Women should just still out and relax then. Just stop working in or on the relationship. Why put in any effort if the other party isn't? Both can be slackers together and it will probably be a great, go with the flow symbiosis.
I love Tove's writing as much for the absence of obvious political shaping as the insight. This is an example at its best. It comes just as I'm mentally abstracting a piece of my own on sex & love. So, for now, just a thank you (although many observations also resonated - including those in the comments). Everyone is thoughtful & smart on this blog.
This framing makes a lot of sense to me. As you got towards the end, I was thinking about men's tendency to be lazier and to sort of "expect" the concept of more options and more reproductive success, as an excuse to invest less emotionally. A couple things I wanted to add:
First, I know men who go fully to one end of the spectrum - their only goal in life is to provide money and security, and they think that buys their way out of all other responsibilities. Needless to say these men end up unhappy with terrible marriages and bad relationships with their kids. Making a lot of money is not an excuse to forgo literally all of the other life skills you're supposed to acquire as a man. This mindset might have worked at some point, when just keeping children alive was a victory. But it is profoundly outdated, and men who fail to see that are failing a basic test of intelligence (and manliness).
And second, there is a tendency for even mediocre men - men who aren't providing a lot of money or security - to do this same thing. To bring low investment to the relationship, to adopt the mindset that the relationship is just the home thing. That there are other options - subconsciously they believe they could still find reproductive success elsewhere.
And it may sound harsh, but it's like... dude, if you're not providing a lot of resources, I'm sorry but you're going to have to work even harder at home than the men who are. You don't have the luxury of treating your relationship as a given. Is it unfair? Sure, all of life is unfair. But a man who isn't at least providing a lot of resources has even less an ability to rest on his laurels than a high earner or a stud.
"I always reasoned: “If you just tell me what you want me to do, I’ll gladly do it.”
This isn't really true. This is the voice of the superego that tries to maintain a positive self-image. The deeper recesses of the soul actually hate these chores, but few men have the self-reflection to admit it.
These tasks are mundane, boring, nothing heroic about them, a 75 IQ person with the physical strength of a child could do them. I was very unhappy in my marriage after our child was born, I told my life I hate being at home in the evenings, it is all extremely boring, mundane and unheroic, I don't understand how can she cope with that.
How can a person do tasks that do not make themselves feel good about them, because they are so easy, anyone could do them?
Well I suppose they can try to not make them about themselves, but I am not so unselfish.
How can women accept a life of mundane, unheroic tasks? Are they really that unselfish?
Treating the home as a second workplace is bad enough in itself, but in the real workplace I solve computer puzzles only a few % of people could. Filling a dishwasher is something any child could do. Maybe one could train a monkey to. I absolutely hated this stuff.
I told her I want to be a rampaging viking, or something, romantic adventure, challenge, heroism, I cannot deal with this gray mundane domestic life.
The marriage did not last long after.
Well of course I did not turn into any kind of adventurer, but now I get to read about them. And paid help does the chores.
So my take is men do not deal well with domestication, we just try to maintain a good-hubby self-image so we lie to ourselves and tell us we do.
The results are these excuses "I did not know it needs to be done" and so on.
One thing is clear, I am never ever doing a live-in relationship again. I want relationships as vacation, leisure, going to the beach together and suchlike.
Post-40 it is doable, many older divorcee women want it like that - staying independent.
I understand perfectly what you mean. Actually, I could have said that myself when I had only one child. Paradoxically, that is one reason why I have six children: One or two is too easy. With more children it starts to get more similar to computer puzzles.
My guess is that the boredom of domestic life is one very important reason behind the fertility crisis. People need incentives to choose to have children - and definitely choose to have more than two children. Just saying that having children is extremely fun and stimulating doesn't work. Because as you say, many parts of it are not.
Interesting! Well a "herding cats" experience would have been challenging enough to be fun, I think.
When the neighbor kid, who is also a single child, visits my daughter, she is entirely transformed. Even just two work very different than one. She is transformed from the lazy phone addict couch potato to a whirlwind, they chase each other around the garden, with the dogs and all.
""*If a woman obviously puts a lot of effort into looking sexy, don't pursue her for a long-term relationship. Slutshame her instead.""
This is a common misconception. Men do not slut shame in anywhere near the intensity and frequently as women do. Women do this because a slut lowers the value of sex for all women. If sex were cheap and easy, women would get fewer benefits for holding out. Men on the other hand love cheap and easy sex. Why would we ever want to dissuade a woman from engaging in such.
My relationship has been on the rocks for about a year, and I have attempted to leave several times, but my partner says “he’ll really change this time”, and for some reason I believe him, despite us discussing the same issues for years and years.
Starting about a year ago, I have been frequently asking him to read a certain relationship book that offers great understanding and strategies to deal with the issues we have been facing, and he has never read it. Recently he actually read it and our relationship is instantly turning around. He now says he regrets not reading the book a year ago, as it would have saved a year of grief. Men can fuck right off, right?
The problem with blaming the other sex is that both engage in frustrating behavior. The problems are inherent to the human condition. Nothing truly meaningful comes to you easy. If it did, you would not value it.
If you want to see old, lonely and pathetic, find elderly men who were players, or women who dropped every man who did not read her mind. I assure you that working towards a higher goal is worth it. It may not be this one, but you will be regretful if you never sufficiently change and adapt to be part of something greater than yourself.
I mostly give this speech to young men, but I have been giving more and more to women. It is sad how our culture has abandoned so many institutions that were once central to our growth as human beings (churches, clubs,...). We are paying such a high price for that now.
This is actually a new take on the curse of Eve -- that she's going to be thinking too much about her husband, way more than he thinks about her. And she'll be so busy thinking about their relationship that she can't do much else. It certainly describes me. Add kids to the mix, and I'm basically useless. I understand the desire to be a housewife, simply because it's all I can think about anyway.
well, I don't *actually* want to be a dependent and spend my day cleaning up after people. But I do find that since having kids my brain is 25% occupied by them at all times.
I have been saying for years that the problem with modern dating is that men just aren't interested, and there isn't anything you can do to make them interested. Thank you for putting this together! Its a good theory and at least it makes it all make sense. I have historically been very baffled by all of this.
Men are interested, but the women are too busy fighting each other over the sleaziest men. I never cease to be amazed at how many women prefer being cheap playthings to a handful of men over having real relationships with men who actually want them. I am so happy I grew up when I did (1990's).
Could you give more examples of the work women are putting in? I planned vacations, planned dates, found a place for us to live, moved all our stuff, found her a reliable car, etc. because as she would say “you know I’m not good at that kind of stuff.”
I got the feeling she thought she was sacrificing more than me just because she carried the heavy heavy burden of being unsatisfied with the relationship and who I was as a person.
This whole post seems so backwards to me. Like saying “the consumers of Game of Thrones actually put in more work than the producers, because they spend more time reacting to the finished product.”
I have only dated one man who actually planned dates. I’ve never dated any man who would plan a vacation. I’ve always made more money than the men I’ve dated, and had my shit more together. Maybe I’m just picking/putting up with losers. And maybe you have too.
I’ve spent a lot of time and effort thinking about (and trying to apply) how relationships and life could be improved (communicating better, parenting better, being more healthy, more connection, more fun, more sex), only to receive zero reply or effort from the man. They are then apparently super surprised when I end the relationship
The fans are way more invested in the show (and continually find and explain away discrepancies and internal contradictions in the show) than are anyone in the cast, crew or staff.
I was thinking the same; personally, I have seen more couples like you where the man is investing heavily for survival of relationship. The author herself is admitting that she is drawing these conclusions from her anecdotal experiences, her viewpoint can have some value but I will suggest to male readers not to assume that the relationships that will encounter will give same observations as that of the author.
From my personal experience (as a lot of relationship advice is given), it sounds like you were taken for granted as the relationship was one sided. I think women weigh sex (esp. after the initial spark is gone) as more work and emotional upkeep than us guys understand. This can start a cycle, putting in tons of work to get your reward at the end of the night and her believing things are now equal as you both did something to contribute.
>>Like saying “the consumers of Game of Thrones actually put in more work than the producers, because they spend more time reacting to the finished product.”
A very interesting analogy. And a surprisingly good one. Actually I do think some consumers of Games of Thrones get more obsessed with the show than the creators themselves. The crew will work hard for months and years. But eventually they will move on and create something else. Meanwhile, some fans will remake their entire lives and entire selves after their favorite TV show.
Are they productive? Should they rather be doing something else? Probably, yes. But nonetheless, they are sacrificing more than the crew that created the show. And although those extreme fans are overdoing it, there can't be any show without fans.
It's kind of a sideways analogy, because the "consumers" don't do more work to *produce/create* the show, but the evangelists/true believers/stans are not simply consumers and they maintain the world of the media property (in this case, GOT) long past the creators have moved on, as you say.
It's simply a different thing, but it does relate to your post in that these fans maintain relationships/a shared reality with one another requires much more/different work than the producers. It's why Lost disappointed so many hardcore fans: nothing the production team could come up with could compare with the years long, collaborative project of thinking up scenarios of what's really going on and projecting "4D chess." The way fans are stoked to heavily invest emotionally, financially, and spiritually these days and leads to intense backlashes it's reflective of your point.
I would critique your comment about "slut shaming." That is a female pastime. Men love sluts. Otherwise, this is mostly accurate. Women do not experience the horrors of constantly being told that they are not good enough. Men often get rejects more times than the average woman can comprehend. The act of getting a woman to call you is an achievement. Once a woman sleeps with you, you need time to recover from that process.
Women often have a very hard time understanding the difficulties of normal men. They look at the tall, handsome CEO's and imagine every man's life is easy and fun. It is actually brutally difficult, from beatings and hazing in youth, to the repeated sneering of the opposite sex until he has the assets to demand female attention.
What you should be writing about is how women have the LUXURY of putting time and effort into relationships. Most men do not. Pornography and gaming are not the cause of male suffering but rather the analgesic men use to survive the modern loneliness they endure while women fight with each other to become the 'nth mistress of a high-status male.
Monogamy was a distinctly Christian idea. Polygamy was the norm across Africa, the Middle East and China until the end of the second world war. China only ditched their traditional polygamy in 1949, when they bizarrely copied Christian models of living from Marxists. Muslims still practice it, as do many in Africa. The Spanish abolished this and forced their Christian marriage practices upon the Americas.
Today we are returning to the biological norm of elite males getting many females and most males getting none. Whether this is a result of feminism or the decline of Christianity is debatable.
One thing that I think would help build this out is the women's relationship with her children. Once she has children, I think her focus is much more on them and much less on him. This increases her cognitive workload on relationships and complicates her relationship with her husband (not just from less attention for him but also home is no longer a refuge when there are a bunch of screaming kids around).
I think there lies a lot in this. Also, society encourages parents to put more or less all cognitive effort they have into their children. Children are often described as demanding to the degree that parents should have little attention left for anything else.
I guess there are countless relationships where the female party first was a good girlfriend/wife for a number of years and spent most of her attention on being girlfriend/wife. When kids finally arrive, she changes identity to good mother. And then there is not much relationship left.
"If a woman obviously puts a lot of effort into looking sexy, don't pursue her for a long-term relationship. Slutshame her instead."
Generally agree with the article and find it insightful, but from what I can tell, women more than men slutshame and zealously enforce female chastity. I suppose this is because "loose women" are seen as the equivalent of scabs who undercut the union price. Men see the overly sexy woman as a good time, but not more.
I felt strongly about this as well. I have never seen a male slut shame a woman other than some weak, weepy rejected male. Men love having sluts around. In a perfect world, there would be sluts everywhere and most men could focus more time and energy on important things like quality whisky and fine time pieces.
This is basically how it is for cats. Pretty much all of us were raised by single mothers, basically none of us know for sure who our father is, and tomcats never pay child support.
Even if I wanted to help out with the kittens, some of them might be mine, remember, I wouldn't dream of trying, not if I valued my ears.
Although tomcats do spend an inordinate amount of time chasing pussy.
This article seems like the dark mirror image of the idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a couple years now: namely, that women don't really feel attraction to men, at least not in a way that a man would recognize. Consider the difference between the relationship-as-leisure mindset versus the relationship-as-work mindset: for someone with the leisure mindset, as you said, the relationship *is* the reward: It's inherently gratifying to spend time around your partner for someone, regardless of any effort you may or may not put into the relationship, like some kind of magic happiness spigot. Contrast with relationships as work: here, just being around your partner isn't enough. You have to extract some sort of value out of them in order to accomplish your actual terminal goal, which, unlike in the former case, is *not* just contact with your partner. The only difference between work and play is whether doing it is gratifying or not, and the fact that women seem to approach relationships as work makes me deeply skeptical that there can be any real attraction (or, rather, "real" attraction) occurring in light of this fact.
Men have different ways of feeling attraction too. For example I never felt the "pretty body, would like to put my penis into it" kind of attraction, it was just too vulgar for me.
For cats, it's about the smell as much as a queen having a nice figure, a saucy tilt of the ears and a witch of the tail that suggests a cat who is up for adventure.
I like this article, but it suffers a little from sounding overly transactional. I think this often happens when you explain the give and take in a relationship explicitly.
Think about it in terms of sex: If both partners are mutually putting in effort it is hot and attractive, if only one partner is doing all the work and the other is lying there like a cold fish, its not attractive or good. Women are attracted to those that work with them, excited and proactive about jumping in; I don't think there is anything particularly weird about being attracted to that.
A fascinatingly interesting comment, thank you. I think I understand what you mean: Genuine attraction requires a certain degree of playfulness. And trying to change someone for the better is not playful.
I enjoy spending time with my children. At the same time, it is work, because I'm trying to improve my children. In that sense, women treat their partners as they treat children - as lovely work.
And as everyone knows, being someone's mother (or being mothered) is not very compatible with sexual attraction. And as everybody knows, women have a tendency to lose sexual interest in their partners when the partner gets too familiar. I think there could be a clear connection here - making one's partner an object of work kills off attraction.
The good news is that women also feel that kind of playful attraction that men do. And I think that every instruction book for how to be a woman should urge women to remember to continue seeing their partners that way too. It is entirely possible to alternate between seeing a person as a flawed object of improvement and an object of attraction. Many relationships would be happier with more of the latter from the female side.
Women should just still out and relax then. Just stop working in or on the relationship. Why put in any effort if the other party isn't? Both can be slackers together and it will probably be a great, go with the flow symbiosis.
I love Tove's writing as much for the absence of obvious political shaping as the insight. This is an example at its best. It comes just as I'm mentally abstracting a piece of my own on sex & love. So, for now, just a thank you (although many observations also resonated - including those in the comments). Everyone is thoughtful & smart on this blog.
This framing makes a lot of sense to me. As you got towards the end, I was thinking about men's tendency to be lazier and to sort of "expect" the concept of more options and more reproductive success, as an excuse to invest less emotionally. A couple things I wanted to add:
First, I know men who go fully to one end of the spectrum - their only goal in life is to provide money and security, and they think that buys their way out of all other responsibilities. Needless to say these men end up unhappy with terrible marriages and bad relationships with their kids. Making a lot of money is not an excuse to forgo literally all of the other life skills you're supposed to acquire as a man. This mindset might have worked at some point, when just keeping children alive was a victory. But it is profoundly outdated, and men who fail to see that are failing a basic test of intelligence (and manliness).
And second, there is a tendency for even mediocre men - men who aren't providing a lot of money or security - to do this same thing. To bring low investment to the relationship, to adopt the mindset that the relationship is just the home thing. That there are other options - subconsciously they believe they could still find reproductive success elsewhere.
And it may sound harsh, but it's like... dude, if you're not providing a lot of resources, I'm sorry but you're going to have to work even harder at home than the men who are. You don't have the luxury of treating your relationship as a given. Is it unfair? Sure, all of life is unfair. But a man who isn't at least providing a lot of resources has even less an ability to rest on his laurels than a high earner or a stud.
"I always reasoned: “If you just tell me what you want me to do, I’ll gladly do it.”
This isn't really true. This is the voice of the superego that tries to maintain a positive self-image. The deeper recesses of the soul actually hate these chores, but few men have the self-reflection to admit it.
These tasks are mundane, boring, nothing heroic about them, a 75 IQ person with the physical strength of a child could do them. I was very unhappy in my marriage after our child was born, I told my life I hate being at home in the evenings, it is all extremely boring, mundane and unheroic, I don't understand how can she cope with that.
How can a person do tasks that do not make themselves feel good about them, because they are so easy, anyone could do them?
Well I suppose they can try to not make them about themselves, but I am not so unselfish.
How can women accept a life of mundane, unheroic tasks? Are they really that unselfish?
Treating the home as a second workplace is bad enough in itself, but in the real workplace I solve computer puzzles only a few % of people could. Filling a dishwasher is something any child could do. Maybe one could train a monkey to. I absolutely hated this stuff.
I told her I want to be a rampaging viking, or something, romantic adventure, challenge, heroism, I cannot deal with this gray mundane domestic life.
The marriage did not last long after.
Well of course I did not turn into any kind of adventurer, but now I get to read about them. And paid help does the chores.
So my take is men do not deal well with domestication, we just try to maintain a good-hubby self-image so we lie to ourselves and tell us we do.
The results are these excuses "I did not know it needs to be done" and so on.
One thing is clear, I am never ever doing a live-in relationship again. I want relationships as vacation, leisure, going to the beach together and suchlike.
Post-40 it is doable, many older divorcee women want it like that - staying independent.
I understand perfectly what you mean. Actually, I could have said that myself when I had only one child. Paradoxically, that is one reason why I have six children: One or two is too easy. With more children it starts to get more similar to computer puzzles.
My guess is that the boredom of domestic life is one very important reason behind the fertility crisis. People need incentives to choose to have children - and definitely choose to have more than two children. Just saying that having children is extremely fun and stimulating doesn't work. Because as you say, many parts of it are not.
Interesting! Well a "herding cats" experience would have been challenging enough to be fun, I think.
When the neighbor kid, who is also a single child, visits my daughter, she is entirely transformed. Even just two work very different than one. She is transformed from the lazy phone addict couch potato to a whirlwind, they chase each other around the garden, with the dogs and all.
Cats resent being herded!
What in the world is "relationship theory"? What are you even talking about?
""*If a woman obviously puts a lot of effort into looking sexy, don't pursue her for a long-term relationship. Slutshame her instead.""
This is a common misconception. Men do not slut shame in anywhere near the intensity and frequently as women do. Women do this because a slut lowers the value of sex for all women. If sex were cheap and easy, women would get fewer benefits for holding out. Men on the other hand love cheap and easy sex. Why would we ever want to dissuade a woman from engaging in such.
My relationship has been on the rocks for about a year, and I have attempted to leave several times, but my partner says “he’ll really change this time”, and for some reason I believe him, despite us discussing the same issues for years and years.
Starting about a year ago, I have been frequently asking him to read a certain relationship book that offers great understanding and strategies to deal with the issues we have been facing, and he has never read it. Recently he actually read it and our relationship is instantly turning around. He now says he regrets not reading the book a year ago, as it would have saved a year of grief. Men can fuck right off, right?
The problem with blaming the other sex is that both engage in frustrating behavior. The problems are inherent to the human condition. Nothing truly meaningful comes to you easy. If it did, you would not value it.
If you want to see old, lonely and pathetic, find elderly men who were players, or women who dropped every man who did not read her mind. I assure you that working towards a higher goal is worth it. It may not be this one, but you will be regretful if you never sufficiently change and adapt to be part of something greater than yourself.
I mostly give this speech to young men, but I have been giving more and more to women. It is sad how our culture has abandoned so many institutions that were once central to our growth as human beings (churches, clubs,...). We are paying such a high price for that now.
This is actually a new take on the curse of Eve -- that she's going to be thinking too much about her husband, way more than he thinks about her. And she'll be so busy thinking about their relationship that she can't do much else. It certainly describes me. Add kids to the mix, and I'm basically useless. I understand the desire to be a housewife, simply because it's all I can think about anyway.
Are you disappointed you don't have energy left to be a corporate attorney or a stockbroker?
If only we could afford such a luxury.
well, I don't *actually* want to be a dependent and spend my day cleaning up after people. But I do find that since having kids my brain is 25% occupied by them at all times.
I have been saying for years that the problem with modern dating is that men just aren't interested, and there isn't anything you can do to make them interested. Thank you for putting this together! Its a good theory and at least it makes it all make sense. I have historically been very baffled by all of this.
Men are interested, but the women are too busy fighting each other over the sleaziest men. I never cease to be amazed at how many women prefer being cheap playthings to a handful of men over having real relationships with men who actually want them. I am so happy I grew up when I did (1990's).
I think it was better to grow up when I did--in the 1960s and 1970s. But the late 1940s and 1950s might have been still better.
Not my experience in the least!
Interesting read.
Could you give more examples of the work women are putting in? I planned vacations, planned dates, found a place for us to live, moved all our stuff, found her a reliable car, etc. because as she would say “you know I’m not good at that kind of stuff.”
I got the feeling she thought she was sacrificing more than me just because she carried the heavy heavy burden of being unsatisfied with the relationship and who I was as a person.
This whole post seems so backwards to me. Like saying “the consumers of Game of Thrones actually put in more work than the producers, because they spend more time reacting to the finished product.”
I have only dated one man who actually planned dates. I’ve never dated any man who would plan a vacation. I’ve always made more money than the men I’ve dated, and had my shit more together. Maybe I’m just picking/putting up with losers. And maybe you have too.
I’ve spent a lot of time and effort thinking about (and trying to apply) how relationships and life could be improved (communicating better, parenting better, being more healthy, more connection, more fun, more sex), only to receive zero reply or effort from the man. They are then apparently super surprised when I end the relationship
Ever seen "Galaxy Quest"?
The fans are way more invested in the show (and continually find and explain away discrepancies and internal contradictions in the show) than are anyone in the cast, crew or staff.
I was thinking the same; personally, I have seen more couples like you where the man is investing heavily for survival of relationship. The author herself is admitting that she is drawing these conclusions from her anecdotal experiences, her viewpoint can have some value but I will suggest to male readers not to assume that the relationships that will encounter will give same observations as that of the author.
From my personal experience (as a lot of relationship advice is given), it sounds like you were taken for granted as the relationship was one sided. I think women weigh sex (esp. after the initial spark is gone) as more work and emotional upkeep than us guys understand. This can start a cycle, putting in tons of work to get your reward at the end of the night and her believing things are now equal as you both did something to contribute.
Perhaps you are an outlier?
>>Like saying “the consumers of Game of Thrones actually put in more work than the producers, because they spend more time reacting to the finished product.”
A very interesting analogy. And a surprisingly good one. Actually I do think some consumers of Games of Thrones get more obsessed with the show than the creators themselves. The crew will work hard for months and years. But eventually they will move on and create something else. Meanwhile, some fans will remake their entire lives and entire selves after their favorite TV show.
Are they productive? Should they rather be doing something else? Probably, yes. But nonetheless, they are sacrificing more than the crew that created the show. And although those extreme fans are overdoing it, there can't be any show without fans.
It's kind of a sideways analogy, because the "consumers" don't do more work to *produce/create* the show, but the evangelists/true believers/stans are not simply consumers and they maintain the world of the media property (in this case, GOT) long past the creators have moved on, as you say.
It's simply a different thing, but it does relate to your post in that these fans maintain relationships/a shared reality with one another requires much more/different work than the producers. It's why Lost disappointed so many hardcore fans: nothing the production team could come up with could compare with the years long, collaborative project of thinking up scenarios of what's really going on and projecting "4D chess." The way fans are stoked to heavily invest emotionally, financially, and spiritually these days and leads to intense backlashes it's reflective of your point.
There have been many shows without fans. You simply never hear of them.
I would critique your comment about "slut shaming." That is a female pastime. Men love sluts. Otherwise, this is mostly accurate. Women do not experience the horrors of constantly being told that they are not good enough. Men often get rejects more times than the average woman can comprehend. The act of getting a woman to call you is an achievement. Once a woman sleeps with you, you need time to recover from that process.
Women often have a very hard time understanding the difficulties of normal men. They look at the tall, handsome CEO's and imagine every man's life is easy and fun. It is actually brutally difficult, from beatings and hazing in youth, to the repeated sneering of the opposite sex until he has the assets to demand female attention.
What you should be writing about is how women have the LUXURY of putting time and effort into relationships. Most men do not. Pornography and gaming are not the cause of male suffering but rather the analgesic men use to survive the modern loneliness they endure while women fight with each other to become the 'nth mistress of a high-status male.
This is why humans invented monogamy, to spread the love around a bit, so to speak.
Monogamy was a distinctly Christian idea. Polygamy was the norm across Africa, the Middle East and China until the end of the second world war. China only ditched their traditional polygamy in 1949, when they bizarrely copied Christian models of living from Marxists. Muslims still practice it, as do many in Africa. The Spanish abolished this and forced their Christian marriage practices upon the Americas.
Today we are returning to the biological norm of elite males getting many females and most males getting none. Whether this is a result of feminism or the decline of Christianity is debatable.
This was excellent and very insightful.
One thing that I think would help build this out is the women's relationship with her children. Once she has children, I think her focus is much more on them and much less on him. This increases her cognitive workload on relationships and complicates her relationship with her husband (not just from less attention for him but also home is no longer a refuge when there are a bunch of screaming kids around).
Thoughts?
I think there lies a lot in this. Also, society encourages parents to put more or less all cognitive effort they have into their children. Children are often described as demanding to the degree that parents should have little attention left for anything else.
I guess there are countless relationships where the female party first was a good girlfriend/wife for a number of years and spent most of her attention on being girlfriend/wife. When kids finally arrive, she changes identity to good mother. And then there is not much relationship left.
"If a woman obviously puts a lot of effort into looking sexy, don't pursue her for a long-term relationship. Slutshame her instead."
Generally agree with the article and find it insightful, but from what I can tell, women more than men slutshame and zealously enforce female chastity. I suppose this is because "loose women" are seen as the equivalent of scabs who undercut the union price. Men see the overly sexy woman as a good time, but not more.
This is contra feminist mythology.
I felt strongly about this as well. I have never seen a male slut shame a woman other than some weak, weepy rejected male. Men love having sluts around. In a perfect world, there would be sluts everywhere and most men could focus more time and energy on important things like quality whisky and fine time pieces.
This is basically how it is for cats. Pretty much all of us were raised by single mothers, basically none of us know for sure who our father is, and tomcats never pay child support.
Even if I wanted to help out with the kittens, some of them might be mine, remember, I wouldn't dream of trying, not if I valued my ears.
Although tomcats do spend an inordinate amount of time chasing pussy.
This article seems like the dark mirror image of the idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a couple years now: namely, that women don't really feel attraction to men, at least not in a way that a man would recognize. Consider the difference between the relationship-as-leisure mindset versus the relationship-as-work mindset: for someone with the leisure mindset, as you said, the relationship *is* the reward: It's inherently gratifying to spend time around your partner for someone, regardless of any effort you may or may not put into the relationship, like some kind of magic happiness spigot. Contrast with relationships as work: here, just being around your partner isn't enough. You have to extract some sort of value out of them in order to accomplish your actual terminal goal, which, unlike in the former case, is *not* just contact with your partner. The only difference between work and play is whether doing it is gratifying or not, and the fact that women seem to approach relationships as work makes me deeply skeptical that there can be any real attraction (or, rather, "real" attraction) occurring in light of this fact.
Men have different ways of feeling attraction too. For example I never felt the "pretty body, would like to put my penis into it" kind of attraction, it was just too vulgar for me.
For cats, it's about the smell as much as a queen having a nice figure, a saucy tilt of the ears and a witch of the tail that suggests a cat who is up for adventure.
I like this article, but it suffers a little from sounding overly transactional. I think this often happens when you explain the give and take in a relationship explicitly.
Think about it in terms of sex: If both partners are mutually putting in effort it is hot and attractive, if only one partner is doing all the work and the other is lying there like a cold fish, its not attractive or good. Women are attracted to those that work with them, excited and proactive about jumping in; I don't think there is anything particularly weird about being attracted to that.
She's attracted to your ability to show up.
"Showing up is 80% of Success. Showing up on-time is 90%. Showing up on-time with a good attitude is 99%."
A fascinatingly interesting comment, thank you. I think I understand what you mean: Genuine attraction requires a certain degree of playfulness. And trying to change someone for the better is not playful.
I enjoy spending time with my children. At the same time, it is work, because I'm trying to improve my children. In that sense, women treat their partners as they treat children - as lovely work.
And as everyone knows, being someone's mother (or being mothered) is not very compatible with sexual attraction. And as everybody knows, women have a tendency to lose sexual interest in their partners when the partner gets too familiar. I think there could be a clear connection here - making one's partner an object of work kills off attraction.
The good news is that women also feel that kind of playful attraction that men do. And I think that every instruction book for how to be a woman should urge women to remember to continue seeing their partners that way too. It is entirely possible to alternate between seeing a person as a flawed object of improvement and an object of attraction. Many relationships would be happier with more of the latter from the female side.
You need an instruction book for how to be a woman? I know human women are supposed to be complicated, but are they really that complicated?
We most definitely are!
Humans are baffling....
Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps (1999, with Barbara Pease)[9][10]