but it should be equally obvious that such behavior is less than rational in our modern era of contraception: sex simply doesn’t have the same dangers that it did in the ancestral environment.
Is getting pregnant really the only danger? Sex can cause the release of mind altering drug that can cause you to pair bond (women more so than men). This can have a dramatic effect on your life if it is with the wrong person.
This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships, which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life. PUA statistically works against the success rate of long term relationships.
This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships,
I’ve posted some thoughts on the orientation of PUAs to relationships. Although many PUAs do focus on short term relationships, most of what they are doing would be the same even for long-term relationships.
As far as I can tell, limiting factor of most PUAs in attracting women for either short-term or long-term relationships is that they are insufficiently masculine, high-status, and exciting. At least, with young women, who may well be skewed towards short-term mating (contra the stereotypical assumption that women always want relationships).
Young men are often accused of being “led by their dicks” when choosing mates. I think there is something analogous going on with young women. Even though in the abstract they may want relationships, they also want highly sexually attractive guys. And the most sexually attractive guy out there for many women isn’t necessarily the guy who would make a good long-term relationship partner.
So if you are a young guy and you want a relationship with a young woman, you have to deal with competition from guys running a flashy short-term mating strategy. For a woman to notice you and be interested in getting to know you well enough to even think of you as a long-term mate, you have to outshine the local badboys. If you try to present yourself as stable, romantic, long-term mate from the start, you will be consistently overlooked.
Of course, not all women are following this type of mating strategy where most of their attention goes to the flashiest males, who they then try to “convert” into long-term mates. In fact, I’m willing to bet that there is at least a reasonable minority of women who only go for long-term mates. But it’s common enough that men need to be aware of it. It pays for young men to have the kind of flashy presentation that PUAs teach, regardless of whether they are looking for short-term or long-term relationships.
which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life
I’ve seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.
I’ve seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.
I have my own pet theory about this, extrapolated from real-life observations and a number of other clues, which are not very strong individually, but seem to add up to a pretty strong web of evidence.
To put it as succinctly as possible, the problem stems from two not very pretty, but nevertheless real facts. First, the attractiveness of individual men to women has an extremely high statistical dispersion, even more so than vice versa. (In other words, the difference between men from different percentiles in women’s eyes will be significantly greater than the difference between women in analogous percentiles in men’s eyes.) Second, and more important, for a typical woman, the attractiveness of men she can get for non-serious temporary relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of her realistic options for permanent commitment. (This also holds far more so than the reverse.) It follows that when a woman with a variegated relationship history finally settles down, it will likely be with a man whose attractiveness is significantly lower than those she’s been involved with in the past. It’s not hard to see why this is a recipe for trouble, and clearly the implications are somewhat reactionary in nature.
On the other hand, if a woman settles down with a man who outclasses all those she’d been involved with earlier, her ability to bond with him probably won’t be compromised. Trouble is, this is obviously increasingly unlikely as their number is greater.
Second, and more important, for a typical woman, the attractiveness of men she can get for non-serious temporary relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of her realistic options for permanent commitment. (This also holds far more so than the reverse.) It follows that when a woman with a variegated relationship history finally settles down, it will likely be with a man whose attractiveness is significantly lower than those she’s been involved with in the past.
Excellent point; I was thinking along similar lines in this comment.
I think part of the reason that I found komponisto’s original comment in the thread to be less offensive than others was because it instantly reminded me of the hypothesis you describe, which is a potential way of rationalizing his comment.
The argument goes something like this: For many gender-typical heterosexual women, the guys who are the most sexually exciting may not always be the best relationship partners. This could be partly be because the men who are highly attractive to women are also highly attractive to other women, and have so much options that it’s difficult for particular women to get them in a relationship. Men have lower standards for short-term partners than for long-term partners. It could also be because, for some women, there is a tradeoff between the traits that make a guy a good long-term partner, and the traits that make him sexually exciting. For example, certain masculine traits like dominance are sexually exciting to some women, but may nevertheless be frustrating to deal with in an actual relationship.
The argument proceeds by suggesting that since the most sexually exciting guys are the worst relationship prospects (for some women), everyone could be better off if women also “gave a chance” to slightly less attractive men who could be better relationship prospects. Women should decide what they want in men by taking into account more than just sex appeal, the argument goes, and the result would be that women don’t restrict their dating to only the most sexually exciting guys around at the time.
Now, I call this “the argument” because I’m not sold on it myself. The fact is that people, especially young people, like excitement. I’m not really interested in saying that women should go for guys who bore them, even if those guys might be more stable. Yet I think that this argument should be one that we can entertain; it’s a rationalization of komponisto’s original argument, and it takes into account women’s interests. Furthermore, to the extent that there is conflict between different elements of women’s preferences (e.g. desire for excitement vs. desire for a long-term relationship), women may be free to decide which elements of their preferences are most important, and which they should act on.
The other reason that I’m skeptical of asking women to change is that it’s not really their fault that there can be such a tradeoff between sexual attractiveness and long-term potential in males. To some degree, that tradeoff is inevitable because it’s logically impossible for men to be dominant and non-dominant at the same time, and it’s empirically difficult to find men who have high level of both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. Yet some of that tradeoff is cultural: male socialization seems to put men on “tracks” of either a drab “nice guy” long-term mating strategy, or a more exciting “bad boy” short-term mating strategy. The attractiveness of a lot of men in the former category is artificially deflated by harmful cultural forces.
It’s not women’s fault, if a lot of the time, the only choices they are faced with is “sexually exciting badboy who will get tired of me in a month,” and “boring, sweet nerdy guy who I’m only marginally attracted to.” This is a tough menu for women to face, and I don’t think the choice they should make is obvious. It would be better for everyone if the second guy had a bit more of an edge, making him a credible object of female desire and credible contender to the badboy. Thanks to the seduction community, that guy can now get more of an edge.
(I propose that female attraction as a function of masculinity is non-linear for some women: it’s more like a bell-curve or a threshold function. Some women always want more masculinity in men; others are happy with a certain amount. Unfortunately, the amount of masculinity that most women want is more than a lot of the guys who would make good long-term mates have. This could steer women towards dating guys who are masculinity-overkill and poor long-term mates, since those are the only guys above the threshold of attractiveness.)
(I propose that female attraction as a function of masculinity is non-linear for some women: it’s more like a bell-curve or a threshold function. Some women always want more masculinity in men; others are happy with a certain amount. Unfortunately, the amount of masculinity that most women want is more than a lot of the guys who would make good long-term mates have. This could steer women towards dating guys who are masculinity-overkill and poor long-term mates, since those are the only guys above the threshold of attractiveness.)
I absolutely agree with this observation. The saddest thing is that most of the “nice” guys could ramp up their masculinity with some reasonable effort, and without compromising any of the existing aspects of their personality that they value. This would make things much happier both for them and for women, who are nowadays indeed facing a severe shortage of men that are both good long-term prospects and above some reasonable threshold of masculinity. Yet it’s virtually impossible to open this topic in public, let alone present any concrete advice on how to actually achieve this goal, without triggering all sorts of politically correct alarms.
If this is true, why aren’t they doing it? I’m not convinced that the heightening of happiness you speak of is worth the lessening of happiness that those guys evidently believe would occur were they to change themselves (or alternatively, act like someone else for as long as it takes).
lessening of happiness that those guys evidently believe would occur were they to change themselves
They greatly overestimate the lessening of happiness they would experience from changing things. Saying “changing isn’t worth it” seems like some sort of rationalization that leads people to settle for mediocrity, even from the perspective of their own values. And it’s a purely theoretical conjecture: you (general “you”) will never know until you’ve tried.
Yes, you will need some change in your self-image. But it’s not like improving your social skills, body language, voice tonality, and fashion sense is going to shatter your sense of self and turn you into a fundamentally different person. You will feel continuity with your previous version; most of your values will be the same, and some of your values will actually be served better. The only way it would be a problem is for people who have very brittle self-images, like “I don’t talk to people at parties.” Why the hell not?
Of course, it’s difficult for people who hold a value against changing their behavior to fit other people’s criteria and expectations. For people with this value, I would ask: is it more important than some of your other values and goals?
So many introverts have been duped with platitudes like “you shouldn’t change yourself for anyone.” Yet the entire nature of social interaction involves people adjusting to fit the expectations of others (see impression management. Many introverts and nerdy people huff and puff and say “well, IDONTLIKETHATANDITSSTUPID.” But I’m not sure whether social interaction works is inherently so bad, or whether it is merely unintuitive given some of the personality traits and socialization of introverted and nerdy people.
The goal of self-identity should not be trying to avoid having to make any changes or adjustments for others; the goal should be to reconcile one’s desire for identity and individuality with the adjustments one makes in the social landscape.
Might be useful to explain the compromises necessary in terms of computer security. Somebody wants to know something about your hardware specs, so they ask you to run the performance benchmark app “look like a tough guy” and send them the outputs. They’re a lot less interested in whatever other benchmarks you might have, because of the whole apples-to-oranges thing. You’re worried that it’s malware, so, run it in ring 3 where it can’t touch the critical processes. You’re running “don’t talk to people at parties” in ring 0? That sounds like a fairly serious problem in and of itself, of which conflicts with the benchmark app are just one symptom.
I have a strong negative reaction to much of your argument, but I’m not sure why, so I’m going to hold off on a response to those things that I’m unsure about. However,
Yet the entire nature of social interaction involves people adjusting to fit the expectations of others
I would say that some things we do socially involve this, and others do not. For example, it seems unlikely that you believe the point of your comment in reply to me was to adjust yourself to my expectations, or the expectations of others here, and yet we are interacting socially.
I have a strong negative reaction to much of your argument, but I’m not sure why, so I’m going to hold off on a response to those things that I’m unsure about.
When you’re ready to articulate it, I would be interested to hear it. I didn’t phrase my comment to be maximally persuasive to the particular people who needed it; I aimed it at a more general LW audience.
For more about where I am coming from, also see this essay on shallowness.
I would say that some things we do socially involve this, and others do not.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at. I mean that social interaction is impossible without some level of conforming.
Because the necessary information is difficult to obtain in a clear and convincing form, and it’s drowned in a vast sea of nonsense that’s produced on this subject by just about every source of information in the modern society. Therefore, a great many people are unaware of the problem, or even actively misled about it due to the prevailing hypocritical norms for discussing the subject.
I wonder if the women who go for “flashier” males make up a disproportionate portion of the dating pool, because women who tend to choose those types of males who are inclined to become long-term mates end up with long-term mates and stop dating?
It’s sort of like how, according to my Econ 101 textbook, most people who are unemployed experience short-term unemployment, but most of the people unemployed at any given moment are experiencing long-term unemployment. For example, during one year, you’d have three people who are unemployed all year, and twelve people who are unemployed for only a month. If you look at who’s employed at any given moment, you’ll see the five long-term unemployed people and only one short-term unemployed, but the person who’s short-term unemployed keeps changing while the long-term unemployed people are always the same ones.
I’ve seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life.
It says they controlled for a variety of variables but the obvious question is whether families / cultures that discourage pre-marital sex also discourage divorce and whether this was controlled for. I don’t have time to read the paper now so if anyone knows the answer to that I’d be interested.
I read Teachman’s paper in the meantime; overall, it looks like a solid piece of work. The controls are definitely not broad enough to rule out the above hypothesis directly. This however should not be held against him, since this question is outside the scope of the study, and it would be a very difficult task to come up with controls that cover all such possible familial and cultural influences reliably.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic finding of the paper is inconsistent with the above hypothesis. One would expect that conservative families and subcultures discourage premarital sex and (especially!) cohabitation even between future spouses to a significant extent. Therefore, if the effect of premarital sex on divorce risk is entirely due to such influences, we would expect to see a difference between women who practiced cohabitation or premarital sex only with their future husbands and those who didn’t practice it at all. Yet as Slumlord points out, the striking result is exactly that there is no such difference.
That said, this finding is inconsistent with a previous study that looked into the question of why exactly virginity at marriage predicts lower probabilities of divorce: J.R. Kahn & K.A. London, Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce. (Unfortunately, I haven’t found an ungated version.) Kahn & London’s conclusion was that this is because lack of premarital sex correlates with traditionalist attitudes, i.e. basically the above hypothesis. However, their conclusion is based on a complex statistical model that makes it look quite far-fetched to me. Frankly, I lack the statistical knowledge to judge it reliably and authoritatively, but in any case, Teachman’s work looks like a much stronger and more straightforward piece of evidence that points in the contrary direction.
[Update: after rummaging through the literature a bit more, I found a letter to the editor by one Tim Heaton, published in the same journal (vol. 55, p. 240), which harshly criticizes the soundness of Kahn & London’s statistics. This was followed by an unconvincing response by K&L, presenting the usual cop-out of the sort, yes, our methodology is lousy, but we couldn’t do any better. On the whole, my above conclusions are further reinforced by this finding.]
This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships, which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life
I’d like more research on the nature of pair bonding, but it sounds plausible. Specifically whether men who’ve had lots of sexual partners are more likely to be leave women than those who have had few. If so women are likely to be more wary.
This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA:
Ideally the PUA scheme would be replaced by something as well though. Advice on how to gain experience with women and what they really want, without short term dating and without getting into bad long term relationships.
I’m imagining something like the following, it roughly mirrors my development, although it was unconscious. Although it would probably be hard to follow for very sexually frustrated men.
1) Find women that you enjoy spending time with in a non-sexual way, either at work or a shared hobby/interest. Do not try to befriend them specifically, but befriend the group. On-line interaction might work, but you will do better if you see people in the flesh.
2) Do not focus on a specific woman. Do not think you want to have sex with them. That is friendzone them to borrow PUA terminology. If you are interested in long term monogamy this is an important skill to have*!
3) Casually watch their interactions with their boyfriends/husbands and the sorts of conversations they have. Do not try them out on your female friends, unless you are very sure they are interested in you. But knowing what behaviours are appropriate/attractive for the sort of women that you can get on with is important.
What they react to is probably a more accurate picture of what they want, than what they say they want though.
4) Improve some of the things that PUA people talk about, appearance, posture, demeanour etc
5) Some of your female friends may flirt with you, especially when drunk. This may be entirely innocent, and is likely to be if they are in a relationship. Practice and have fun but don’t take it too seriously. If they do flirt, take it as a compliment and it means you are ready for dating. You should have a good idea of what sort of woman you get on with as well.
6) Try dating. Ask your female friends to suggest friends, try on-line dating.
However I’m pretty sure I learnt a lot about relationships from watching my Mum and Dad (and Aunts and Uncles, all in long term AFAIK monogamous relationships) interact as I was growing up as well, so I wasn’t starting from no knowledge.
I haven’t done much of 6 myself. Because people, in general, tend to drive me up the wall if I’m around them a lot. There are rare exceptions, though. And that isn’t even taking into consideration other compatibility issues.
*Not friendzoning your partner, but your partners friends.
I agree that men form lasting emotional bonds partly as a result of (more often than a cause of) physical intimacy. But this usually does not exclude desire for sex with other women. If a man immediately settles down with the first woman who will touch him, it just means he really hates looking for such women (perhaps irrationally so). In this case, his even finding one is (excluding abusive psychopaths) an improvement.
Is getting pregnant really the only danger? Sex can cause the release of mind altering drug that can cause you to pair bond (women more so than men). This can have a dramatic effect on your life if it is with the wrong person.
This seems like an excellent reason for men to object to PUA: it focuses mainly on one night stands and short term relationships, which may reduce the ease and likelihood of pair bonding for the woman, later in life. PUA statistically works against the success rate of long term relationships.
I’ve posted some thoughts on the orientation of PUAs to relationships. Although many PUAs do focus on short term relationships, most of what they are doing would be the same even for long-term relationships.
As far as I can tell, limiting factor of most PUAs in attracting women for either short-term or long-term relationships is that they are insufficiently masculine, high-status, and exciting. At least, with young women, who may well be skewed towards short-term mating (contra the stereotypical assumption that women always want relationships).
Young men are often accused of being “led by their dicks” when choosing mates. I think there is something analogous going on with young women. Even though in the abstract they may want relationships, they also want highly sexually attractive guys. And the most sexually attractive guy out there for many women isn’t necessarily the guy who would make a good long-term relationship partner.
So if you are a young guy and you want a relationship with a young woman, you have to deal with competition from guys running a flashy short-term mating strategy. For a woman to notice you and be interested in getting to know you well enough to even think of you as a long-term mate, you have to outshine the local badboys. If you try to present yourself as stable, romantic, long-term mate from the start, you will be consistently overlooked.
Of course, not all women are following this type of mating strategy where most of their attention goes to the flashiest males, who they then try to “convert” into long-term mates. In fact, I’m willing to bet that there is at least a reasonable minority of women who only go for long-term mates. But it’s common enough that men need to be aware of it. It pays for young men to have the kind of flashy presentation that PUAs teach, regardless of whether they are looking for short-term or long-term relationships.
I’ve seen this idea before, but I wonder if we actually have any empirical evidence that it is true that short-term mating reduces the likelihood of pair bonding for women later in life. My gut reaction is that this may be true for some female phenotypes, but not for others.
HughRistik:
I have my own pet theory about this, extrapolated from real-life observations and a number of other clues, which are not very strong individually, but seem to add up to a pretty strong web of evidence.
To put it as succinctly as possible, the problem stems from two not very pretty, but nevertheless real facts. First, the attractiveness of individual men to women has an extremely high statistical dispersion, even more so than vice versa. (In other words, the difference between men from different percentiles in women’s eyes will be significantly greater than the difference between women in analogous percentiles in men’s eyes.) Second, and more important, for a typical woman, the attractiveness of men she can get for non-serious temporary relationships is significantly higher than the attractiveness of her realistic options for permanent commitment. (This also holds far more so than the reverse.) It follows that when a woman with a variegated relationship history finally settles down, it will likely be with a man whose attractiveness is significantly lower than those she’s been involved with in the past. It’s not hard to see why this is a recipe for trouble, and clearly the implications are somewhat reactionary in nature.
On the other hand, if a woman settles down with a man who outclasses all those she’d been involved with earlier, her ability to bond with him probably won’t be compromised. Trouble is, this is obviously increasingly unlikely as their number is greater.
Excellent point; I was thinking along similar lines in this comment.
I think part of the reason that I found komponisto’s original comment in the thread to be less offensive than others was because it instantly reminded me of the hypothesis you describe, which is a potential way of rationalizing his comment.
The argument goes something like this: For many gender-typical heterosexual women, the guys who are the most sexually exciting may not always be the best relationship partners. This could be partly be because the men who are highly attractive to women are also highly attractive to other women, and have so much options that it’s difficult for particular women to get them in a relationship. Men have lower standards for short-term partners than for long-term partners. It could also be because, for some women, there is a tradeoff between the traits that make a guy a good long-term partner, and the traits that make him sexually exciting. For example, certain masculine traits like dominance are sexually exciting to some women, but may nevertheless be frustrating to deal with in an actual relationship.
The argument proceeds by suggesting that since the most sexually exciting guys are the worst relationship prospects (for some women), everyone could be better off if women also “gave a chance” to slightly less attractive men who could be better relationship prospects. Women should decide what they want in men by taking into account more than just sex appeal, the argument goes, and the result would be that women don’t restrict their dating to only the most sexually exciting guys around at the time.
Now, I call this “the argument” because I’m not sold on it myself. The fact is that people, especially young people, like excitement. I’m not really interested in saying that women should go for guys who bore them, even if those guys might be more stable. Yet I think that this argument should be one that we can entertain; it’s a rationalization of komponisto’s original argument, and it takes into account women’s interests. Furthermore, to the extent that there is conflict between different elements of women’s preferences (e.g. desire for excitement vs. desire for a long-term relationship), women may be free to decide which elements of their preferences are most important, and which they should act on.
The other reason that I’m skeptical of asking women to change is that it’s not really their fault that there can be such a tradeoff between sexual attractiveness and long-term potential in males. To some degree, that tradeoff is inevitable because it’s logically impossible for men to be dominant and non-dominant at the same time, and it’s empirically difficult to find men who have high level of both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. Yet some of that tradeoff is cultural: male socialization seems to put men on “tracks” of either a drab “nice guy” long-term mating strategy, or a more exciting “bad boy” short-term mating strategy. The attractiveness of a lot of men in the former category is artificially deflated by harmful cultural forces.
It’s not women’s fault, if a lot of the time, the only choices they are faced with is “sexually exciting badboy who will get tired of me in a month,” and “boring, sweet nerdy guy who I’m only marginally attracted to.” This is a tough menu for women to face, and I don’t think the choice they should make is obvious. It would be better for everyone if the second guy had a bit more of an edge, making him a credible object of female desire and credible contender to the badboy. Thanks to the seduction community, that guy can now get more of an edge.
(I propose that female attraction as a function of masculinity is non-linear for some women: it’s more like a bell-curve or a threshold function. Some women always want more masculinity in men; others are happy with a certain amount. Unfortunately, the amount of masculinity that most women want is more than a lot of the guys who would make good long-term mates have. This could steer women towards dating guys who are masculinity-overkill and poor long-term mates, since those are the only guys above the threshold of attractiveness.)
HughRistik:
I absolutely agree with this observation. The saddest thing is that most of the “nice” guys could ramp up their masculinity with some reasonable effort, and without compromising any of the existing aspects of their personality that they value. This would make things much happier both for them and for women, who are nowadays indeed facing a severe shortage of men that are both good long-term prospects and above some reasonable threshold of masculinity. Yet it’s virtually impossible to open this topic in public, let alone present any concrete advice on how to actually achieve this goal, without triggering all sorts of politically correct alarms.
If this is true, why aren’t they doing it? I’m not convinced that the heightening of happiness you speak of is worth the lessening of happiness that those guys evidently believe would occur were they to change themselves (or alternatively, act like someone else for as long as it takes).
They greatly overestimate the lessening of happiness they would experience from changing things. Saying “changing isn’t worth it” seems like some sort of rationalization that leads people to settle for mediocrity, even from the perspective of their own values. And it’s a purely theoretical conjecture: you (general “you”) will never know until you’ve tried.
Yes, you will need some change in your self-image. But it’s not like improving your social skills, body language, voice tonality, and fashion sense is going to shatter your sense of self and turn you into a fundamentally different person. You will feel continuity with your previous version; most of your values will be the same, and some of your values will actually be served better. The only way it would be a problem is for people who have very brittle self-images, like “I don’t talk to people at parties.” Why the hell not?
Of course, it’s difficult for people who hold a value against changing their behavior to fit other people’s criteria and expectations. For people with this value, I would ask: is it more important than some of your other values and goals?
So many introverts have been duped with platitudes like “you shouldn’t change yourself for anyone.” Yet the entire nature of social interaction involves people adjusting to fit the expectations of others (see impression management. Many introverts and nerdy people huff and puff and say “well, IDONTLIKETHATANDITSSTUPID.” But I’m not sure whether social interaction works is inherently so bad, or whether it is merely unintuitive given some of the personality traits and socialization of introverted and nerdy people.
The goal of self-identity should not be trying to avoid having to make any changes or adjustments for others; the goal should be to reconcile one’s desire for identity and individuality with the adjustments one makes in the social landscape.
Might be useful to explain the compromises necessary in terms of computer security. Somebody wants to know something about your hardware specs, so they ask you to run the performance benchmark app “look like a tough guy” and send them the outputs. They’re a lot less interested in whatever other benchmarks you might have, because of the whole apples-to-oranges thing. You’re worried that it’s malware, so, run it in ring 3 where it can’t touch the critical processes. You’re running “don’t talk to people at parties” in ring 0? That sounds like a fairly serious problem in and of itself, of which conflicts with the benchmark app are just one symptom.
You mean, try on roles as a way of practicing them, while protecting them from “ring 0” (your “true self”)?
Practicing them, yes, but also more directly as part of cooperating with established communication standards.
I have a strong negative reaction to much of your argument, but I’m not sure why, so I’m going to hold off on a response to those things that I’m unsure about. However,
I would say that some things we do socially involve this, and others do not. For example, it seems unlikely that you believe the point of your comment in reply to me was to adjust yourself to my expectations, or the expectations of others here, and yet we are interacting socially.
When you’re ready to articulate it, I would be interested to hear it. I didn’t phrase my comment to be maximally persuasive to the particular people who needed it; I aimed it at a more general LW audience.
For more about where I am coming from, also see this essay on shallowness.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at. I mean that social interaction is impossible without some level of conforming.
randallsquared:
Because the necessary information is difficult to obtain in a clear and convincing form, and it’s drowned in a vast sea of nonsense that’s produced on this subject by just about every source of information in the modern society. Therefore, a great many people are unaware of the problem, or even actively misled about it due to the prevailing hypocritical norms for discussing the subject.
I wonder if the women who go for “flashier” males make up a disproportionate portion of the dating pool, because women who tend to choose those types of males who are inclined to become long-term mates end up with long-term mates and stop dating?
It’s sort of like how, according to my Econ 101 textbook, most people who are unemployed experience short-term unemployment, but most of the people unemployed at any given moment are experiencing long-term unemployment. For example, during one year, you’d have three people who are unemployed all year, and twelve people who are unemployed for only a month. If you look at who’s employed at any given moment, you’ll see the five long-term unemployed people and only one short-term unemployed, but the person who’s short-term unemployed keeps changing while the long-term unemployed people are always the same ones.
(I think I said that awkwardly...)
HughRistik:
I just ran into an interesting link that’s highly pertinent for this topic. Slumlord discusses a paper that provides for a very strong case that the answer is yes:
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-divorce-risk.html
(H/t Thursday via OB.) I haven’t had the time to read the paper in detail, but on a casual look, it seems quite convincing.
It says they controlled for a variety of variables but the obvious question is whether families / cultures that discourage pre-marital sex also discourage divorce and whether this was controlled for. I don’t have time to read the paper now so if anyone knows the answer to that I’d be interested.
I read Teachman’s paper in the meantime; overall, it looks like a solid piece of work. The controls are definitely not broad enough to rule out the above hypothesis directly. This however should not be held against him, since this question is outside the scope of the study, and it would be a very difficult task to come up with controls that cover all such possible familial and cultural influences reliably.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic finding of the paper is inconsistent with the above hypothesis. One would expect that conservative families and subcultures discourage premarital sex and (especially!) cohabitation even between future spouses to a significant extent. Therefore, if the effect of premarital sex on divorce risk is entirely due to such influences, we would expect to see a difference between women who practiced cohabitation or premarital sex only with their future husbands and those who didn’t practice it at all. Yet as Slumlord points out, the striking result is exactly that there is no such difference.
That said, this finding is inconsistent with a previous study that looked into the question of why exactly virginity at marriage predicts lower probabilities of divorce: J.R. Kahn & K.A. London, Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce. (Unfortunately, I haven’t found an ungated version.) Kahn & London’s conclusion was that this is because lack of premarital sex correlates with traditionalist attitudes, i.e. basically the above hypothesis. However, their conclusion is based on a complex statistical model that makes it look quite far-fetched to me. Frankly, I lack the statistical knowledge to judge it reliably and authoritatively, but in any case, Teachman’s work looks like a much stronger and more straightforward piece of evidence that points in the contrary direction.
[Update: after rummaging through the literature a bit more, I found a letter to the editor by one Tim Heaton, published in the same journal (vol. 55, p. 240), which harshly criticizes the soundness of Kahn & London’s statistics. This was followed by an unconvincing response by K&L, presenting the usual cop-out of the sort, yes, our methodology is lousy, but we couldn’t do any better. On the whole, my above conclusions are further reinforced by this finding.]
I’d like more research on the nature of pair bonding, but it sounds plausible. Specifically whether men who’ve had lots of sexual partners are more likely to be leave women than those who have had few. If so women are likely to be more wary.
Ideally the PUA scheme would be replaced by something as well though. Advice on how to gain experience with women and what they really want, without short term dating and without getting into bad long term relationships.
I’m imagining something like the following, it roughly mirrors my development, although it was unconscious. Although it would probably be hard to follow for very sexually frustrated men.
1) Find women that you enjoy spending time with in a non-sexual way, either at work or a shared hobby/interest. Do not try to befriend them specifically, but befriend the group. On-line interaction might work, but you will do better if you see people in the flesh.
2) Do not focus on a specific woman. Do not think you want to have sex with them. That is friendzone them to borrow PUA terminology. If you are interested in long term monogamy this is an important skill to have*!
3) Casually watch their interactions with their boyfriends/husbands and the sorts of conversations they have. Do not try them out on your female friends, unless you are very sure they are interested in you. But knowing what behaviours are appropriate/attractive for the sort of women that you can get on with is important.
What they react to is probably a more accurate picture of what they want, than what they say they want though.
4) Improve some of the things that PUA people talk about, appearance, posture, demeanour etc
5) Some of your female friends may flirt with you, especially when drunk. This may be entirely innocent, and is likely to be if they are in a relationship. Practice and have fun but don’t take it too seriously. If they do flirt, take it as a compliment and it means you are ready for dating. You should have a good idea of what sort of woman you get on with as well.
6) Try dating. Ask your female friends to suggest friends, try on-line dating.
However I’m pretty sure I learnt a lot about relationships from watching my Mum and Dad (and Aunts and Uncles, all in long term AFAIK monogamous relationships) interact as I was growing up as well, so I wasn’t starting from no knowledge.
I haven’t done much of 6 myself. Because people, in general, tend to drive me up the wall if I’m around them a lot. There are rare exceptions, though. And that isn’t even taking into consideration other compatibility issues.
*Not friendzoning your partner, but your partners friends.
I agree that men form lasting emotional bonds partly as a result of (more often than a cause of) physical intimacy. But this usually does not exclude desire for sex with other women. If a man immediately settles down with the first woman who will touch him, it just means he really hates looking for such women (perhaps irrationally so). In this case, his even finding one is (excluding abusive psychopaths) an improvement.
I agree, which is the reason that I specified “for the woman”.