Missing The Point of Romance

Mate Hunting that Works

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The Dating Crisis

Dating was broken. Nobody was getting together at work anymore, because recent major sexual harassment scandals were casting a hell of a shadow. Women were frustrated, because although they didn’t have any trouble getting dates and getting laid, nobody seemed to want to keep them long term.

People were staying single for longer, some of them not pairing up until they were in their late twenties, and those who paired up were heavily discouraged from taking things seriously “too soon.” Getting married before your twenty-fifth birthday was considered stupid a priori, and although a lot of people had sex in high school and college in defiance of the normative expectations of adults, the older people got, the less time and latitude they had for meeting anyone.

Careers were more important anyway. If you wanted to be responsible and respectable, you had to concentrate on your career and build a good nest egg so that when you finally did partner up you had something real to offer. Wealth made you marketable if you were a man, and if you were a woman it made you secure—you always had a good exit hatch.

The only people who were really having any success were those in various countercultures—the BDSM scene, the church scene, the drug scene, the rave scene, etc.—and even then, most of the relationships were plagued by drama, intra-couple therapy language, and interference from outsiders.

The entire thing was such a mess that a popular wisdom began to circulate, especially in more conservative wings of the culture, that the only way for a man to win the dating game without being fixed up by family members was to be a tech bro who raked in a lot of cash and could afford a trophy wife—and the only way for a woman to win was to give up on the feminist-friendly party scene and re-embrace more traditional values: dress modestly, allow her parents to help vet her suitors, avoid premarital (or at least pre-engagement) sex, and stop socializing altogether with men who didn’t interest her as potential marriage material.

And so, predictably, a trio of blockbuster novels advice books followed. One was what you might call the original traditionalist MGTOW bible, and the other was the first of the “tradwife” genre to break through to the mainstream—and before both, the “husband hunting” genre experienced a rebirth after a couple decades dormancy.

Thus, in 1995 Sherrie Schneider and Ellen Fain laid out the rules for young women who wanted to land a good mate,¹ in 1997 Joshua Harris decided to kiss dating goodbye,² and in 1999 Wendy Shalit advocated a return to modesty.³

Runaway successes, all

Why were things so broken?

Mostly, it was due to bad luck. Young adults of the time were following the Boomers into the job market, and there were a lot of Boomers, all of whom were older and had more experience. If you wanted to get a foot on the corporate ladder, you had to be willing to work for shit wages or you had to go start your own hustle—which, going by the numbers, would probably fail.

Women who wanted socially-secure families only had to look to an older pool of partners to be able to get financial stability with a man who’d outgrown his childish insecurities (or at least knew how to hide them better). Thanks to the prevalence of divorce at the time,⁴ there were a lot of single, fairly well-off, middle-aged men.

Young men who wanted women their own age were in a tough spot indeed, and their best bet involved landing a girl at a residential college before she was old enough to know that she could do better—and then hope like hell that, once she got into the workforce, she wasn’t wooed away by the wily men of the world (or got so lost in her career that she stopped putting priority of action on her partner and/or family altogether).

Women, on the other hand, weren’t much better off. The men their own age whose attention they sought and/or could easily get were often players—that is, guys who were into bedpost-notching and always had a better deal right around the corner. Guys with interesting hobbies often had poor social skills, or strange perversions, or major dysfunctions and daddy issues that made them unsuitable.

And those older men they could land by batting an eye in the right direction? Well, the problem with those relationships, as a significant minority of women who got into them found out, was that the power imbalances in both directions were very tough to negotiate—the young woman always had a better option (at least in terms of youth and vitality) than her husband, and the husband knew more about money, the law, personal manipulation, and social politics. It was not uncommon for these couples to enter death spirals not long after the honeymoon ended.⁵

The world today, of course, is a bit different. We didn’t have smart phones and dating apps back then—instead, we had singles bars. They’d always been there, of course, but they’d previously been a specialized scene frequented only by people looking for sex, not people looking for relationships.

However, they suddenly got more important as our ability to meet partners at work, through family, and through friends got frozen out in the wake of an economic recession and a sexual harassment panic⁶ all while the whole culture was still at the end of a protracted panic over repressed memories, child molestation, sex trafficking, and Satanic ritual abuse. And, if you were a dude, to score at a singles bar, you had to be rich, muscly, tall, or really socially adept (and it helped if you were all of the above).

We didn’t have the words MGTOW or Incel or Chad, but we certainly had the types. We also had man-hating feminists setting a lot of the cultural conversation, flanked by woman-hating fuck boys, religious conservative trad-fetishsists, and pornographers, all under the shadow of an increasing desperation on everyone’s part to find a way to partner up before all the good ones were gone.

A popular joke of the time went like this:

Men/women are like parking spaces. All the good ones are either taken or handicapped.

Everything old is new again.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Dating is broken now, too. If you’re among those who are suffering in the current broken-down bonding scene, or among those who (like myself) are worried about the people who are, you may find yourself tempted to blame the apps, or the economy, or the maxxers and the chads and the bitches and hoes and the incels and femcels and everybody and everything else that seems to be making the situation impossible.

And, just like the elements that made dating impossible during my young adulthood (demography, culture pressures, economic woes, video games, and social tumult/breakdown), the new impossible obstacles (which include all of the above that my generation faced, plus the lockdowns, the further restriction of social venues and mores, social media, smart phones and everything deleterious they enable) are actual problems.

But, in both eras, the reflexive fixes—a return to imaginary “traditional”⁷ values, leaving the dating market entirely, throwing shade at the other sex, and despairing that one will never be in the top ten percent of mates who can reliably attract the people they really want to—are entirely self-defeating. And they both stem from a basic misunderstanding of what each sex wants, and what the whole mating game is ultimately for…especially in a world where childlessness is common.

Who Wants a Spouse?

If things are so impossible, why do we do it?

Sure, our sex drive pushes us to find sex partners (I daresay that’s why it’s called a “drive”), and our parenting drive pushes us to desire children, and our bonding drive pushes us to desire connections to friends and family, but why do we spend so much time hunting for mates? Why do we prize marriage or marriage-like arrangements?

When you strip away sex, and parenting, and romantic feelings, there is a very simple cry at the heart of the social animal:

I want to belong.

We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Our time on the Earth is brief, and we only fully develop when we’re in community with other beings. Being in community is risky—not everyone is going to understand that your preoccupation with watching goats masturbate to John Waters movies isn’t because you’re perving on the goats (or the movies), but because you think campy horny goats are the most hilarious thing in the world. It makes sense to want someone in your corner that understands you. Someone who is on your team, come-what-may.

Because of the way humans do the pair-bonding thing, we tend to seek out such people with our sex drives, and those drives tend to push us towards superlatives (the most beautiful, the most pure, the most successful, the most buff, etc.). And because, on top of sex being a method of deep communication, sexual success equates to literally fulfilling the purpose our bodies evolved for, our sexuality is a gateway into the most vulnerable parts of ourselves—thus, even if we learn to manage the vulnerability well, we are all tremendously sensitive to rejection.⁸

And, since we are often sexually compatible (a biological thing) with people to whom we are not well-suited as partners (a psychological and social thing), most romantic relationships have a shelf life—and that’s quite apart from the basic vast incompatibilities in communication styles, drives, and values that separate even the most feminine heterosexual men from even the most masculine heterosexual women.

In a pre-agricultural context, where children only needed to be closely-parented until they were mobile on their own, and where close parenting was often the responsibility of the mother’s family, these incompatibilities weren’t a huge problem—fuck whoever you’re sexually compatible with, stick with someone you’re in love with, and if it ends, your kids are still okay. This fits with the rhythms of life in a hunter-gatherer society, where opportunism and canniness are essential, on every level, to life itself. Hunter-gatherer tribes share fate and risk among the tribe.⁹

Once you get agriculture in the mix, the rhythms of life shift into something decidedly more long-term. Farming doesn’t just require the ability to look ahead for a season—it requires the ability to look ahead decades. Ground must be prepped, and unless you’re in the heart of a river valley with reliable flooding (such as along the Nile before the Aswan Dam), that prep includes building the soil, pulling up rocks, and a litany of other things. If you want to farm a patch of ground for more than a couple years, you have to manage things with a very long time horizon; the decisions you make today will affect whether your grandchildren are able to eat long after you’re dead.

This world requires a different kind of sexual and romantic partnership: one that lasts, and where each party can bear a different sort of load. The business of life is a business indeed, and must be managed like one, but to be bearable it still must meet the needs of the principals (i.e. the spouses, however many of them there are, for in agricultural contexts, polygamy is common) well enough that the family doesn’t destroy itself. Arranged marriages are common. Shared fate helps keep things functioning well enough, and the community enforces the match because chaos in the neighborhood is perilous for everyone.

As life shifts into the industrial age, so too shift the things that we demand of our partners. In the industrial age and following, humans become semi-nomadic again, except that instead of following the weather, they’re following work. Short term relationships are appropriate and common in such a world, because the next change in the economic winds might push you to another town, another state, or (in extreme circumstances) another country—and because the pressure from outsiders (extended family members, community scolds, etc.) didn’t work as well to keep marriages together.

In this world the desire for a lover and the desire to belong are closer and more directly identified than ever before, because the home is a small, mobile place where the family is such an atomized social unit that one might call it “nuclear.”

Our world since has gotten even more atomized. Gone are the days when parties and gatherings were a weekly part of most people’s lives, where public festivals and concerts united communities, where we did most of our shopping in our own neighborhood, and where we countered the atomizing pressures of reading and television with book clubs and fan conventions. We each now spend much of our lives in a highly curated individual universe, and if we’re not very careful, we wind up doing so completely alone—regardless of how successful we are with friends, lovers, and partners.

Mate Market or Butcher Shop?

Each of the above underlying economic conditions places unnatural demands on human mating, but it is nonetheless the hand we are dealt, and we must play it.

It does a woman no good to curse the fact that she can’t easily live a fulfilled life where, because her children are safely parented by her brothers, she is free to take the lovers and build the relationships she desires without risking their safety. Nor does it do a man any good to complain that he can’t reliably get laid (or even win female esteem, which is actually the animating motivation for men after they get out of the storm-years of puberty) so long as he does a pretty decent job defending the village.

We live when and where we live, and although we’ve got a certain amount of power over the “where,” nobody among us is capable of picking the “when.”

Except maybe for this guy

That raises three very important questions for a young adult looking for love:

1. What does it take to make a good partnership work?

2. What does it take to make a good partnership last?

3. What does it take to find a good partner in the first place?

You may notice that those questions are a bit out of order, chronologically speaking. Fear not, there is a madness to my method: how you answer the final question is conditioned by what you’re looking for, and how long you want it to last. If you don’t understand where you’re aiming, you won’t know how to do your hunting.

You’ve been wading through the a butcher shop of broken hearts and frustrated expectations behind the meat market of Tindr and Grindr, so you may as well get a look into how the relational sausage is made.

What Makes a Relationship Work?

St. Paul famously saw marriage as a sacramental re-enactment of the relationship between Christ and the Church:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a glorious church, without stain or wrinkle or any such blemish, but holy and blameless.

In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. Indeed, no one ever hated his own body, but he nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church. For we are members of His body.

—Ephesians 5:22-30, Berean Standard Bible

So there you go. Man dies so woman can live, and woman sacrifices her will so that man may command, eh? And that’s supposed to make a relationship healthy?

What a load of crap.

And that is the most decent advice attributed to St. Paul on the subject of marriage—similar passages in Corinthians and Colossians are focused entirely on the Sharia-like insistence that men should rule their well-concealed wives, and wives should put up with it. Given the generally shitty quality of Paul’s relational advice, it shouldn’t be surprising that in his surviving writings he claims to be uninterested in relationships with women.

But, like thousands of hustlers since, he built and sold an idealized model of how things oughta be based on his personal hang-ups.

Those hustlers—and the occasional genuine broker—have collectively written whole libraries of books taking apart every single possible nuance of how to make a relationship work and how to solve common problems within one. Given this astonishing stack of resources, one might expect that marriage and/or partnership is an incredibly complicated thing…but it’s not. It’s very simple, and all of its many problems derive from its simplicity.

Here is is:

A partnership works to the extent that each partner is more invested in the success of the team then they are in advancing their own interests. The bet both parties make is the same as the players on a baseball team make: my interests are better served if the team wins than if I look good on my own.

Every single “couples problem” you hear about (sexual problems, money problems, endless fighting, poor communication, interference from friends and families-of-origin, etc.) are the result of one or both partners cheating on the team arrangement.¹⁰

• A husband might be trying to fill a hole in his sense of personal power by demanding the subordination of his wife’s will and interests to his own.

• A wife might play perpetual emotional defense against her husband—not because of anything he did, but because she was previously badly mistreated by people who claimed to love her.

• A husband might be irresponsible with money or paperwork as a tactic to frustrate attempts to control him.

• A wife might spend too much on trinkets and baubles and clothes in order to enhance her own social position, at the expense of the team’s financial, social, or relational goals.

• A husband may choose to dive down the neck of a bottle or into a joint as a way to numb his ennui and avoid the vulnerability that being known by another human requires.

• A wife might use her son or daughter as a proxy spouse because there’s no risk in being vulnerable with a child who’s dependent upon you and who has no experience upon which to disapprove of you or spot your lies.

This is not an exhaustive list. And, of course, each of these kinds of defection can come from either partner.

Even the most horrific problem a couple can face—the death of a child—breaks couples up (when it does) because each partner’s personal grief so undermines the couple’s sense of solidarity that it it so disturbs their ability to act as a team. This is why you’ll occasionally see a fractious couple who lose a child, and who pull together as a result: only their partner truly understands their grief, and the relationship solidifies in the wake of the tragedy.

The team rises when its members prioritize the team above their own self-centered concerns. It falls or fails when one member decides to serve their own interests at the expense of the team.

One of the big reasons that people have trouble finding partners—especially good partners—is that they are looking for something to complete their own lives and meet their own needs, rather than looking for a situation where their gifts and strengths will add value to the life of another, and give birth to a solid team.

A good partnership will fulfill needs and complete lives, but, like good cardiovascular health, these things come as a by-product of other activities that are not always easy or pleasant. You can’t buy romantic bliss off the shelf at the mate store. To get what you want, you must build the thing that can meet those needs: the team.

The team is the shared artistic and workmanlike project of its participants. It is in the nature of teammates of any kind to share a fate—if one rises, all benefit. If one falls, all suffer. The sharing of a fate is the external orienting pressure that, if managed correctly, turns the graphite lump of the participants into the diamond of the solid team.

What does it take to make a good partnership last?

Unfortunately, humans are not rational creatures. We’re not even, really, creatures of habit. We are, like all animals, fundamentally lazy.

This laziness is of a strategic sort:

If you waste energy now, you won’t have it available in an emergency.

This logic is so baked into our DNA that we more-or-less automatically take the path that appears the least fraught in any given moment. If you’ve ever wondered why people get stuck in bad relationships, in lives and jobs and careers they hate, in situations they can’t stand, and hooked on chemicals that destroy their lives, this is why: doing something different and difficult feels more costly than doing something easy and ruinous.

Our species came-of-age (so to speak) in an environment optimized for medium-term mating—as is the case in hunter-gatherer tribes where children become quasi-independent around the age of five—so you would expect to find some predictable patterns in human mating: Intense erotic attachment at the beginning, mellowing out into more settled and comfortable attachment, and then moving towards restlessness and dissatisfaction where each party starts (subconsciously, at least) shopping around for a new arrangement.

In our world, serious relationships reliably break up at 2 years, 7 years, 15 years, and after the departure of grown children. Look at those numbers, and you’ll notice something:

• Two years is about the amount of time it takes for intense erotic attachment to fade, and, in an ancestral environment, if a couple has produced no children in that time, the fading of the attachment marks a natural point of dissolution.

• Seven years from initial mating is the time it takes to reliably raise a child to the age of quasi-independence in an ancestral environment. The seven-year itch is not just a cultural construct.

• Fifteen years is what you might expect if you successfully reboot your relationship after the seven-year doldrums, but don’t remember how to do it next time the itch hits.

• Social pressures and obligation are excellent reasons to see a partnership through to the departure of one’s children. It’s our socially-constructed echo of the biologically-programmed seven-year itch.

As with “how to make a relationship work,” there have been veritable libraries of advice books written on the subject of how to make a relationship last, but because the reason that good relationships decay in the absence of defection by one of the involved parties is biological, all the advice on offer boils down to versions of “find ways to recapture/re-ignite that initial spark.”

Sounds like a good idea, but it ain’t exactly actionable. So how do you actually do it?

If you want to re-ignite that spark, you can’t just spend more time together or have more sex (though these things help). You have to duplicate the singular condition that created that intense excitement in the first place.

At the beginning of every relationship, there is thrill. It’s easy to think that the fun parts—the sex, the laughing, the creative dates, the deep conversation—are the source of that thrill…but they’re not. They are, instead, the venue in which that thrill emerges.

The source of the thrill is, instead, risk.

Think of all the things that thrilled you as a child. You jumped off swings. You rode roller coasters. You slid down slides and hung from monkey-bars. You ran away from people who chased you—or you chased people. You explored strange parts of the neighborhood. You climbed trees. You went streaking. You made friends. You played games. You got into fights. You snuck around in order to avoid the attention of adults who might not approve of your trying cigarettes, or beer, or coffee, or of going to the creek or to the park unsupervised.

All these things (and those like them) gave you a thrill because you were, in every instance, putting yourself at risk of injury, humiliation, exposure, punishment, and even (if you were like the kids I grew up with) death. Thrill is the feeling you get when you combine fear with determination in the face of inevitability. When you’re trying to convince yourself to get on your first roller-coaster you might be filled with dread, but by the time you get to the top of the first climb and you feel the chain let go, you’re hit with the inevitability of the drop, and your whole body fills with terror and joy as you fall free. For reasons you can’t understand, your body starts to get pleasure out of the ride.

When you start a new relationship—and this goes double for new romances—you’re putting yourself at risk. Every new move in the social dance puts you at risk for rejection, and when you are not rejected you love the person who accepted you just a little bit more. If that person matches your risk, the two of you don’t just develop affection for each other, you create a bond of solidarity. You’ve been through the terror of exposure, of letting yourself be known, together. Like soldiers who fought beside one another in battle, you’re bonded.¹¹

So if you want to keep a romantic partnership fresh, you have to find new ways to share risk with your partner. Maybe after over two decades together in the city you decide to uproot your lives and go build a home in the wilderness.¹² Maybe you decide to take up skydiving together. It doesn’t really matter what it is—what matters is that both partners are involved and engaged together, and that each both feel exposed to risk, and sense that their partner also feels a similar level of risk.

When you share risk with someone, everything old about them becomes new again. The body that you know every inch and flaw of becomes young and vital and sexy and irresistible, despite the fact that it’s got wrinkles and moles and too much fat on it. The smile and voice that are so familiar that they are part of the background become fresh and new like they were years before, except now that freshness sits atop years of familiarity, which gives the freshness a new meaning.

A beautiful apple in the store tastes good. That same apple hanging on a tree that was planted in your yard when you were a kid, and that you grew up with, tastes incomparably better.

What does it take to find a good partner in the first place?

Here we finally get to the nub of the matter:

Nobody dates anymore.

People who chat up others in public are creepy.

There’s no other way to meet people besides online.

Even doing things like joining churches or other social clubs doesn’t work anymore.

You can search and search and search, but you’re never going to find anyone.

Men should go their own way. Who needs women anyway?

Women should use their sexuality to control men and land the rich guys.

Mates are like parking spaces: all the good ones are either taken or handicapped.

Forget the bullshit you hear on the internet. Human societies—even polygamous societies—have always been mostly-and-serially monogamous.¹³ Some rare lone-wolves and deeply wounded people to one side, everyone wants something to belong to. Everyone wants a partner, a best friend, a lover, and a comrade-in-arms.

Meeting people who want someone is not difficult. Meeting someone who wants you is the tough part.

Here’s the great secret to finding a good mate:

Become one.

But what if you’re a plain-looking (or ugly) woman? What if you’re a troll-looking dude with no money and no muscles?

90%+ of the people you see on real life have no prayer of living up to the beauty/success standards you see in advertising, porn, and movies.¹⁴ That’s because these things are, for one reason or another, selling you the dream of escape from being you.

You’ve got you to work with. And to be the kind of man or woman that can land a good partner you have to be every inch as good as the kind of partner you’re seeking.

But women are attracted to looks and money and power, aren’t they? And aren’t men attracted to youth and curves?

Well, sure. But those things are just proxies for deeper and more meaningful things. If you weren’t born a winner of the genetic and/or social lottery, you’re going to have to do something those gifted people don’t have to until much later in life, when those natural advantages fade:

Become a good partner.

On average (there are exceptions), here’s what that means:

Men are attracted to warmth, gentleness, strength, openness, and honesty. Great tits may catch their eye, but a great—and genuine—smile is what catches their heart. Men are generally willing to go to great lengths (including the risk of death) for the positive attention (even non-sexual attention) of a woman—any woman.¹⁵ A woman who can be trusted to honor that vulnerability is a catch worth holding on to, even if her face is disfigured by third-degree burns.

Women are attracted to competence and confidence and trustworthiness (all of which are forms of strength). The wealth/power/swagger thing is just an easy-to-spot proxy signal. A man who is predictable is safe to be with (trustworthy), and a man who is competent and confident is adaptable and dependable. Very little feels more valuing than receiving the loving attention of a man who inspires respect with these qualities.¹⁶

Learn to communicate well, to say what you mean, to give without hesitation when you decide to give, and to defend yourself when necessary. And learn to do those things in the context of being on a team.

Once you’ve got those things down, the next step is to get a good idea of what you’ve got to offer. Some people can offer relational security. Some can offer great adventure. Some can offer wealth and opportunity. Some offer a sense of fun and delight. Figure out what you bring that makes being on your team worthwhile. Then, as you’re doing the intimacy dance, find ways to show that part off. You’re looking for someone who can add value to your life, and someone to whose life you can add value. If it goes one way or the other, but not both, it will not work.

Finally, stop chickening out. You are surrounded by people. Talk to them, and learn to do it in a way that makes them feel complimented rather than intruded upon.¹⁷

Risk rejection. Your goal is not to find someone, your goal is to find someone suitable for you. Someone who is already going your way, or who is going and growing in a direction you’re willing to go. Being rejected by someone who doesn’t want you is a gift. They’re being decent enough not to take up your time—which is, in the end, the only resource you really have.

Letting Go of the Bullshit

The neo-trads, the modesty brokers, the MGTOWS, the Andrew Tates, the Male Headship people, the man-haters, the man-eaters, and all the others like them are cheating you. They’re using your dissatisfaction to validate their own (and/or to line their pocketbooks).

For you dudes who think you want a submissive/demure/passive woman, you’re kidding yourself. Someone who won’t challenge you will never stimulate you to grow, and she will bore you before long, and you’ll have trouble getting it up with her. And, if she’s really committed to maintaining the submission bit, she’ll figure out how to manipulate you so that she’s running the show from the shadows, because any man who’s got a hard-on for plenary power is so needy that manipulating him is easy.

For you women who think you want a man you can control, think again. Such a man will very quickly cease being exciting or even lovable—he will, at best, engage your maternal instinct, which will gradually make him sexually revolting to you. And if he’s entirely non-threatening, you will never feel safe with him anyway—you will grow to distrust his character, his motives, and his ability/willingness to stick up for you.

Whether you’re a man or a woman, you don’t just want someone you like, you want someone you respect. You want a partner who inspires your admiration, because they are better than you are in some important way. Someone you admire is worth the effort of staying close to, because they deserve your best.

Anything less, and you’re not really doing the partnership thing…you’re just passing the time while life rolls by.

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1. The original pick-up artist advice book to hit it big with Gen X, but it didn’t cause a scandal because it was targeted at women rather than men. It advocates a hyper-controlling and manipulative male-brain-hacking strategy that most women find as miserable as do the men upon whom it is used. In addition to being cynical all through, the program is so designed as to retard the development of personal intimacy in favor of formal-ish obligation, since people acting out of guilt and frustration are more predictable than those acting from other motives. In short, it re-imagines Machiavelli’s political dictate for rulers that “the fear of the people for their sovereign is more lasting and less fickle than their love” as relational advice. The authors parlayed its success into a franchise and a “relationship coaching” business.

2. Harris’s book advocated a form of neo-Victorian courtship supervised and managed by parents, and, failing that, championed singlehood as a better deal for everyone (especially men) compared with competing for the attentions of women with shallow-sex obsessed alphas. Harris’s ideas wreaked havoc in his personal life, and he later apologized for and withdrew the book from publication.

3. The female companion to Harris’s book, it argues that a woman’s personal power and well-being stems from her sexual un-attainability. Giving into feminist behaviors (showing skin, having sexual relationships, swearing, being very competitive, telling bawdy jokes, and otherwise engaging in crass, sexual/erotic, or male-typical behavior) costs a woman her true nature and happiness, as well as rendering her undesirable to the only sort of men who are worth desiring.

4. It was MUCH higher than it is now.

5. Please note that I said “Significant minority.” The majority of these relationships did pretty well—but when they didn’t work, they didn’t work in a very predictable and extremely nasty fashion, and the blow-ups were spectacular.

6. Which included high-profile rape hoaxes and a wave of vigilante reputation destruction.

7. I need to do a deep-dive article on this at some point, but if you’re impatient you can get some non-trivial doses of how things actually used to be in my [Unfolding the World] series.

8. And before you think “Yeah, but what about those really calloused people who sleep around all the time? What about people who use sex as a weapon? What about serial killers?” I urge you to consider how many of those people do what they do because they’re trying to repair holes in a damaged sense of their sexual and/or relational selves. If this is a new concept to you, let me know in the comments and I can recommend some reading on the topic.

9. Note these two concepts. They become very important as we move towards our conclusion.

10. And sometimes they’re doing so for very compelling reasons.

11. That’s right. All bonding is trauma-bonding. Some bonds are healthier than others.

12. Not that I’d know what that’s like.

13. When plural marriage or plural mating is allowed, it only ever happens with a small minority of the population, and the only times it is socially destabilizing are when wives are, by law, made into a privilege enjoyed by high-ranking men. Given the option, most people, most of the time, opt for a partnership with one other person.

14. This is true even if you live in a place with uncommonly rich and attractive people. I used to live in San Francisco, where model-quality women and men were a dime a dozen…except that most of them looked plain next to the stunners who lived there and actually made their money as models. The same was true with entrepreneurs and other elites—there’s always someone better than you. React to that in a healthy way and you grow in response. React to it in an unhealthy way and you stagnate and hide.

15. This is why men will change a flat tire for a stranger on the side of a busy freeway at night—and sometimes get killed doing it.

16. For example (and this is not the only such example I’ve seen): I’m a goofy-looking hobbit-shaped middle-aged bearded-and-balding mountain man who was too poor as a kid to afford to get braces for the gap between my front teeth. I looked way dumber when I was “young and beautiful” than I do now. I’m a professional artist that lives in financial feast-and-famine, and the famines get very lean indeed. But my looks and sporadic broke-ness didn’t stop me from landing the best partner I could have wished for as a kid, nor from figuring out how to re-kindle our relationship every time we skated near divorce. It also doesn’t stop women from their twenties through their sixties from flirting with me (and occasionally actually hitting on me) when I’m out in public (and yes, my partner finds that extremely entertaining rather than threatening, because she knows where she ranks with me. She’s also my editor, so if she didn’t, this footnote wouldn’t have survived to publication).

17. I know this is a huge taboo right now, but it is a learnable skill, and when you nail it the world opens up before you. Everybody is lonely—everyone wants to be listened to. That they have defensive shields up doesn’t change that fact. You can add tremendous value to the world just by making the day a little more pleasant for strangers and neighbors.