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A lot of women would discuss some of these if put using different terms.
Also, it doesn't just produce a negative female reaction. It produces a negative reaction in a lot of humans because you are signalling a lot of things by discussing these:
You are probably also opening wounds and triggering insecurity about where they would stand in "SMV" or whatever. A lot of people find the Darwinian nature of early dating bad.
I think as humans a lot of us have an ideal of (unrealistic) somewhat unconditional care and of being loved for things we influence, for our deeds and words. Entire religions are founded on this. A big part of later-stage dating and relationships is about trust, kindness, reciprocity and related things.
The manosphere gets some regrettable aspects of dating and early relationship formation right but there is actual evidence that being a decent person is pretty important for actually having quality long-term relationships. If you are signalling early that you instrumentalise and commoditise people that is a pretty negative signal and will rightfully put people off. Not everyone would be of course, package this stuff in the right language and I'm sure you could discuss it with some women.
I honestly get put off when people enthusiastically talk about having a zero-sum mindset about these things even if I think they have a point. It's just a signal that this person is probably not very kind. And why would you want to talk about this enthusiastically and with a partner? It's honestly inherently quite an awkward topic.
Good points. How exactly is one to discuss the dating market in the abstract without "commoditising", "instrumentalising", or "dehumanising" anyone?
Well with my most recent partner, once we got to know each other pretty well, we naturally talked about our personal history with the local dating scene and how that informed our perspectives on dating. We discussed the various causal factors that might've led each of us to have such very different experiences despite nominally participating in the exact same arena. I mean, it's really fascinating stuff, is it not? Wouldn't you want to know about your partner's past lived experiences and what sort of future lived experiences they are expecting themselves to have? And yes, she was somewhere on the spectrum too.
But maybe I should've made this clearer -- I'm talking about talking about this with platonic friends, not women I'm trying to actively hit on. Platonic male friends, at least the bunch I have, have no problem whatsoever talking about what they've needed to do to get to where they are as an attractive mate, or about female fertility and how that informs their family planning and mate selection strategies. Not in those specific terms, but definitely about those specific topics.
Your platonic male friends are likely similar to you in worldview and personality. I think the average person, male or female, would find anyone saying things like “mate selection strategy” off putting. I don’t know what words you use when talking about these subjects to women, but even if you’re being careful, you’re probably giving off an overly analytical, clinical, impersonal vibe that most people don’t like to see applied to human relationships.
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I found a lot of my really meta dating-app conversations tended to be of the sort where I'd get halfway through a first date, realize I had no real interest in ever seeing the woman ever again and then just start asking questions. Also a few cases where the woman was a massive oversharer of their dating-app escapades which killed anything I had for them, but I was happy to talk about the game as a player at the time.
On that note, I'd say look maximizing generally pretty overrated for women so long as they're not obese. Even fours could get pretty solid dates so long as they could see their feet, and most of the chatter I got was more of the 'Girl dithering/trying to reach for the absolute hottest guy instead of dating just a notch or two up and probably finding a solid consistent boyfriend'. Hell, in my year or so of concerted dating app effort I went from a 35 BMI to like a 22, dressed/presented better and got better at dating as a whole which meant I feel like I saw life as a male 2/10 all the way to a 7/10 which was pretty illuminating.
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I think you have to either be talking to a pretty high decoupler or approach this stuff in a sensitive and safe way. One reliable, evidence-backed thing is that women score about 0.5 SD or similar higher on neuroticism (OCEAN trait) than men - meaning the average woman has a bit of a more sensitive trigger for threats. Someone talking about this stuff can both trigger insecurities (bad for higher neuroticism) and also, as mentioned, make you look like someone who generally has a bit of zero-sum mindset.
Also female dating is and has never been grounded in cultivation of resources and positive traits. I find a lot of women get this wrong and are surprised in a kind of female nice-guy-ism, like I read about a female doctor that expected to be a hot commodity but was then surprised most men cared about looks, agreeableness, etc. over her career and that all her hard work didn't make her good prospect. So it might be hard for women to empathise with what this means to be a man (a common trope for men is that non-parental love is always conditional). As a man this stuff sounds like acknowledgment of a tough (shared) reality, as a woman you might sound like someone who sees things as being an eternal competition and who can't care/love unconditionally which looks bad even for a platonic friend.
She’s not entirely wrong.
If she has a good career, savings and possessions while not being exceedingly ugly, unpleasant or old, all this makes her a good marriage prospect within her upper-middle-class social circle (we can assume), because her male peers do prioritize such attributes within the context of modern assortative mating.
But I stress: these attributes make her an attractive wife – not a great girlfriend, situationship partner, fling or sex partner, but wife.
Do they make her a good wife? Doctors often have to move and she might care more about her patients than you. I can see this with other girlboss office jobs though. (Full disclosure: I am a guy dating one. I do love her but the job comes with a lot of negatives for relationships and well, the money angle isn't compelling for me for various reasons. A lot of my GFs female colleagues are single, none of the male ones are).
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In my experience the most professionally qualified females either had overbearing bossbitch energy which is kinda self-explanatory, or the other side of the spectrum where I ran into a bunch of women who'd just never really dated until mid-late twenties at all due to focusing on their professional/academic pathway. And you've never seen a slower-moving, awkwarder scrum than dating apps with a woman who treats it as a HR exercise and is disposed to bolt back into the KDrama bunker at the slightest vibe anything is even slightly off. Also generally incapable of giving the right signals to guys due to their lack of experience so their 'flirty withdrawal' attempts just read as 'fuck off and die'.
I'm not even saying this purely out of experience of dating these woman. My now-wife's friends and siblings trend alarmingly in that direction, and I've seen this common social thread from multiple angles now consequentially.
It looks to me like both men and women would benefit from more opportunities to spend time together when they are still in their teens. Maybe the Japanese have the right idea with their all-but-mandatory leniently supervised after-school clubs.
True but to a certain degree a lot of this was family pressure on girls (largely of Asian extraction but not all) who'd had an all-consuming thrust towards academic/professional achievement till mid twenties. Then got hit with the 'where grandkids' from their parents who'd been incredibly antipathic towards any dating in the meantime. My personal filters/location probably meant I ran into more of this type than most people would, but it was pretty striking how many long-term single women there are who kinda fit into this mold. Also there's likely a plethora of men in the same boat, undeniably.
I'm not saying they had to slut it up in college.
A lot of "how to fix your dating" advice for men is basically "you didn't have enough low-stakes interactions with women, here's how to speed-level your game". Socializing in mixed groups without constant adult supervision, but without salacious activities either, should fix it.
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After a certain age you also get adverse selection (on both sexes). Can concur with the bossbitch thing. Some women try hard to cultivate disagreeability which while maybe adaptive in their careers make her a pretty bad partner (especially if paired with being neurotic, which women are on average more than men). For men this kind of works (though only to a point, I'm not fully aligned with the manosphere people here) but for women it's generally quite off-putting.
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security. Some people would call me insecure for thinking this but I've not yet met a woman who contradicts this idea (I'm sure they are out there but most women want to be provided for).
I honestly think the bossbitch thing is more productive than some of the paralysis-by-analysis cases I saw. The bossbitches were capable of getting laid/manifesting a short-term relationship but tended to go awry in the medium term. The inexperienced ones were perfectly good women but just stuck in this weird quagmire where nothing happens for years on end.
I do agree with your last point where unless you find a woman who's running the trifecta of high earning + spending conscious + loyal as hell you're more likely to end up compelled to a new level of lifestyle creep by adding a second high earner than you are to end up actually getting ahead.
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