very little outreach from women, even though attractiveness is not often considered to be one of the most critical factors in the success of a long-term relationship.
this does not mean a woman using this strategy will never again get to savor male pursuit; women using this strategy need only “activate” this pursuit through some pursuit of their own, initiating contact and letting the targets know explicitly they will not be rejected if they take the emotional risk of pursuit—which
society has not handled its transition to sexual freedom and individual autonomy, as well as we like to pretend it has.
One study showed that ten percent of the US population considers watching porn to be a form of cheating. What if your partner is among that ten percent and you are not? If you consume porn, you would therefore think you are golden within your relationship contract, whereas your partner would see it as you committing a clear violation—you could easily end up cheating in their eyes without ever intending to.
some will see an expensive surprise gift than cannot be returned as a way for an individual to non-consensually force relationship escalation.)
compromise rewards those who act emotional and unreasonable, and it punishes those who work toward resolving conflict. In every relationship we have observed in which compromise is used as a conflict resolution method, the more unreasonable member gets their way more frequently—occasionally
you and your partner have a disagreement about room temperature (and you somehow forgot to include a room temperature clause in your contract . . . like a madman).
Because enforcement is so crucial, the immediate dissolution of a partnership in response to any violation is neither a prudent nor a realistic approach. Instead, apply one default low-level response to any sort of generic violation and specific, logical, reasonable, and easy-to-actually execute responses to more extreme violations
of the greatest benefits of marriage is that it allows partners to act as a single unit and offload parts of their cognitive load and basic life maintenance to each other.
almost everything else a person gets from a relationship—be that sex, love, or childcare—can be achieved through hiring someone or dating, while cognitive integration is only accessible through a long-term relationship with a person.
cognitively siloed partners divide responsibility by domain, whereas cognitively integrated partners divide responsibility by stage in the decision making and action-taking process.
While superficially similar to enmeshment, cognitively integrated relationships and enmeshed relationships have about as much in common as poly relationships and relationships in which someone enjoys many sexual partners by cheating on a spouse.
(1) there is a social expectation that a woman should be able to draw resources from a man and (2) there is a social expectation that a woman can only draw resources from one man at a time
Were this cultural expectation reversed and we lived in a world in which these conditions were applied to men, we feel confident in saying that men would be far more likely to terminate long-term relationships than women—there is nothing “innately female” about being subject to market forces.
Society insinuates to men that relationships are for sex and implies to women that relationships are for resources/status. It
On Tinder, 80% of men compete over the bottom 22% of women, while 78% of women compete for the top 20% of men.
To put it another way, a man of average attractiveness will only be “liked” by 0.87% of women (1 in 115).
the dating economy for women on Hinge would rank as the world’s 75th least equal economy, about the same as the economies of the UK or Canada, and the economy for men on Hinge would rank as the 8th least equal economy. Countries ranking this low on economic equality are typically embroiled in active civil war—people are starving on the streets,
women beg to not be sent low-effort messages like “Hey,” wishing instead for more thoughtful, personalized messages.
One study demonstrated that lengthening a message from fifty words to two thousand five hundred words increases a man’s odds of receiving a reply by less than 10%. This marginal boost in odds does not make the time investment logical if, in a similar time period, he can reach out to nineteen additional women with a “hey” equivalent. If time is a limited resource to a man, it is simply not logical for him to waste
If a person goes long enough without exploring new categories of behavior while older behaviors cease to generate happiness, they may even end up feeling as though nothing gives them happiness anymore (though clinical depression can also cause this feeling).
play behavior, which typically manifests as interaction with peers in a physically taxing manner that involves a high degree of touching and boundary testing, is critical during childhood.
studies have shown adolescents are extremely sensitive to social cues and have trouble ignoring them.
