Obsidian argues that men are generally more expected to “settle” than are women:
Because of evolutionary realities, Women are and have always been the choosier sex. This is understandable-Women only have a limited amount of eggs, a limited amount of time to “make good” on them, and human childbirth is perhaps the most difficult of all the mammals on the planet to pull off successfully. All of this makes sex, even in our time of vastly improved medical science, quite risky for the Female; if she makes the wrong choice of mate and has his kid(s), it can prove disastrous in a whole host of ways. I personally know scores of Men who, upon merely finding out that a Woman has a kid or two, immediately drops her from contention, not only as a date, but even as a pump and dump. They don’t want to be bothered, and in our age of “Maury Baby Mama/Baby Daddy” high drama, I can’t say that I blame them. Of course, there are also scores of Men out there who can and will screw just about everything in sight, and that’s kind of the point of this post today.
It’s an interesting theory, but one that I believe has two major vulnerabilities.
First, it’s easy and understandable for men to talk about how choosy women are because we are the ones that get rejected by them. They do the rejecting. We ask out. We seek to mate while they spend a good portion of their time shooting down men that seek to mate. Or that’s one way of looking at it, anyway. But men don’t spend much time rejecting women because we almost never have to. If we’re not attracted to a woman, all we have to do is refrain from asking her out! We ask out a very small percentage of the women that we know, so in a way we’re defacto rejecting the vast majority of women out there.
I’m not saying that it’s fair that we are expected to ask women out or that women must to some degree rely on men asking women out, but it’s still the most common practice. One of the upshots for men is that it allows us to reject women without rejecting them. It allows us to evade our own standards. It’s easier to believe that you have an extremely open mind when girls you’re uninterested in are background furniture.
The second problem is that we’re choosy when it comes to… what, precisely? Sex? As Obsidian points out, we’re notoriously unchoosy in that department. But when it comes to a monogamous relationship, marriage, and other forms of commitment, guys have something of a different reputation. When guys angle for sex but put off any sort of commitment, we are being choosy in our own way. We are being selective about who we give our monogamous devotion to. A guy that’s sleeping with a girl on a regular basis but refuses to commit to them is not necessarily being any less choosy. Can a woman who hedges on sex or romantic commitment even while she’s getting exactly what she wants from the guy (emotional validation, bug-smashing willingness, etc) make the claim that she’s not being choosy because she’s spending time and giving attention to a guy that is not exactly her ideal? It’s the same sort of thing.
Whether men are more picky than women or vice-versa is extremely difficult to gauge. Not coincidentally, both sides believe that it’s the other side gumming up with works with their unrealistic standards. As is often the case, the truth falls somewhere in between. It’s unlikely that each side is exactly the same degree of choosy in the aggregate, but it’s also the case that there is such wide variation within each gender that it’s problematic to paint with a very wide brush at all.
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I can’t say that I find Obsidian’s crude sociobiology particularly compelling, but the elephant in this room is: monogamy, or the lack thereof.
When men talk about women being too choosy, we are complaining that women in their twenties refuse to submit to a one-to-one pairing on an ordinal scale. Sure, we may not like where we are on the hierarchy, or we may be frustrated when we realize that we climbed the wrong one, but that isn’t what this complaint is about. The complaint is that a man in the x-percentile of attractiveness is denied the opportunity to pair with a woman in the same x-percentile.
When women talk about men being too choosy, they are really only describing the behavior of men at the tippy-top of the hierarchy who, given the behavior of women, find it easy to get the milk for free.
And of course, there is no shortage of female bloggers who defend their perogative to do exactly this. But let’s make sure we understand the issue.
When women talk about men being too choosy, they are really only describing the behavior of men at the tippy-top of the hierarchy who, given the behavior of women, find it easy to get the milk for free.
That’s… unproven. To say the least. You’re essentially making the rather unsurprising argument that women have unreasonable expectations and men do not.
I mean, I guess what I’m getting as it that you’re making the self-serving (for men) assumption that men are really pursuing and being rejected by women in their own station who are in turn reserving themselves for men in a higher station. Don’t get me wrong. It happens. But it also happens that a lot of men do not really have a realistic idea of where there station is. It’s also often the case that women are not reserving themselves for men in a higher station, but rather for men that simply fit a different criteria. There is a lot more at work here than simple ordinal separation.
Station-selection is a huge issue early on before we have an idea of where we are. But as time progresses, the assumption that men become more realistic and women do not is a position that is rather self-serving to men. As is the opposite position for women, wherein men still hanker for size-0 cheerleaders while women just want to find a decent guy to be with. Men often interpret this as women hankering after men who hanker after size-0 cheerleaders, whom we assume to be men that can get them. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s men that do harbor unrealistic expectations and sometimes it’s men that simply want something different than what they have to offer.
When it comes to “Oh, sure, I’ll tap that” men can be exceptionally unchoosy. Of course, that assumes that we notice the woman in the first place and that she’s not background furniture. When it comes to actually partnering up and the sacrifices that come with it, though? That’s where I’m not so sure. I’m definitely not willing to sign on to the notion that guys want a nice, stable relationship with a girl no better than he is and that it’s promiscuous girls who won’t settle down (with a guy no better than she) that are the problem. It just strikes me as too convenient a belief for men to hold so confidently and a belief too often held by guys that… have issues… with ladies in the overall.
Do normal people (i.e. people outside the “Game” and HBD blogosphere) really have an “ordinal scale”?
Of all the happily married people I know in our circle of friends and acquaintances, I don’t know anyone who assessed their mate on an “ordinal scale.” I know people who met somebody in grad school, or in a chat group on the Internet, or in chemistry lab, and then decided they liked them, and then decided they were easy enough to live with, and then married them.
I don’t know anyone who obsessed about an “ordinal scale.” It was more on the lines of: “Wow, I’m so glad I met someone who knows who Diego Rivera is but still has a good job and career prospects” (what I thought when I met **my** mate.)
But it also happens that a lot of men do not really have a realistic idea of where there station is.
I would argue that the difference is in degree and timing. Whatever their earlier illusions, men who graduate from college without a fiance’ are in for some serious shock therapy. But because women find it relatively easy to have, um, casual encounters, the lesson takes longer to learn. They do learn it — hell, even ? got married eventually — but lesson isn’t really internalized until age 30 or so.
Maria: If it matters, I chose my words as I did, not because of an “obsession”, but because I wanted to preempt the rather tautological argument that if a man is rejected by a woman, he definitionally aimed too high.
What’s “too high”? In my case, I would have taken points off for a Brad Pitt look-alike if he’d never heard of Diego Rivera (or other intellectual or cultural touchstones that are important to me.)
Most people really **do** pair up on the basis of common interests, common goals, and compatible temperaments, not on “evo-pscyh” crap. Only the misfits in the Game-o-sphere even care about that stuff.
Maria: I agree, but this is a second-order sifting. With few exceptions — and I do not deny that exceptions exist — people look for these commonalities among their actual or perceived “station” (in Trumwill’s word).
Parenthetically . . . I’m glad you found someone who likes Diego Rivera, but while I agree with you about the importance of common goals and compatible temperaments, I would in general counsel anyone against holding out for “common interests”. Babies! That’s where our common interests wind up, eventually. 🙂
Whatever their earlier illusions, men who graduate from college without a fiance’ are in for some serious shock therapy. But because women find it relatively easy to have, um, casual encounters, the lesson takes longer to learn. They do learn it — hell, even ? got married eventually — but lesson isn’t really internalized until age 30 or so.
I don’t know … while some women (e.g. Sex and the City types) think they have all the time in the world to settle down and marry and have children, it’s definitely my impression that most women don’t think that way at all, instead being fully aware that time is not unlimited. Whether men or women are more likely to be “impatient” at a given age is a matter of debate. But clearly, women are not immune to time pressures.
When it comes to “Oh, sure, I’ll tap that” men can be exceptionally unchoosy. Of course, that assumes that we notice the woman in the first place and that she’s not background furniture.
One thing modern nerdish culture lacks is a ways for mildly shy or introverted people to socialize. Solitary entertainment is better these days, and most nerds don’t go to church. I can believe there are people who don’t look romantically in the current hookup culture, however real that is, but would have in lower key dating scenes. Guys and girls who would dance, but won’t grind.
Very true. Some women call it becoming invisible. I have heard that women have ways of conveying interest or being open to an invitation. But since men are never afraid of sexual violence from unattractive women, we’re probably pretty blind to that from sexually unappealing women.
Of all the happily married people I know in our circle of friends and acquaintances, I don’t know anyone who assessed their mate on an “ordinal scale…common interests, common goals, and compatible temperaments, not on “evo-pscyh” crap.
You don’t know peope obsessed with the ranking because you know people who are too busy living and dating, or being married to be obsessed with ranking. Chances are they act like they act like there’s a ranking. Roisyphiles don’t have to deal with all the distractions of real life women, freeing them to do what’s really important. Rank chicks on the internet.
More than likely, your happily married friends married people similar to them in SES, and they probably paired up on a few major personality traits, as well as on smarts and looks. I think what Phi means is that it is that handsome investment banker, dumpy gas station cashier marriages are very unusual. Assortive mating on important qualities is more rule than exception. Interests, goals, and temperment are part of evo psych, temperment is moderately heritable. One some preferences people are remarkably similar. Almost everyone wants a kind, smart, spouse with his her feet on the ground, a good sense of humor…But there are not enough of those people to go around for every dickhead schlub. So awesome people tend to marry other awesome people. There are obviously idiosyncratic prefences as well, but not many people are looking for a mean, dumb, delusional, and humorless spouse. but lots of people have interests that bore most of the other sex to tears. Star Trek and knitting come to mind: people who need those interests in common might be too picky. Or might not, I dunno.
Some relationships end when a big gap in “percintile” opens up. If, God forbid, your husband started shooting herion and lost his job, you might move on. You’d weigh your common interest in Diego Rivera and all the other things you want, including his (hopefully) positive track record in the marriage.
You really couldn’t come up with a rough ordinal system for men? You never seen a friend with a man and thought “she could do better”? If you have, that man ranks lower than the woman.
Remember when you commented on Lady Raine’s blog about women’s sexual/relationship market value declining at like 30 or whatever the “PUA”s say? You cited a bunch of women who married royalty. There are what, 1000, 2000 members of the world’s royal families? The chance that you’d select only royalty for that list is miniscule. More likely you choose women who married princes and dukes because you think those men are high market value.
What about unhappy married people that you know? Even if you don’t know any, something like 1/3 of first marriages end in divorce, so they are out there. A fair amount of bad relationship choices would be be in those couples.
I would argue that the difference is in degree and timing. Whatever their earlier illusions, men who graduate from college without a fiance’ are in for some serious shock therapy.
???!!!
Where I come from, few expect to graduate from college with a fiance in tow. Not even all that many even want that. I almost graduated from college engaged and people (though they liked Julianne) were not exactly supportive. Most thought we were too young (and they were right). I would also expect that of the subset that want to be engaged upon leaving college, women are disproportionately represented.
I’m skeptical that it really takes until they turn thirty or so. It is one of those life lessons that many have to learn the hard way, but most of the time I doubt it takes more than one good burning. Evangeline is an example that I like to use for this. She spent her early twenties pining over the perfect relationship with the perfect guy and mistaking sex for a signal that it wasn’t, but she was there by 25.
Most women catch on to this more quickly than you give them credit for.
As for guys… well, guys tend to notice certain kinds of women first and foremost. These women are disproportionately likely to be above their station. As I said in the original post, guys don’t even have to reject women that are ordinately their matches. They just have to not notice them. Guys that don’t gather a whole lot of feedback by asking girls out don’t get the pointers as to where they stand that girls do because they don’t have girls asking them out.
This is another flaw with women-sleeping-solely-with-alpha theory. Alphas spend more of their time pursuing more attractive women. Sure, if one lands in their lap, they won’t object. But they’re inclined to overlook average women as well. There are exceptions, always, but when I look back with one notable exception when I’ve seen a girl hung up on another guy instead of me as she would be in a just world, it’s not as though the guy is some 1-in-10 rarity. Those guys that don’t notice them. They don’t need to be bothered to.
Lastly, though we’ve discussed this before, I want to reiterate my previous comments that the general state of affairs of people in their twenties is not a bunch of everyguys that want to settle down and a bunch of women out sleeping with alphas. You and I are outliers in this regard.
Do normal people (i.e. people outside the “Game” and HBD blogosphere) really have an “ordinal scale”?
I think it’s a male thing. We like to sort and organize and rate. The whole 1-to-10 rating. This is one of the things I had to talk myself down from when I was younger. I assumed that because a girl rejected me that she either was above me or was holding out for someone above me. Looking back, though, it was as often as not a compatibility thing. A lot of the time they would end up with guys that the girls I ended up with would not be particularly interested in even if they had the chance.
Also at play is when our perception of relationships are established, when we first become interested in the opposite sex, there really is more of an ordinal nature to things. We don’t know what we want, so we go with what’s obvious rather than what we’re compatible with. It’s only later as we discover ourselves and go through trial-and-error that we start being attracted to different types rather than numerical designations.
Phi: That’s clearly a comment from a guy who does not have children. It’s the common interests, common goals and compatibility that keep you going through all the stresses of making a living, paying down a mortgage, and raising a family. HB10 looks and “evo-psych” crap wouldn’t stand a chance at helping anyone raise a famly. Look at Andre Agassi — miserable in his first marriage to Brooke Shields, with whom he had nothing in common; very happy in his second marriage to the plainer-looking Steffi Graf, with whom he had a lot in common .
I have two children. I know what I am talking about.
Most women in their 20s are very busy getting an education, paying off their student loans, and building a career. This is the reality of life in a First World, globalized economy for both men and women. If you don’t do those things, you end up in the underclass.
The idea that 20-something women are spending their time “riding the cock carousel” “holding out for alphas” and other crap, is just that — crap. It’s a sad and rather poisonous mythology crafted to smooth over the hurt feelings of a certain group of male social misfits.
I didn’t marry til my 30s. I would have been thrilled to have found my Mr. Right when I was in my 20s, but it didn’t happen for me. Why? Because I was poor and I didn’t want to marry any of the low-IQ blue-collar schlubs around me.
It took me until my 30s to work myself out of poverty, and into a social/career position where I could meet a professional guy from a top-tier school (who also knew who Diego Rivera was, among many other things.)
Regarding my use of the word “station”, it pertains to the Four Stations, which is how I believe that people are generally sortable.
In Alpha-Beta speak, Alphas are in Station One, Betas in Stations Two and Three, and Omegas in Station Four.
In 1-to-10 ratings, Station One is a 9 or 10, Station Two is 7 or 8, Station Three is 3-6, and Station Four is a 1 or 2.
I think that common interests matter less than common values. Not common values insomuch as Republicans and Democrats or Christians and Atheists (though if any designation is of importance to either member of the partnership, it should be taken into account). But common values leads to common understanding, which is conducive to a happy relationship and to raising children together.
(btw, Phi has a couple daughters)
Still married to their mother?
Yep
For how long?
Who the f’ is Diego Rivera, and why was it so important to you that your mate knew who he was? I like to read (though I did a lot more of it before I got sucked into blogging, and commenting on other blogs), but this sort of thing reminds me of something I had forgotten about after being out of the dating market for a few years. It reminds me of the little literary litmus tests I’d see sometimes on dating site profiles.
There was one girl in particular who wanted a guy who had read a particular novelist (I forget his name, offhand, but I think he shared it with a character in the Thunder Cats cartoon). That always seemed sort of pointless to me. Back in the day, I read stacks of literary novels, including some by putative geniuses, intellectuals, etc. But there are stacks and stacks of books I never got around to. Same with everyone else. I would never have thought to scratch a potential date off the list because she had read, say, Delillo and not Pynchon. Really, who gives a shit.
Maria, not sure exactly how long, but every indication is that they are stable.
Dave, I can understand being really excited when you meet someone that shares your interest and for your interest to perk up. I have more difficulty with it being a litmus test.
Maybe it wasn’t so much a litmus test. I don’t recall whether it was a requirement or a preference at this point. My memory is filtered through the years, upon which layers of cynicism may have accrued. And the author, I think, was Kundera. Checking Wiki, that wasn’t the name of a character on Thunder Cats. But it’s close to the name of the planet (Thundera), so that may be what I was thinking of.
Maria, Phi is very religious. His social experience is from a different world and I’m amazed he even tries to relate to the stuff people talk about in this neck of the woods.
This is probably why he thinks so many men are eager to meet women young, get married, have babies, and be stable providers et al.
I, too, am wondering who Diego Rivera is. (I could look it up, but isn’t that cheating?) I keep thinking, Diego Garcia.
I, too, am wondering who Diego Rivera is.
I actually know this without cheating. He was a Mexican artist who was married to Frida Kahlo. He did mostly murals, I think. I only know this because of the Frida Kahlo movie. John Goodman played Rivera.
Knowing an artist because there was a movie about ’em is hands-down the most philistine way to know anything about art.
Now that you mention that, the name sounds vaguely familiar. Must have read about Rivera somewhere in the past. I feel so edified now.
Any time I hear the name Diego anything or anything Diego, I think of Zorro. I’m pretty literaturally hopeless.
Could be worse, Trumwill. You could think of Dora the Explorer’s sidekick. He’s a Diego too.
Maria:
Most people really **do** pair up on the basis of common interests, common goals, and compatible temperaments, not on “evo-pscyh” crap.
What’s that word women use to explain why they reject a man who has all those things, or sleep with a man who has none of them? Oh…right. “Chemistry.” Chemistry is what happens when the right evo-psych buttons get pushed.
I have known who is Diego Rivera for long. But I wouldn’t marry a woman whose list of requirements for a husband included knowing who Diego Rivera is.
The worse thing is not that this requirement implies the woman being extremely choosy. The worse thing is that it implies the woman being extremely shallow if she thinks that having the same information about dead painters is fundamental for a good marriage. I am sorry to be cruel, but this is what I think.
Maria didn’t say it was a requirement. Just that it was a point of attraction.
“The worse thing is not that this requirement implies the woman being extremely choosy. The worse thing is that it implies the woman being extremely shallow if she thinks that having the same information about dead painters is fundamental for a good marriage. I am sorry to be cruel, but this is what I think. ”
To me, it indicates that she is insufferably pretentious and self-obsessed. Probably also wants to live vicariously through her man.
“The idea that 20-something women are spending their time “riding the cock carousel” “holding out for alphas” and other crap, is just that — crap. It’s a sad and rather poisonous mythology crafted to smooth over the hurt feelings of a certain group of male social misfits.”
I hung out with Alphas in High School, joined an Alpha fraternity, but I am a geek (Alpha geek but a geek).
You are wrong. I knew guys who who slept with a huge proportion of the women in our social circles, and saw most of the women in our social circles sleep with the same hand full of guys. There were exceptions. There were stable couples, but the 80/20 rule is real. I was a fly on the wall, as my geekiness made me a non-entity at times. It was as hush-hush as they could make it but it happens.
As it pertains to alpha fraternities, it strikes me as likely as not that girls that gravitate towards that may not be a representative sample.
There was a university that I considered attending. One of the reasons I didn’t end up going there was the realization that it was sucking up those in my classmates that were part of what I called the 25/75 problem, which is not exactly the same as the 80/20 but there are similarities. The places you go and the people you choose to hang out with makes a difference. Life is not a singles bar or a frat house.
“As it pertains to alpha fraternities, it strikes me as likely as not that girls that gravitate towards that may not be a representative sample.”
True, they are different, but I didn’t join till my sophmore year, and later went to a smaller university where I did not join one. I spent plenty of time outside the greek system and saw similiar hypergamous behavior, but especially in Highschool, where keeping things under wraps was harder. Maybe the reality of hypergamey/polygamy is exagerated, particularly in my own mind as I was a looser in love, but I’ve seen enough of it to know it is true on some significant level. Look at stats on virginity. More male virgins. (It especially becomes disturbing for a geek when the you look at virginity stats of MIT males vs others. Why do women hate science types so much? I know why, it just bugs me still.) I grew up my entire life in the same neighborhood, and most of my social circle remained steady from middle school through high school, and some of my friends, the Alphas, by the time we graduated Highschool, had hooked up with most of the females in our social circle at one point in time or another. There were always a few chase girls, and few Alpha guys who were in steady “head cheerleader” type relationships, but I knew guys who hooked up with different girls constantly (normally going younger and younger as we progressed through the grades), and I knew girls who pretty much hooked up with every single Alpha male at least once. Since many of us went to the same colleges, or spent vacation time back at home, this behavior continued on some. Thinking about it, I’m should pull out my yearbook, interview my old buddies, and draw a diagram of who hooked up with who. To summarize, I knew tons of guys who didn’t participate in the mating market at all, but I hardly knew any females who didn’t at least date a little bit. Do the math.
The worse thing is not that this requirement implies the woman being extremely choosy. The worse thing is that it implies the woman being extremely shallow if she thinks that having the same information about dead painters is fundamental for a good marriage. I am sorry to be cruel, but this is what I think.
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The requirement wasn’t knowing who Rivera was in particular, just any decent artist, writer or playwright. And being willing to take me to a museum or play etc. that I wanted to go to.
Believe it or not, my husband was the first man I ever dated who was willing to take me somewhere I actually wanted to go.
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To me, it indicates that she is insufferably pretentious and self-obsessed. Probably also wants to live vicariously through her man.
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I don’t think that wanting someone whose intellect you can respect is “living vicariously through her man.”
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Maria didn’t say it was a requirement. Just that it was a point of attraction.
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Exactly. Thank you Will.
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I wonder what Maria would have to say about Hip Hop…
O.