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Why do a lot of women not like acknowledging the practical aspects of dating? By this I mean that women appear to be put off by me simply discussing:
Of course I'm not discussing these topic with women I'm trying to actually date, I'm not that autistic. But if you're trying to actually find a partner to settle down and have kids with, how do you not take all of these into account? Not only does it reek of impracticality, but on an even deeper level, it appears that any attempt to practically model the dating world at all produces a negative female reaction.
(Maybe it's because some of these women don't ever intend on having kids and therefore don't ever have to be realistic about dating.)
Legibility mostly doesn't serve women that much on the dating scene. By keeping things vague they both increase their optionality by not getting rules lawyered into "actually by your own stated values I'm a catch so you should date me!" and select out from their dating pool men who can't navigate vague and ambiguous social dynamics. At least at the individual level there really isn't any compelling reason for women to be particularly candid. Going further I doubt many women themselves have really interrogated what actually attracts them to a partner. Sexually successful women mostly lay bait and filter. They are concerned with the quality of the bait, their appearance and social position, and their degrees of freedom to quickly and efficiently filter out undesirable suiters. Neither of these is particularly served by legibility.
Legibility in the dating market is something men crave, maybe on a biological level. Navigating the sexual marketplace is one of the most centrally selected evolutionary drives. So it makes sense that men would be frustrated with illegibility in the same way women would be frustrated by men who figure out their strategies and find ways to extract sex without responsibility.
Another factor to consider is that there isn't really any kind of coordination here. women aren't conspiring to keep things illegible. This is actually broadly helped by women not strongly introspecting in a way to surface hard rules. If they did then men could more easily read their communications and exploit them. Women are much better served by going off vibes that are maximally hard to decompile.
Amazing. A way of life that has literally no evidence of existing prior to the Industrial Revolution, must, in fact, be the ancestral environment we evolved in, because why else would we be acting that way now? Talk about people living in the "eternal present;" marriage has been about personal fulfilment for about the past 70 years or so, therefore it must always have been that way. Surely we should ask why, were this were the case, then why is it not working? Why is fertility collapsing, why are men and women just completely checking out, why are they increasingly neurotic? No, we cannot ask that, because it simply must be the case that men have to be chad for women, pay no attention to all recorded history showing marriage being controlled by family, with archeological evidence and oral traditions/myths (as well as extant hunter gatheres) indicating this is the same for pre-history.
Courtship isn't exactly a modern invention in the last 70 years. It happens in observed and studied hunter gathering tribes and we have records of it in every civilization. It happens in other closely related species and we have many of the sexual dimorphic characteristics, concealed ovulation and year-round female receptivity, classic to pair bonding species.
The actual makeup of the social roles certainly change but I think they broadly almost always fit the model I proposed above. Especially for men who in practically every society I've heard of are expected to prove themselves worthy through successfully demonstrating merit in some way. Which hunter gathering societies exactly do you observe male sexual success decouple from the ability to navigate the sexual market place? Of which being impressive to a girl's parents would certainly be an example. What do you even think status is? If what it took to get paired with a high status and attractive woman was very legible do you not think men would endeavor to game whatever the system was?
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