Men consume relationships. Women produce them.

Women tend to consider relationships work. Men tend consider them leisure

Lately there has been some discussion and advice on Substack on romantic relationships, containing quotes like the following:

“Women marry hoping their husbands will change; men marry hoping their wives won’t change. And they’re both usually disappointed.”

Different varieties of that quote have appeared at different places during the 20th century. It is a popular saying for a reason: There is something in it.

Producer females, consumer males

I have an (equally anecdotal and unscientific) theory why things are this way: Because for women, romantic relationships are work, aimed at achieving things, while for men, romantic relationships are leisure, aimed at relaxing and having a good time.

That is the number one difference between male and female relationship styles, I think. The usual differences that are well-established by science appear much smaller: Women value commitment higher than men, men like casual relationships more and so on. All this is well-known. But the difference between the sexes in these areas are not that big and pervasive. The male and female averages differ, but there is also a large gender overlap: There are plenty of very devoted men and rather casual-minded women on the market.

Instead I think that the biggest, most consistent difference between male and female relationship styles lies in the amount of intellectual investment in relationship matters. All over the scale from the most casual-minded to the most devoted, women expect relationships to be a kind of work. Exciting, rewarding and even sometimes mind-blowing work. But still, fundamentally, work. Women expect to direct great intellectual effort to their relationships, regardless of what kind of relationships they prefer. They expect to focus and concentrate and rationally share thoughts and experiences with other women in order to take the right steps and make the right decisions.

In contrast to that, men all over the casual-devoted scale tend to see their relationships as a reward for work well done. A sexual or romantic relationship is what comes after work. That doesn't mean that men aren't prepared to work to maintain and support their relationships. They just don't expect the relationship in itself to be work. 

The average male approaches potential female romantic partners a bit like consumers of a ready-made product. When a typical man meets the woman of his life, he reacts like someone who opens a package from Amazon. 

The most sought-after husbands react with astonishment when opening the package. They think they have gotten an invaluable product that is worth protecting and maintaining at almost any cost. 

The less sought-after husbands scrutinize their product and assess whether they are likely to get something better or not. They conclude the product needs to be good enough at the moment, but keeps an eye open for other opportunities.

Another less-sought-after kind of husband blandly accepts their product as a fact of life. So this is what they get, they conclude. They don't actively search for anything else, but they also don't invest more than necessary in what is just a mundane part of reality. If someone better, or someone at all, comes up and offers herself, they happily accept. Then their assessment that this-is-it is proven wrong, and the foundation for marriage crumbles. 

Women at work

The same scale of devotion and callousness exists on the female side. The difference is that the typical woman doesn't see a husband as a consumer product. Rather, she sees him as a fundamental building block in her Project Build a Relationship. The most important project in life. 

The most devoted type of wife will adapt her project to the building block she finds. He might be so inspiring and impressive that he gives her entirely new ideas for Project Build a Relationship. However, not even the most devoted wives get completely stricken with awe. Because essentially, they are at work. That requires a measure of clarity of thought. Those few women who actually get completely enchanted by their male partners will lose more or less all their agency in the process. They will be caught up in a grand project where someone else controls the steering wheel. 

Less devoted types of wives will be on the look-out for their ideal building blocks. If one who seemed promising enough is not keeping up to expectations, they will discard him and search for a new one. Not uncommonly, they will scout the market for a new and better partner through having an affair¹.

What they will mostly not do, is acting as haplessly as men. They can be just as callous, insensitive and disloyal to their partner. But they will not be as clueless. Whether they are of the devoted and loyal kind or the more opportunistic kind, they will take their relationships seriously. They will not just slip into relationships and affairs. When they enter a relationship, it is with the intention of building a relationship. When they enter an affair, it is mostly with the intention of trying out an alternative partner without immediately giving up the first one².

Essentially, building relationships is the great project of human females. They sometimes make mistakes and think they can build a relationship with a man who is hopelessly badly suited for the purpose, or leave a man who seems as promising as any to an outside observer. But in general, they are using all their IQ points when they build relationships. They do not always succeed, but they are trying very hard. 

Even the most loyal and devoted husbands are not really as women tend to be. They are prepared to invest enormous amounts of work in the object of their passion. But they would prefer that she came with a manual. However much they are prepared to sacrifice for their priceless partner, they see her as an object of devotion rather than as a project. They happily accept a very high price. But they mostly don't get the idea that they are supposed to spend great intellectual effort on figuring out how to pay that price.

Only circumstantial proof

The basis of my assertions above are 

1. A large number of anecdotes acquired throughout life

2. A few pieces of circumstantial proof from science that point in the same direction

3. The presence of a couple of writers who have made more or less the same observations as me

My personal anecdotes are, well, personal anecdotes and in themselves too petty to mention here. The scientific clues are, more or less:

* Women talk and read more about relationships than men.³

* Men fall in love more easily than women.⁴

* American men are happier with their partners when cohabitating than when married, while American women are less happy in cohabiting relationships than in marriage.⁵

* Women initiate divorce much more often than men. 

* Stable romantic relationships between homosexual men tend to be fewer per capita than lesbian and heterosexual relationships. Without women working on and maintaining relationships, it seems like the number of stable relationships decreases.⁶ 

I'm not completely certain that all the above assertions are the product of conclusive or even good science. But at least they were obtained using some kind of scientific method.

Then we have the writers who have come to the same conclusion as me. Most of all a man called Matthew Fray. His wife divorced him because he left dishes by the sink. According to Matthew Fray himself, she was right in doing so. The couple had a one-year-old son together and Matthew fell into deep depression when his wife divorced him with that explicit explanation. After pulling himself together, he made the conclusion that his wife had been nagging him about those dishes because the dish question actually meant something to her. Ignoring her appeals to put his used dishes in the dishwasher meant the same as stating that her opinion was unimportant to him. He now works as a relationship coach in order to help other men avoid repeating such simple mistakes.

Matthew Fray writes explicitly that men make themselves less intelligent in relationship matters than at work:

"I always reasoned: “If you just tell me what you want me to do, I’ll gladly do it.”

But she didn’t want to be my mother. She wanted to be my partner, and she wanted me to apply all of my intelligence and learning capabilities to the logistics of managing our lives and household[...] 

Men invented heavy machines that can fly in the air reliably and safely. Men proved the heliocentric model of the solar system, establishing that the Earth orbits the Sun. Men design and build skyscrapers, and take hearts and other human organs from dead people and replace the corresponding failing organs inside of living people, and then those people stay alive afterward. Which is insane.

Men are totally good at stuff.

Men are perfectly capable of doing a lot of these things our wives complain about. What we are not good at is being psychic, or accurately predicting how our wives might feel about any given thing because male and female emotional responses tend to differ pretty dramatically."⁷

An entirely different writer reporting similar conclusions is Lisa Taddeo, famous for her non-fiction book Three Women (2019). In the preface of that book Taddeo explains that she at first intended to write about male desire, but changed her mind when she was confronted with the shallowness of men's attitude to their relationships:

"Presidents forfeit glory for blow jobs. Everything a man takes a lifetime to build he may gamble for a moment. I have never entirely subscribed to the theory that powerful men have such outsize egos that they cannot suppose they will ever be caught; rather, I think that the desire is so strong in the instant that everything else—family, home, career—melts down into a little liquid cooler and thinner than semen. Into nothing.

As I began to write this book, a book about human desire, I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee. So I began by talking to men: to a philosopher in Los Angeles, a schoolteacher in New Jersey, a politician in Washington, D.C. I was indeed drawn to their stories the way one is drawn to order the same entrée from a Chinese restaurant menu again and again.

The philosopher’s story, which began as the story of a good-looking man whose less beautiful wife did not want to sleep with him, with all the attendant miserly agonies of dwindling passion and love, turned into the story of a man who wanted to sleep with the tattooed masseuse he saw for his back pain. She says she wants to run away with me to Big Sur, he texted early one bright morning. The next time we met I sat across from him at a coffee shop as he described the hips of the masseuse. His passion didn’t seem dignified in the wake of what he had lost in his marriage; rather, it seemed perfunctory.

The men’s stories began to bleed together. In some cases, there was prolonged courting; sometimes the courting was closer to grooming; but mostly, the stories ended in the stammering pulses of orgasm. And whereas the man’s throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm, I found that the woman’s was often just beginning."⁸

Admittedly, Lisa Taddeo mostly seems to assume that it is the strength of male desire that blocks every intellectual effort, while I make the more cynical assumption that men consider passionate relationships leisure and subsequently turn their brains off when they enter one. But Lisa Taddeo and I have made the same observations: Typical men don't have many interesting things to say about their passionate relationships, because they spend their intellectual efforts elsewhere.

Where does all that female IQ go? 

If writers like Matthew Fray are right that men underperform in relationships compared to their general intelligence, that leads to another question: Do women underperform in areas other than relationships, since they put so much of their time and energy and intellectual resources into relationships?

It is a relevant question, because women clearly seem to be underperforming in intellectual pursuits. A hundred years ago that could be explained by gender oppression and discrimination. But that is not the case today. Women who feel discriminated against are free to start a Substack (like I did when I felt the world was discriminating against me). And I have yet to find an abundance of discriminated-against female intellectuals here. I find at least as many undervalued male intellectuals. For that reason, I find it difficult to believe that women in general hold great intellectual insights in secret. If those hidden insights are ever to reveal themselves, the time is now.

Gaussian distribution of IQ of men (σ ≈ 16.2) and women (σ ≈ 13.2), from Scrutinizing Distributions Proves That IQ Is Inherited and Explains the Fat Tail, 2020, by Michael Grabinski and Galiya Klinkova

We always have the explanation that there are fewer women with very high IQs. Males and females have about the same average IQ, but the male curve has fatter tails: There are more low-IQ males and more very high-IQ males. The problem with that explanation is that in most intellectual areas, IQ above a certain level is a poor predictor of performance, as I wrote more about here. The greater frequency of high IQs should benefit males in physics and mathematics. But males also outperform females in areas where there is little measurable female disadvantage. Whatever area we are looking at, except maybe the most feminine like fashion design, there are more males than females at the top. 

The reason could be that those less measurable abilities that make people interesting intellectuals are distributed just like IQ, with fatter tails on the male side. But it could also be that females have another distribution of interests than males. If a male philosopher turns his brain off when he enters a new relationship, maybe that leaves him the freedom to engage more with philosophy. Relaxing at home can probably save men some effort they can use in intellectual endeavors. And conversely, intense fretting over relationships probably takes female intellectual attention away from the world of science and philosophy.

Traces of oppression 

If my perception that men spend comparatively little intellectual effort on relationships is right, there are two possible explanations:

1. Environmental influences

2. Hardwired, biological causes

If there lies something in the biological explanation, I think that is yet another sign that history hasn't been very gender equal. Human males evolved to invest in their partner and children - and to invest quite a lot. But that investment tends to be of the objective kind. Men typically want to invest in what they find valuable.

That points to a history of relative unfreedom for females. If females had any important means of hurting the prospects of husbands who didn't please them, I think males would have evolved better abilities to care about female subjective feelings. The current division of relational labor simply suggests that during history, men were more important to women than women were to men. If the cost of a non-functioning relationship was higher for the female party than for the male party, it would be a safe bet for males to shift over the burden of making relationships work to females. That is just game theory. 

There are other reasons for men to stay oblivious to their partners' wishes as well:

1. It paid off to be selfish. A man's reproductive interest is often not the same as his wife's. For example, a first wife might have felt high levels of distress from getting a co-wife. Ignoring his wife's interests could be very reproductively rewarding for a man. 

2. In a society where male reproductive success is more uneven than female reproductive success, a man who manages to reproduce should, on average, be a little more well-adapted to the environment than a woman who manages to reproduce. If, for example, the pool of females is reduced through infanticide and childhood neglect (more about that here), growing up alive is the main merit on the female side. Males, on the other hand, compete as adults. That could make the average breeding male a better decision-maker than the average breeding female. If an average man and an average woman in such an environment are striving equally for the welfare of the family unit, the probability that the man's opinions are better should be slightly higher than the reverse. That way, the ignore-the-subjective-feelings-of-your-wife mindset might have been neutral or even slightly beneficial throughout history, also among husbands who completely bet on a high investment strategy. 

If there is any biological background to the leisurely male approach to relationships, it is a sign that entertaining relationships wasn't the main job for men. Negotiating, trading, plotting and fighting with other men probably was the real job. Actually being with the woman was the easy part. Time to relax and reap the fruits of hard work and good fortune.

The lost manual

As long as men dominated women, ignoring the finer nuances of female subjective feelings was a rather safe strategy. When male superiority over females gradually dissolved, men still weren't required to become relationship connoisseurs. Instead they were given a manual for how a decent husband was supposed to behave. It consisted of points like:

*Be faithful.

*Work hard to support your family.

*Invest the bulk of your money in your family.

*Show your partner appreciation through obtaining as valuable gifts as you can sensibly afford. 

*If a woman obviously puts a lot of effort into looking sexy, don't pursue her for a long-term relationship. Slutshame her instead.

As long as such a manual existed, there was a way for men to invest labor and resources in their relationship without much intellectual effort. They could just follow the manual and please partners and potential partners sufficiently. When the manual was taken away in the name of individualism and liberalism, people had to figure out for themselves how to invest. This arrangement hit disproportionately against those who didn't have the habit and propensity to figure relationship stuff out. 

The ubiquity of male sexlessness and loneliness made numerous men enter that traditionally female realm of relationship theory. But mostly only very superficially. Discussions within the incel sphere are predominantly about how to catch the interest of a willing desirable woman and little about how to build a relationship with that desirable woman.⁹ Even the most desperate men take the same road as their much more successful ancestors and leave relationship matters to women. (There are indeed a few male writers, like Jakob Falkovich, who are using their intellectual gifts to reason about relationship dynamics and who have people from the incel sphere in their audience. But so far it hasn't led to a mass movement.)

The main difference compared to before is that women's right not to be interested is now very much of a concern and cause of aggrievement. She doesn't need him more than he needs her. But while she spends a lot of time and effort figuring out whether it is worth it and in what way, he can only haplessly observe whether she wants to stay with him or not. In a world of gender equality, male disinterest in relationship dynamics has become a liability.

It seems like most men don’t want to spend any substantial portion of their intellectual capacity on relationship theory. The real question is: Can they get away with it? Or has the evolution of relationship theorists finally started also on the male side?

Emmet Brickowski: A man who liked his manual. The Lego Movie Fandom Wiki 

1. David Buss, When Men Behave Badly, 2021, chapter 3

2. David Buss, When Men Behave Badly, 2021, chapter 3

3. Sai Gaddam, Ogi Ogas, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, 2011, chapter 4

4. https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3wekz/why-men-fall-in-love-faster-than-women, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224545.2010.522626

https://www.aurorahealthcareblog.org/2016/02/12/do-you-believe-in-love-at-first-sight/

https://www.foxnews.com/health/love-at-first-sight-is-real-if-you-believe

5. https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-asked-whom-does-it-matter-who-makes-the-first-move-in-a-relationship

6. Christopher Carpenter and Gary J Gates, Gay and Lesbian Partnership: Evidence from California, 2008

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831392/

7. From Matthew Fray's blog https://matthewfray.com/2016/01/14/she-divorced-me-because-i-left-dishes-by-the-sink/

8. Lisa Taddeo, Three Women, 2019. Excerpt can be found at https://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/three-women-by-lisa-taddeo/excerpt

9. I'm referring to some Swedish-Japanese basic research here: Peter Ueda, Man väljer sin egen väg, 2023. More about that book during the coming few weeks.