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There has been some new study recently showing that female promiscuity, just like male promiscuity, is limited to a small subset of the total population. Before I deleted X, I saw several posts asking why non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't. I want to propose a hypothesis.
But first, a digression. Imagine a happily married gay couple, Fred and Steve. It's Saturday afternoon, their adopted kids won't be back home for a couple more hours, all the chores are done, and Fred's looking bored and restless. Steve suggests a quickie to pass the time. Is Fred down for it? I would bet my money on yes.
Now replace Fred with Frida. Suddenly, the odds are completely different. I am not saying that all women are not into random acts of intercourse, but the proportion of them that are dtf is low enough that reversing the bet makes total financial sense.
What does this have to do with promiscuity? My hypothesis is that it's significantly correlated with overall sex drive in women. (Feel free to nominate me for the Ig Nobel prize.) There are some non-promiscuous, but libidinous women, except they don't stay on the dating market long, just like reasonably prices houses in good locations are almost never seen on Zillow. The visible parts of the dating market are promiscuous women and women with low sex drive. In the past the concepts of "putting out", "marital duty" obscured this dynamic, but modern women have been brought up knowing they don't owe anyone sex and don't have to hide their (dis)interest. And given that single lives are now easier than ever, why bother with trying to date such women at all? Better to concentrate on the visibly promiscuous women or on the age cohorts that are just entering the dating market, both of them have a higher share of women with a high enough sex drive.
Generalize that further.
The people who are visible on the dating market are often 'broken' in some way that makes their ability to maintain long-term relationships much more stunted (especially under modern conditions).
The ones who are capable of stable pair-bonding and are generally normal in terms of attractiveness, life-put-togetherness, from happy families, are by sheer definition, the ones most likely to get locked in to a stable relationship early and not leave. The pool, at any given time, is mostly inhabited by the broken and you have to get lucky to chance onto a viable partner in their brief period of availability.
It creates a double-sided Market for Lemons as people learn to expect the worst from each given encounter and thus are ever less willing to extend commitment or effort to the next person.
So don't limit it just to promiscuity and libido, include emotional stability and familial instincts and generally being 'sane' enough to envision a committed relationship with that person. If the person is aware that they're broken, they even have an incentive to hide that from potential matches, so there's already a layer of suspicion going in.
In terms of promiscuous women, I think that they get the focus because sexual availability is one of the few things that's relatively easy to sus out in short order, and if you've decided you're unlikely to find a life partner anytime soon, getting sex in the meantime is a consolation prize of sorts. Or a self-esteem booster.
This is an issue that the dating apps not only haven't solved, they've exacerbated.
They give you less up front information than you'd need to make a solid judgment, they disallow searching out specific characteristics and they show you people at seemingly random that you know almost nothing about other than they, too, have been unable to secure commitment.
It enrages me. I know with precision the qualities I'm looking for. I know what qualities I want to avoid. I'm acutely aware how rare these positive qualities are, DOUBLY so among those who are still single. So I want to be given tools to zero in on these people more directly, and not absorb the waste of time and additional risk of figuring out if this person who deigned to match with me is sane or not, whilst operating on the assumption they are not. When the person I'm searching for is so unique, the search tools need to be powerful. And search is, on the technology side, a solved problem, I should be able to pluck my potential partners out of the ether with ease.
But this is simply not a thing you are allowed to do in the current era.
I read a book about attachment styles which made the more specific argument that securely attached people tend to pair off with other securely attached people early on, resulting in a dating pool made up primarily of insecurely attached people. This results in the "anxious-avoidant trap", a relationship made up of one anxiously attached person and one avoidant person, which is mutually unfulfilling.
Yep.
I've become ACUTELY prescient at noticing when someone is anxious-avoidant or worse, just straight up dismissive. Me, I'm mildly anxious (have gotten a lot better) and very secure once basic trust is established. It takes a lot of effort to maintain that, since one scary thing is that secure-attachment people can be shifted over to avoidant and anxious if they have enough bad experiences with the other types.
So the secure types become a rarer and rarer type to find because they're either pairing off or getting ruined by having a handful of bad relationships that failed on them.
I'm semi-comfortable with the anxious types, I don't mind giving reassurances to them that the relationship is strong... but there's always going to be some incident that 'confirms' their fears and causes them to cut it off when they think that things are about to go south.
The ones where the avoidant person is trying to withdraw and the other party is trying to chase and secure their commitment is maybe the worst dynamic on a meta level, because it can remain stable for quite a while but its burning out both parties as it continues. I remember straight up telling one girl "look, its one thing to want men to chase you... but you have to be willing to be caught and its clear you are not."
And the pernicious one is the avoidant who is mostly aware they're avoidant, and keeps trying to establish relationships with people then withdrawing suddenly, closing off all contact as if the connection never existed, and move on relatively quickly. That one hurts.
This is apparently a pattern with some women. Fire up a dating app, stick around long enough to find a nice enough dude, delete the app, date for a bit, freak out and break it off, stay single and get lonely after a bit, then repeat.
You rang?
Thank Christ I broke out of that cycle.
How?
I've done the 'anxious with an avoidant' bit from the avoidant side. Wasn't fun at all. Any advice much appreciated.
The best I can say is "persistence". Sticking with a relationship I know makes me happy even when my gut is telling me to cut and run. Per High Fidelity, it's about learning to recognise when your guts have shit for brains.
I don’t know. Never went wrong trusting my gut but I’ve went wrong several times ignoring it. Maybe my intuition was always calibrated just right. I’ve known people who were equally persistent and all miserable just the same.
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