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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.
It sucks because you rarely ever learn any useful lessons out of it either, because there's no reason for things ending other than "brain said to run so I ran."
You don't learn to be a better partner, you just get left wondering if you were inadequate.
What helped me a lot was keeping tabs on these women for long enough that I could see that it wasn't me, they did this to every guy. I actually had an interesting realization that of all the women I dated seriously... only one of them has managed to get into a stable relationship, so realistically I probably couldn't have made any of those situations work on my own efforts.
But also means I've been pretty bad at selecting good partners.
And finally, the thing I really hate is when I meet a girl whose personality is a really close match to my ideal and is physically attractive, but I immediately clock her as anxious or avoidant and I ultimately learn that she had a bad experience with a controlling, abusive, or adulterous/sociopathic dude who has basically ruined her pair-bonding capability. And I agonize over the "what ifs" I had met her earlier before the damage was done.
This is a problem writ large with how many of them think, that I’ve noticed. They find it easy to attach with men who are “low stakes” to them, because it doesn’t matter if they end up leaving or not. They’ve got no sustained investment in them; they’re a utility or a prop. Guys they have a serious interest in they’re more cold or distant with because they risk a “misstep” of screwing things up; or some other idiotic reason.
Guys see this behavior and say to themselves, “Shit, I wish I was treated like I didn’t matter.” Because women are treating men they don’t like or care for better than the men they do. This is why they’ve got everything backwards. If you like a man and want to lock him down, do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men; keep them a mile away at all times. It’s really as simple as that. I love nothing more than an otherwise boring woman who makes my life easy. That’s the best woman of all time. But they make it harder than it has to be for themselves. And this is the origin story of how good men go bad over time. Men see the narrative unfold with their eyes and see men with bad behavior getting what they want, while upstanding men are punished for it. And so as time goes on, the pool of good men shrinks even further and as women age they wonder where all the decent ones go. That’s what happened to them. They didn’t “go” anywhere. They no longer exist.
Something whenever I hear it that immediately scratches one off for serious consideration thorough is when someone says “I’m not happy…” That is a phrase that is so wildly overused in relationships today that it’s all but lost any serious meaning it may once have had. Concepts like “duty” and “responsibility” are foreign to these people. Nobody in any circumstance of life is guaranteed to be happy 100% of the time. Yes, happiness is enormously important and should be intrinsic to the relationship, but someone who adopts the unhealthy viewpoint of it like they’re always chasing the next high is an emotional junkie who’s more akin to a drug addict that should be in rehab, rather than in a serious relationship. I can’t stand those people.
That's the big one.
Most guys are aware that a woman will have a dozen other prospects in their phone at any given time. You CAN'T get attached to that person, b/c her cost of swapping you out for another is minimal. You become aloof because that's what the game theory says you have to do. She can defect at any time, and she can't be punished for doing so, don't be the chump who cooperates too early.
Costly shows of effort and interest that demonstrate she's not entertaining other men is how you'd actually know she's serious and not as likely to leave on a whim (alas, it takes 5 minutes for her to set up a dating profile, so you're never truly safe).
And no, that doesn't count just sleeping with him, since there's no direct cost to THAT anymore. Be pleasant, show appreciation, make him feel like he is important to you, and he's already yours.
What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.
You’ve just described a long-term relationship. The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.
Women certainly don’t want to act this way for any man, just for a man they’re in love with. It’s true that women who are ‘playing the field’ and aren’t ready to settle into an LTR are noncommittal and ready to swap out — but so are men who are trying to play the field.
The saving grace for men is that most women aren’t actually looking to play the field. It looks like it, especially when you look at the population of women on dating apps, and particularly hookup-oriented dating apps. Those women, of course, are looking for hot men who are good at sex and make the on-ramp to a sexual encounter thrilling and socially permissible.
But the same statistics that show that also show that their absolute number is low, especially compared to the men looking for the same thing. Most women don’t want to be on dating apps, and most would consider joining one to be an admission of failure, an unacceptable stranger danger risk, or at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention in a way that’s uncomfortable and hopelessness-inducing, not validating. These are the actual feelings the average woman feels about dating apps, not something they’ve made up to mess with guys.
I guess sometimes I read discussions from guys on what women are like in dating and I wonder if anyone’s actually been in a reasonably-healthy LTR. Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.
Lesbians in porn do not act like lesbians IRL, but how men like to imagine lesbians. Likewise "girlfriend experience" is not named because it accurately portrays girlfriends IRL, but bevause it portrays how men would like girlfriends would act. Such conduct is not required to be prevalent among real GFs for the name to stay around.
A man who is "pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a [partner] with sexual desire as an undertone" is not as valued as highly by women, as it is by men. I would correct your statement to say "Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels sparks in her the same utility gain". What that is exactly is a subject of debate, but one can't women and men value the same things in a partner. As you admit in the following quote:
Gender asymmetry is built into every point of this debate.
Every serious girlfriend I've had has been like this -- I haven't had many of them, 3 or 4 I suppose if we're generous, but the experience isn't at all foreign to me and when I've been in relationships, the women I've dated have given every appearance that they've valued being this way around me, and we've enjoyed each other's presence because we cared for one another, made each other laugh, felt like the best versions of ourselves around each other. If that experience is as rare as you're suggesting, then swipe right on my profile and call me gigachad.
It's true that things like being able to be a provider, being a psychologically stabilizing in the presence of crises, and caring about her physical and mental needs to an intense and specific degree, are things that women care about in their partners in a way that men don't necessarily do about theirs. Even as stable and formidible a writer as 2rafa, when she talked about being engaged, described how wonderful it was that her fiancé remained calm and helpful even in moments of crisis. Women aren't quiet about this stuff, and it's not stupid or malicious that they value these things. Husbands and fathers exist because women, especially pregnant women, are vulnerable in moments of crisis, and men's adaptive function to hominid evolution was to protect them and provide for them.
But there's more symmetry, at least at a greater level of abstraction, there than you seem to be implying. Both men and women ultimately want a partner that cares for them as an individual person specifically, who pays attention to their needs, and supports them and roots for them when times get tough. Maybe that's not possible in the long term, I'll grant the manosphere the possibility of reasonable doubt, but my experience seeing my mother with my father, my grandmother with my grandfather, my friend's mother with my friend's dad, and my own experiences with women, indicate to me that it is possible.
It may be true that this is much harder to find in modern times, and I don't actually doubt this at all. But blowing it up into an overall model of human behavior given the WEIRD and unique and socially atomized nature of modern times is a pretty serious empirical error.
It's true there's gender asymmetry, but gender asymmetry isn't malice in the same way that the fact that women menstruate and men don't isn't malice; it's just part of what the world is like for a sexually dimorphic mammalian species.
If you've ever been in online dating where you receive male attention, and I have, having explored in a bisexual phase, you realize pretty quick that a lot of male attention is low-quality not just in the sense that the men are basically normal, friendly guys who just aren't hot, or whatever, but that the men are simply just not great prospects under anyone's definition.
You'll get attention from 50 year olds, you'll get people who don't read your bio, you'll find a lot of guys whose profiles are basically "the worst possible selfie a human being has ever taken, obviously taken because the app asked, plus a bio that describes nothing about them." Oftentimes these guys will be aggressive, not even in a threatening way but in a really dumb way, like messaging you and then two hours later, after you don't reply, messaging "well it sounds like you don't actually want what you say you want, you jerk," like externalizing their frustration at one person who doesn't reply will somehow change their fortunes.
And that's not even an environment where the gender asymmetry you're talking about exists -- that's gay men, the most sex-forward group of human beings ever to walk the earth, and many of the same principles that women complain about encountering from men are present there in men looking for men spaces, too. This isn't really because men are horrid people or anything; it's just that the floor for men's attractiveness and basic social competence is pretty damn low, and because of the realities of the species men have to put some effort into being attractive, even to other men who are looking for men.
Complaining about that is of the same genre to me as women complaining about men not having to get pap smears -- your complaint is with God or Darwin or the universe as it exists, it's just what biology is, symmetry and equality was not evolutionarily adaptive. Feminists complain endlessly about the world not being equal for women, and the most confusing thing about the manosphere to me is that they copy them: yes, men and women are not biologically equivalent, them's the breaks.
But also, the main reason that many women don't like dating apps is their perception, which is not without evidence, that a huge number of men are looking ultimately to play the field and not commit to a particular woman. This is a gender asymmetry that resolves in terms of men not looking so great on the LTR-orientation front, and it too has its deep connections to evolutionary biology.
If you tell me the idea of a harem of beautiful women has never occurred to you as compelling because you're just so LTR-oriented and the picky dating app women just can't see that, well, I don't believe you. The thought's in my heart as much as yours, and if we want to be brutally honest about gender asymmetry we have to acknowledge the male desire for polygyny, and the fact that a massive number of men -- both hot and frumpy, rich and poor -- would take the option given the means and opportunity. If we're allowed to question seriously women's 'wonderfulness', then questioning men's 'wonderfulness' is also fair game.
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