The Painful Truth About Modern Dating Culture - Alex DatePsych

what's going on with risk aversion and men not approaching women sure so risk aversion refers to a personality trait or disposition where individuals are basically more accepting or more willing to take risks so highrisk aversion would be individuals who are uh less willing to take risks and a big risk for men at least a perceived risk is of course approaching women so recently I conducted a survey and I used a measure of risk aversion and I asked about approach Behavior basically approaching for dates approaching on the Street approaching in a bar talking to someone at work or in class and yeah there's an inverse correlation or I should say a positive correlation with that risk aversion and willingness to approach right that people who are more risk averse much less willing to approach they tend to have more fears as well as far as the potential consequences of of approaching a woman asking for a date what did they say were the primary fears that these guys were concerned about sure so some of the primary fears are basically social rejection and social consequ quences there were some differences where individuals higher in risk aversion might fear more legal consequences as well like uh some kind of report to HR the police or even something like that but it tends to be mostly kind of a fear of like loss of of reputation yeah well I suppose you know we have a basis for this ancestrally that if you were rebuffed by one of the women in your tribe that that probably wouldn't do much for your credibility with the rest of the women in the tribe and that your mates might take the piss out of you uh so I i' certainly understand from that that angle for the women as well that are listening the all consuming fear as a guy of seeing a girl across the room and looking at her and thinking I should go and say hello because I think that she's nice is like [ __ ] mortal it's reality bending it's so strange it's such a bizarre and again I'm sure that there's loads of guys listening to I don't know what you're talking about I can just go up and talk to anybody but I think even the average normal risk aversion man has this pretty sort of gutteral sense of trepidation before they go and do it absolutely yeah and yeah the most confident man it doesn't matter they're going to be a little bit nervous at least approaching a woman and I think that's something in pickup artist communities that they've kind of caught on to is almost kind of an exposure therapy to that which you know exposure therapy when people have phobias they're exposed gradually to whatever the stimulus is that reduces that fear and so maybe they've kind of caught on like approach a 100 women and you will be less afraid yeah that's what it is but of course most men aren't out there approaching 100 women and that kind of nervousness it persists even if an individual is very very confident to begin with yeah I think that was definitely one of the positive sides of the pickup world was that it taught men to overcome approach anxiety just through exposure therapy right it gamified exposure therapy uh which is pretty reliable when you're trying to get rid of all manner of phobias if it's a spider that you're scared or you agobia and you don't want to leave the house you know it's one step step at a time very very small exposures Etc um and given that this is such a such a difficult one I asked uh it was ages ago but I spoke about um what it's like for a woman to approach a man and be rejected and had some really interesting responses from women that it's really painful for them because they almost feel like they've broken the social norm and still not succeeded so there's kind of two layers of shame that they've had to go through as opposed to I guess men maybe with only one yeah exactly and I didn't even look at women approaching men because it is so uncommon you know even for very attractive men they just don't get approached that much if a man gets approached once or twice a year you know he's a Chad now basically that's what it is it's it's super uncommon for men for men to get approached and it is a violation of those expected gender roles in a way that you know women will wait I would and they will say you know I would prefer to be approached by a man and that's something else that kind of came out in the research you know we asked women uh would you like to be approached more and you had about 70 to 80% of women particularly younger women even more than older women that said yeah I wish men would approach approach more but but they're not going to do it the women aren't going to going to approach men for sure interesting so have you looked longitudinally at this do you know if men's risk aversion and fear of approach has increased over time I don't know for sure but there I think there is some research on that that I that I haven't done that's uh looked at risk aversion in younger generations and they may be more risk Avers so it might be something that we see particularly with the Zoomers right with the younger generation that they are more risk-averse than earlier generations and there's a lot of kind of converging evidence on that that you know they're waiting later in life to take risks like getting a job going to school getting a driver's license many of these other things that would indicate okay they're they're they're kind of hesitant to enter the adult world so to speak yeah Jee Tang's work in Generations is is fantastic with this uh slow life strategy or extended adolesence um it explains an awful lot you know me and bus have been talking about this generalized risk aversion syndrome um and it is it's across you know it permeates absolutely everything but it really really shows up in dating because dating is largely a game of Risk remediation right it's how can I kind of deal with the inevitable uncertainty of going up to someone I don't know if they like me I don't know if they're single I don't know if I'm going to look silly uh it very much is uh kind of like the Vanguard of risk I suppose other things move out of the house changing jobs moving locations but certainly a much lower Stakes more common one which is what makes it interesting because it is low States it's like what you get rejected by somebody when you go up to them like what's there's literally no cost apart from a tiny little bit of discomfort and yet it the felt sense of it is a you know world-ending catastrophe exactly yeah and something kind of related to that is that uh we see for example individuals higher in the dark Triad they have more sexual partners uh Psychopaths as well people that score high in the hair psychopathy checklist we see example people that have a criminal record may have earlier sexual debuse so they're having sex earlier in life or having more partners and these are also all things that are associated with a higher tolerance for risk or even risk seeking individuals who might enjoy risk more so it's kind of like why do they have more Partners or something like that it there's some indication that they might actually even select down so it might not be that they're more attractive but it could be that they're much more tolerant of risk or that they even seek risks out so these are the people kind of approaching more aggressively and so they're kind of reaping the fruits of that so to speak was it you that discovered 50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year yes that sounds right yeah throwing that statistic all over the Internet so I'm glad I'm glad that I got the citation right yeah and the men that have approached are doing remarkably well a lot of the men who have approached they they more than half have gotten a date from it you know and it goes down if you look to like long-term relationships how many dates turn into a long-term relationship but the men who are approaching they're doing pretty well actually okay so 50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year of that 50% 50% of them did get a date I would have to check again but it might even be higher it might have been of the men who had it might have even been about 70% at least got a date or a phone number or some kind of romantic connection there and it goes down to about 20% that got a long-term relationship out of it but sex is higher so you kind of see it go down like date sex is a little bit lower long-term relationship is a little bit lower but mostly they're yeah they're kind of people that approach women they're getting dates from it that's I don't know that seems pretty positive for the approach and I suppose you know there's there's an argument to be made well of course the kind of guys that are approaching women they're the ones that are full of the confidence or they're the ones that know it's a sure thing of course they're getting into relationships and having sex and going on dates and getting phone numbers and stuff but given the fact that this is an exclusively agentic uh decision that you're making right yeah sure if you have a little bit more confidence in yourself it's going to make making the decision more easy but ultimately there's a huge chunk of people in that 50% that are doing it that probably are just as unsure and just as terrified and just as uncertain as you are so yeah I mean that's a a serious white pill for why you should approach women absolutely yeah that's one of the things that I've come to believe is that you know as as far as the whole Pua thing and all of that goes yeah like a lot of it just comes down to approaching women and it does seem to work it's interesting you said agentic as well because I have some more data I haven't put it out yet but this looks at like Locust of control and dating difficulties so I asked people to list all of these what do they think are there difficulties in dating and then I coded those into a survey got the responses and I found a correlation with Locust of control and dating difficulty so individuals that have a higher internal locus of control that are more agentic they tend to report that they have fewer difficulties dating so that's another thing too is that more agentic individuals in that sense like you said yeah they're probably doing better yeah I think William Costello's most recent post about incels found a wildly externalized locus of control exactly yeah his recent paper exactly that he looked at the same thing locus of control and incels had yeah that higher external Locust of control you know people with an external locus of control they see the world as like things just happen to me it's out of my control whereas people within internal locus of control you know they say I make things happen things don't just happen to me you know what whatever happens in life I have some control over that yeah you asked people that survey I really loved it you asked people about the biggest struggles with dating they were experiencing that were holding them back what were the big takeaways that you learned from that well a big one that emerged was fear of rejection for men specifically uh dating apps a lot said you know they just don't well do well on dating apps that was another big one a lot had to do with compatibility and particularly some big uh sex differences there about 70% of women scored highly which was a six or a seven on a seveno liyer scale and said I can't find someone that I'm intellectually attracted to which is something that I didn't expect to be so high but apparently not being able to make an intellectual connection was one another difference was a lot of women uh much more than men said that they felt there was a lot of sexual pressure and demand for them so those are those are things as well not finding someone who was physically attractive enough yeah women scored higher in that as well I think that had a Cohen D of about .6 so about a mediumsized difference there so those are all things like I can't find someone I'm attracted to I'm afraid to approach people because I'm afraid to be rejected can't make a connection with someone on an emotional or intellectual level as well the intellectual one is so interesting and kind of runs against I think a lot of common held dating commentary uh on the internet because it's very difficult for us to quantify what intellectual compatibility or saposexual success actually is right like what no one's talking about that on the internet you know they'll say and I hear this Soho house as a research base for you to go out of should be one of the first places that you look at if you sit around the pool at any Soho House on a Saturday afternoon in a relatively warm country you will get so many fascinating stories about girls in the from 25 to 40 and they dating challenges and dude I it's my ethnographic like in-person Research Center and I'll just sit and just ask questions or overhear conversations about what people are talking about and a lot of the conversations that these girls are saying is you know guys are um intellectually immature emotionally immature um they don't really understand how to take care of themselves and then I say okay so have you tried dating older like if you looked at you know 30 35 40 they say yeah and you know these problems aren't necessarily solved by the passage of time that there are you know adult infants and and and sort of Manchild all over the place and again with this it it would be the low resolution solution to this would be don't don't worry about trying to become intellectually or emotionally interesting or mature just earn more and you will be able to offset your emotional immaturity that would be kind of common held internet wisdom at least for a lot of men yeah exactly I think a lot of people don't think about that and something I noticed when I followed up and I and I saw that it was so big on that intellectual compatibility I asked people what does that mean to you when you see a question like that and a lot of men interpret it to mean like but I'm very intelligent I have a very high IQ and I don't think that's exactly what women uh mean when they're when they're saying I can't find a man who is intellectually compatible I don't think they they mean everyone is stupid or they're not high IQ I think they mean is it someone that's interesting that can uh connect to me emotionally that can connect to me on a on a mental LEL and relate to me which is related to cognitive abilities part of what's called social cognition theory of Mind how well do you understand the emotional states of another person how well can you predict accurately what the other person is thinking I think not being boring is actually a really big part of it as well as far as that intellectual compatibility if you have nothing that you relate on you know being able to relate to someone is probably a big part of it where if everyone's hobbies are different you know someone could be really smart but you still might not find intellectual compatibility that so it's not necessarily men are stupid I think everyone's dumb but it could be kind of like you said you know I have a hard time relating to these men they seem very immature in that sense yeah I think just paying attention to people seems to be incredibly rare you know it's kind of I guess guys talk about this a lot that um it sometimes seems to men that when they're in a relationship women respond to them differently them when they're not you know they're just sat around a dinner table or a bar or whatever just having a chat and I wonder whether that kind of gets rid of a few things the fact that you're if you're in a committed relationship you're not trying to pull so it actually does a couple of things it lowers the stakes because you're not there's no such thing as rejection here she's not on the docket as far as you're concerned and I also wonder whether um some of the sort of chest beating peacock tail fluffing that kind of goes on when guys feel like they need to do a thing to impress a girl and maybe even counter signals that they don't like whereas the dude that sits back and asks what she's interested in or just kind of lets this person waffle on at them uh actually comes across as being more intellectually engaging because they're just letting it come and go nice and easily yeah exactly some fluency in conversation there is probably really related to it as well because something we know about sex differences in intelligence is that men tend to score a little bit higher in Visos spatial but women tend to score a little bit higher in verbal intelligence so women may be a little bit better at communicating and having those conversations holding them and and engaging and so if if men are not in general you know if they're a little bit worse women might struggle to find that like is this someone that can kind of just Ramble On in a sense can they can they hold an interesting conversation in that way and I think that might also be related to kind of what they think of when they say intellectually compatible yeah how is your onean crusade to try and fix the cognitive distortions in the incel world going it's going well I think a lot of people you're a liar you are a liar you a liar yeah I don't know people are always very stuck in what they believe ideology is very very hard to shift and people like kind of simple explanations for things kind of univariate explanations like this is this whereas human behavior is very very multivariate there's so many different things that contribute to why someone might do well at dating or not you know why someone might come across as attract Ive or not and people tend to focus very exclusively on just one thing without taking into account the big picture and these become belief systems that people adopt ideologically in a sense and shifting their beliefs in a way is also kind of difficult because it's almost like it can cause cognitive dissonance but it's also perhaps abandoning an identity that they relate with and I think you see that yeah particularly in incel communities you know they that Community is their friends and their identity in a way what do you wish more incel uh Forum inhabitants new well I wish that they would perhaps understand more Nuance as far as uh all of the research related to attractiveness so it's very I guess if it was a specific thing that I wish they knew perhaps interpreting effect sizes because you will see in a lot of papers and it's kind of a statistical thing you'll see that in the abstract word of a report like ah the more attractive person got more women XYZ or you know the dark people with the dark Triad were more attractive they had more Partners but then you will look at the effects and it will be like one on average or something like that and that's very common in Psychology that sometimes the differences are are relatively small uh but I don't know if people always understand that when they're just reading the abstract or the results initially that just because there's a significant effect it doesn't always mean that it's a meaningful or a large effect yeah Williams most recent study I've got part of the abstract here incels significantly overestimate the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects to women and underestimated the importance of intelligence kindness and humor incels underestimated women's overall minimum mate preference standards as well yeah that's the thing and that and of course that's part of basically that whole black pill ideology that looks reign supreme and and you could say that and there's some research that would support that right that looks are often they're very important no one can deny that they're they're up there as far as the hierarchy goes but if you say only looks matter and everything else uh doesn't contribute at all that's not a very good picture either I did a met a meta analysis looking at lifetime sexual partners and uh physical attractivness and the effect was very small it had a Hedges G of like 0.14 so it's like okay speak Alex what's that yeah what just it means a very small effect so if it's three in Psychology that's about average so we're looking at something that's pretty small so it's kind of like uh yeah more attractive men they have more sexual partners over the lifetime but not very much it's not a really big big difference so there's other things going on there a lot of those are behavioral how do men with a lot of sexual partners act differently and they might be a big difference might be they seek them out uh there's larger effects for something like behavioral dominance for example what do you mean that behavioral dominance uh kind of aggression interpersonal aggression male male competition even things like athleticism in sports participating in a competitive sport those are things actually that predict having more sexual partners better than Than Physical attractiveness does and again this can kind of go back to risk aversion and impulsiveness risk-seeking that men who might seek out those environments they're typically not the kind of men that are afraid to approach women and shoot their shot it's a whole Suite of different things but yeah I I you know competence is sexy you see you see a a girl who's good at pickle ball or something even if you don't care about pickle ball and you're like yeah that's that's like kind of hot like it's cool that that she's able to do something she's got physical control of her or a good singer or a good poet or whatever you know like it kind of doesn't matter what it is but any degree of competence and especially anything that approaches Mastery is just it's sexy it's cool yeah exactly especially for men and David bus he ran of course a large multinational status or multi multinational study on on status ques for men and yeah a lot of the ones at the top are basically signals of competence two of them were having a higher level of education or attending a prestigious University earning more money those sorts of things so yeah all these signals of competence especially for men seem really important as far as uh attracting women and even that could be related to something like intellectual compatibility if you're having a conversation with someone and they seem like like uh they don't know what they're talking about they haven't done anything that would indicate some kind of Mastery or expertise perhaps you would think like that's not someone On My Level intellectually why do you think it is the case then that there is a a meta meme on the internet of intelligence kindness and humor not really being all that important and yet in the data it seems like that actually is in your survey 79% of women said that they were struggling to find somebody that they were intellectually compatible with how what's the reason that this appears to be overlooked especially in the sort of Insel World well I think for one everyone thinks they're really smart everyone thinks they're really funny and so so they might think but I'm all of these things I have a really good personality right A lot of people think that about themselves maybe they don't and so they don't see that uh they're not reaping the rewards from that because they don't actually meet those criteria another could be because you know part of that Meme is probably true that you know if someone is very very low in looks or something like that you know but they they are interesting and funny and all that yeah they can they can still struggle more in dating if they're not hitting that bar that threshold so to speak you know friend zone in in that sense right yeah this is one of the things that I think I realized when I first started researching some of the incel forums they are inhabited by you know some unbelievable percentage of them have physical disability many of them are neurod Divergent in one form or another and what you have is people who are really really out on the tail when it comes to sort of uh just normative um like everything right and what that means is that the philosophy that is derived from the people out on the Tails gets used by the people that actually start to move a little bit closer toward the bell curve so you know yeah if you're somebody who physically presents in a really really unusual way absolutely like LMS very well may be the hierarchy that's most important to you looks money status in uh black pill language um but I'm not convinced that that's true as soon as you meet the you know the the standard threshold but again it's very unfalsifiable a lot of the the phos ophy is um that that's just cope or that it's uh stated versus revealed preferences from women that they don't actually care about intelligence and kindness and humor because they're just going to go home with Giga Chad in any case that it is just going to be you know an Andrew Tate disciple that's going to come in and sweep her off her feet no matter what like alpha fox beat the books blah blah blah like it's very very unfalsifiable which is why when I see you venture into these debates and discussions one-on-one on Twitter that I kind of applaud you I I don't I never get involved but I applaud you from the sidelines for trying to stand your ground yeah I think what you said is is important and it's kind of related to how I see it as well it's better to understand looks as kind of a threshold like a bar that must be met rather than something that where at increasing levels it just keeps returning exponential benefits so to speak as soon as someone hits that threshold like okay this person passes you know as they as they call it in the black fi the looks test they pass the looks test then everything else kind of comes into play right and someone can pass that looks test but if they don't have any of those other things they might still struggle in dating a lot that's actually really really important for women because women meet a lot of people who do pass the looks test right and then they have to compare their options with one another you know but do they have all of these other things to because it's not that women are are necessarily short from options but as far at least as far as looks go because to use an example I ran a study with faces um uh months and months and months back and I picked faces from the Chicago face database that were pre- as being below average in attractiveness and I had the participants rate them again so below average attractive strong correlation there agreement that these are less attractive faces and then instead of asking rate these spes I put them up just a binary would you date yes or no and all of these spces got about 25% of women that said they would so most women don't have to like the individual only some percentage of women have to like the individual right you don't need 100% of women and that seems to be very common that uh looking at research on faces that agreement from women on faces is much lower than it is agreement for men men agree they correlate much strongly in their ratings of an attractive female face than women do for an attractive male face so there's a lot of more variation for women and that means that you know a lot of men no matter what they look like they're not going to be attractive to most women and when they are it's important that they have other qualities and criteria that facilitate it past that point like okay he looks okay what do you think most people misbelieve about online dating you know we've gone through many generations of myth and meme about what online dating is and isn't what do people misunderstand about the world of online dating well a a very common popular perception is that online dating apps are used to facilitate hookups most people use online dating to facilitate long-term relationships between 20 30% tend to say okay I'm using it as a hookup app the rest are saying I'm not engaging in hookups I'm engaging in long-term relationships another has to do kind of with how much people extrapolate from matches and swipes right that match rates for women are of course much much higher a big part of that is because the ratio on these apps is very imbalanced right there's many many more men on these apps can be 3 to one it can be as high as 7 to one the statistics aren't always clear because the apps don't tend to release that but these are things that can skew these match rates but then when you look Beyond match rates when you look at messages when you look at people who report uh having met from these dating apps then you begin to start to see a pretty close one one ratio that at least for the people who are able to get some matches they seem to kind of facilitate sexual encounters relationships relatively well yeah it's interesting that most people would think that it's a Freewheel in casual sex Marketplace and is that from men as well men are saying that I'm not just on here looking for casual sex I'm on here looking for a long-term relationship yeah that is that is for men about 70% long-term relationship about 30 and of course I think a lot of men if casual sex landed in their lap they would probably be open to it but if you ask them like what are you really looking for you know men have kind of a a orientation a lot of the time we think of men having a strong orientation toward casual sex but men kind of have both men have a strong orientation toward casual sex but also a strong desire for long-term monogamous relationships and it's a little bit different from women when I've run surveys asking these questions for example how much do you want a monogamous relationship men and women pretty similar you know both indicate High orientation toward monogamy but if you ask how open are you to Casual Sex that's when you begin to see a difference that men are much more open to casual sex women hardly open at all so men are kind of open to either but tend to desire a committed relationship I read this great study on online dating apps that looked at uh partner preferences for education and attractiveness think you actually ended up putting me on to this so fictitious profiles with manipulated levels of education and photo attractiveness send random invitations for a serious relationship to real online datas we find that men and women prefer attractive over unattractive profiles regardless of their own attractiveness no surprise there we also find that high educated men prefer low educated over High educated profiles as much as high educated women prefer I high educated over low educated profiles with preferences is similar for attractiveness but opposite for Education two groups are more likely to stay single unattractive low educated men and unattractive High educated women yeah exactly so the rule there for men on online dating I guess you know be attractive be educated go back to yeah go back to school and for women yeah kind of kind of the opposite stay out of school but be very hot I guess but really you know women so there's there's kind of something there that you know as as far as preferences go women tend to want a man who is a little bit higher in status than they are and it's still the case in Western society as much as people kind of uh like to say degrees don't matter and all of that it's still a very robust status signal having a degree having some level of education and I think for men there might even be a current stigma in modern times towards women who have uh higher education they might think okay she's kind of a boss babe she's too bossy she's too masculine they might think she's she's going to be um more liberal perhaps or more feminist or something like that so there are some negative stereotypes we see now associated with more educated women but I guess something important to remember in in all of that if people are looking at this and thinking like should I be this way they're taking it kind of normative is that men and women both with a higher level of Education they're much less likely to get divorced they're much less likely to have relationship problems higher relationship satisfaction so really everyone really should be thinking like you know ideally I would have a highly educated mate if it's a man or a woman but you know there are kind of those those stereotypes there yeah it's a difficult one man the what is it for every standard deviation increase in a woman's IQ her chance of marriage drops by 35% I think and it's literally the inverse for men I'd be really interested to see this stuff uh replicated now and you people can always say ah but that that wouldn't be the case now about a study that was that's only 10 years old or 15 years old but I I do think that we're in a changing time uh with more women going to University more women being socioeconomically successful there has to be an awful lot of pressure on both men and women to begin to skew their preferences around what they think here because you're just going to end up in a like sex ratio hypothesis hell if you don't right you you you're going to have to nudge your preferences eventually or well I mean you don't necessarily everyone can just sort of split off into their own like siloed like sex siloed worlds but that seems realistic it doesn't seem realistic to me so I think that it would be interesting to replicate some of these preferences especially around education uh wealth level wealth disparity um to just see more than anything whether a change in the imbalance between men and women which we are seeing is able to nudge this or whether these are kind of like the thermodynamics of sex difference dating attraction yeah exactly that's a tricky situation in the modern environment especially in Europe you seeing many more women going to University than men and at the same time we kind of see that preference which is a stated preference that women would prefer a man who has a similar level of Education or more so it's kind of like what do we do for that you know I try to encourage men I see yeah stay in school you know at least as far as like dating and stuff goes yeah it's it's get that piece of paper even if you know that's going to help is that enough is that enough of a reason to go to the university or whatever I don't know about that but as far as it goes we know yeah that it's a signal that that is attractive to women and as far as it goes for women you know if if we're going to see a lot of women working making more money you know we're seeing this wage Gap that's basically disappeared and we we see women emerging with more education they might have to kind of settle in that sense they might have to kind of adjust their preferences or there's not going to be enough men to go around in a sense yeah yeah it's an interesting one I um I wonder about the sort of male men's concern about what women are are looking for and there was that uh a study as well that I found only one profile out of 100 was liked by more than 80% of women so as you said earlier on um attractiveness especially facial attractiveness it's almost impossible to be liked by everybody right and that's that's literally what that study found that only one profile out of 100 and you might say well this is because women are being too choosy or another equally valid explanation is that women vary massively in what they find attractive right that if you have high variants that also means that trying to find a face that threads the needle of 100 different women's very unique like idiosyncratic uh preferences is impossible exactly yeah yeah female variance for uh ratings of attractiveness male faces it is it is higher in that sense women agree less and I would like to see that profile of the guy who got 80% that that liked it because that is remark remble and I think that's one of the things that discourages people about dating apps if they're like oh I swiped 100 times I only got five matches or something like that it's like you got five matches and out of those five people can you not get a date you only need one you don't need 80% of people to like you and 80% of people are never going to like you you know if it's men women or whatever the case may be but yeah it's those are the statistics I think that kind of discourage people when they see them but the implications are perhaps not as as profound in that sense CU it's like yeah you you just need someone you don't need all of them to like you Seth Stevens dtz had a really interesting Insight in this where he leaned into his nerdy look so he used a website to split test different versions of his own appearance beard no beard glasses no glasses long hair short hair like how should I dress all the rest of it and then used use that data and what he found was that and this is women that were rating him what he found was that the more that he leaned into his nerdy look the more um extreme attraction results he got back back and he ended up F he said it himself on the episode to me he's like dude I am punching way out of my league my Miss but when her friends you know the six months before they met and she said that she was ready to get back on the dating Market or something and her friends asked her what is it that you're into and you know go around the group or whatever and I'm into like tall guys or I'm into like athletic sort of guys got to her and she says I love nerds I'm really really super attracted to nerds so had he have diluted down the more extreme sides of his uh physical appearance and the way that he presents and what he talks about he would have ended up missing out on basically outsized returns in The Mating Market uh because he would have his partner would have passed him by uh yet it's an interesting one what about um Dad bods what have you learned about dadbods so every once in a while on social media people will post a picture or you know basically one of those body fat comparison pictures that you often see if you follow bodybuilding and all of that where it shows like here's someone with 30% here's someone with 25% here's someone with 20 and so on and it will get down to you know guys who are stage lean who are just jacked and very lean and if you ask women which body do you prefer a lot of women will say I prefer the dad bod right which is a guy who maybe is a little bit in shape but not very much and this seems to be something that women pretty consistently say but you know there's a lot of discourse on that like is that true and so I asked women I said why why do you like the dad bod why do you not like these other uh bodies because we also see that these other bodies do emerge in female fantasies for example the covers of romance novels which you know is kind of the erotic material consumed by women those are not Dad bods those are usually someone who looks like a fitness model you see you know chip andell's dancers you see for example the calendars with the sexy firemen anytime women uh consume kind of a visual erotic material even if it's a very light it tends to be someone who actually is kind of jacked and all that and and the men are described the same way within those novels they don't tend to be described as a dad B they tend to be described to someone who's tall and you know kind of lean he's got abs and that sort of a thing so I asked women you know why do you like this this Dad bod and and a lot of it was like ah the bodybuilder he comes across is narcissistic he he would make me insecure he might cheat on me so there's kind of a lot going into that that it's like H do women prefer these BDS perhaps because they signal some kind of comfort they're not as threatening to women and even the idea of a man who's more muscular and larger you know evolutionary women have a trade-off in their selection of mates a strong man who's tall and physically imposing can protect them but he also represents more of a physical threat to them at the time so you have a lot of different converging things that might make a lot of women say you know I would prefer uh the dad bod someone I'm who makes me feel comfortable in a sense as opposed to like the really jacked Fitness mod mod kind of guy what when you're saying that women some say that they prefer the dad bod over the stage lean guy what about if they given a much more normal you know 10% 11% body fat guy who has a good amount of muscle mass what what happens to the skew if you get rid of the extreme sort of bodybuilder body do you know well very it's very rare that women if they see the extreme bodybuilder they very rarely seem to say like that's it it tends to be more of of the leaner kind of fitness model but still much more muscular than the average man but still in that case they tend to say you know I don't want that I want kind of the fluffier guy what sort of body fat do you think they end up settling on can you remember I would think it would be between 20 and 15 wow wow all of the guys on a permac cut you don't need to do it anymore just let cheesecake yourself into a new relationship with a hottie yeah I I remember one of my friends who's been through all manner of different Fitness Pursuits he's done weightlifting he's done powerlifting he's done bodybuilding he did Fitness modeling good-looking kid and his ex-girlfriend who is no longer with anymore perhaps this is a a contributing reason why uh once said to him as he was prepping for a show and sort of dialing in his body and getting down to be super lean she said um I've never been happier with you than when you were powerlifting and for anybody knows what power lifters look like they're in that sort of 15 to probably maybe even 25% you know as you get up toward the super Heavies they're fluffy they're a fluffy bunch and um yet she said that she'd never been happier than when that was the body type that he presented with and I I think uh you know a concern about intrasexual competition about mate poaching um that must contribute a good chunk of it you know kind of the it's not quite the same but guys that are concerned about their partner posting bikini photos on the internet you know a dude in a sufficiently well-fitted t-shirt who's walking around a 8% body fat vascular as hell and and with a good amount of muscle mass yeah it's not you can see what's going on here right you can you can make a lot of inferences about what's what's happening underneath the t-shirt in kind of the same way that a super party hugging dress does for women exactly yeah and something else kind of related to that in the sech is individuals who have Partners who are more attractive if they're men or women uh they experience more jealousy so it could be that that you know if someone is more conventionally attractive they're going to be getting more attention perhaps it evokes more jealousy they're going to be afraid like you said of mate poaching they're going to be afraid okay this person might cheat and there is some actually indication that for men but not for women that men who are a little bit more attractive might commit infidelity a little bit more they're going to have more sexual partners so there can be that perception and it's not maybe perhaps totally inaccurate that okay if you get a guy who's very attractive he's got a great body or something like that uh is he going to stay committed to you is he more likely to cheat and that's kind of something that that women said you know that he seems like he seems like he could be narcissistic he cares too much about his appearance and you know I would worry about him being unfaithful yeah it's I've always thought about this that somebody that's in good condition physically it says an awful lot about them Beyond simply what it's going to feel like to get them naked in bed you know if if somebody has trained consistently for a decade you know so much about them you know that they're probably not a massive degenerate Drinker because it would be very difficult to stick to the protocol if you did that that they are reliable that they can deal with discomfort that they are able to overcome hard things that uh they've got like a pain tolerance which kind of sexy right like you know a whole Litany of different things discipline reliability they've probably got a a pretty robust friend group from going to the gym all that sort of stuff and that you just you tell that but it's kind of a little bit like a hidden signal because the only people that really know that are other people that also go to the gym and it's not the first thing they think the first thing they think is look at the nice shoulders or the good ass or whatever it is that they're looking at but the people that have spent enough time decoding what this means and I do think that it probably percolates somewhere in the back of your mind is that's probably quite a reliable person but uh yeah you also end up with a bit of a difficulty on the bodybuilder side I wonder whether this is part of the Allure of CrossFit athletes that because it's not done specifically for Aesthetics guys are able to get themselves into good condition whilst not seeming like they care overly about that sort of narcissistic side of stuff yeah that could be because there was that perception as well that it's kind of a vain behavior and in that sense almost an unmasculine behavior is what some people said that you know it's like you should not care so much about your appearance as a man basically it's almost a uh but if you're jacked from doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu or chopping wood or doing some other thing your body has come along as a byproduct of a Pursuit that you actually care about so I remember a while ago and I got a lot of stick for this on the internet I remember reading a study a theory that said one of the reasons why women prefer dadbods is this uh caloric Choice idea so um a man that is really good-looking and and and like lean and in good condition if you give him one calorie there is there are more Avenues open to him outside of his committed relationship and his family to which he could spend that calorie right so the resources have more different angles for him to go down because there's going to be other mating opportunities so on and so forth whereas the guy that was the soft fluffy dad bod would presumably have more doorways of potential infidelity closed to him which actually means that he it was that Dad bods are an indication of better dads was the thought that he's not going to spend his calorie trying to chase after some 21y old because she doesn't care about him so I thought that was uh another interesting kind of second order effect of the way that women perceive their current matate uh level of um potential strain yeah exactly yeah and and what you said there dad bods are indicative of better dads I think that's very insightful and important because yeah it is kind of a contrast between long-term versus short-term mate selection when people you know women have a strong orientation towards long-term very few women have a strong orientation towards short-term so when you see women Express their preferences they're often talking about in the context of who would I date who would I like to have a relationship with perhaps not as often as you know who would I like to have a one night stand with and maybe that's why we see Dad bods selected if you post those pictures they'll say yeah this is kind of what I would like they're thinking about a long term but then you maybe see the more ripped jacked guy appear as a character in female fantasies where it's more sexually oriented because within the context of a fantasy it's safe but that doesn't mean that that same man would be safe in the context of a real life relationship yeah what are they called I'm pretty sure there's a name for them are they not called like cinnamon rolls or golden retriever men or something I'm pretty sure this shows how terminally online I am that I know this but I'm absolutely sure that they're called cinnamon roll men or golden retriever men um and yeah the dichotomy that you have in female erotica is saying why are there no like why is grandma porn not a really popular type of pornography for men to consume many men love their grandmother and you're like well yeah but like I it's horses for courses here and for women the thing that they fantasize about might not be the thing that they want to get into a relationship with long term uh one other thing that I thought was fascinating you've been talking about a lot recently is the libido Gap what's that so the libido Gap yeah basically the observation that there's a sex difference in libido in sexual desire well there's a sex difference in sexual desire attitudes and behaviors and this is probably one of the largest sex differences that we see kind of in in behavioral psychology in a sense you know a lot of differences between men and women are small but when it comes to sexual behavior it's it's pretty large and this is something you can see from lines of converging evidence as far as that goes that men have a higher libido men have a higher desire to have sex with more people sex more frequently uh tend to have more open attitudes toward casual sex seeking more sexual variety even if it's within a relationship more sexual variety as far as like sexual acts and experimentation that sort of a thing there's research that indicate well research very very consistently across the years across countries indicates you know men cheat more than women do that's an example of the libido Gap as well if you look at research under fmri and although this isn't always entirely clear men tend to respond to erotic images a little bit more strongly if you look at research using attention paradigms if you present for example naked bodies of men and women it draws the visual attention of men more as well so men pay more attention to that so you have all of these converging lines of evidence that there is a gap in sexual desire in libido in attitudes the role of testosterone of course is a very very big one we know you know testosterone Administration to men or women causes the libido to shoot up and of course men have much more testosterone than women naturally which increases that as well what's the implication of this what's the implication of there being a big libbido gap perhaps that men and women will engage in uh sexual behaviors differently they will pursue them differently that men will pursue sex more frequently in a relationship men are more likely to pursue sex uh outside of the relationship more likely to pursue casual sex and of course there's some debate on this from I I say debate but there's not really much debate at all on this in the scientific literature very large metaanalysis recently conducted on the L Beetle Gap found a difference of about 0.5 so that's about a mediumsized difference but for psychology actually quite large so we know that this is real but there are people who kind of deny it that say you know it's cultural or something like that of course women have the same amount of libido if you ask men and women though they both tend to indicate yeah we know that men have a larger libido that men are more open to sex with multiple people and and all of that yeah I mean if you had women with the libido style of men reading women's erotic would include a different man on each chapter it would be Tom and Jack and Harry and all the way through but it's not there tends to be one protagonist throughout the whole story right whereas I think what's the average number of partners that men go through in a single sexual fantasy it's like four or something right like four or five I think that they cycle through in one sexual fantasy you know for the women that might be the first time that you've heard that if you're a woman but like that's men just like H done with that one like next one I guess it's like a a mental coolage effect in some way right that you've got this this uh very rapid desire for sexual variety even when it's just in your mind yeah exactly there there is that big difference in a desire for sexual variety and even in the context of erotica and women's fantasies you'll often see that it's kind of a process of taming that man over time so it's even almost like a long-term orientation even in the context of sexual fantasies like you know it's sexy and all of this but then at the end they're together in a relationship and with men it's almost the the opposite when these sexual fantasies occur it'll be like casual sex have sex move on to the next person or something like that yeah you looked at uh body count and sexual double standards what did you learn there so that's kind of interesting because there's a lot of discourse of course on body count primarily on the internet one of the things that I was curious about was uh do people even ask you know a lot of men don't even seem to ask which could indicate you know because some people indicate that it's really important for them right uh a very low body count to the point that you know you have men who say you know I would really prefer a virgin wife and at the same time you have men that you know say they don't care at all so I believe it was about 22 40% of men I would have to double check said you know I don't even ask for body countt dat which one way to interpret that is you know they don't care that much another could just be like I don't want to know right then asking about ideal body count it's actually pretty similar for men and women and in the survey that I did and in past research that seems to be the case that both men and women seem to prefer a lower body count in partners of the opposite sex the ideal it's not zero if someone's a virgin that seems to be kind of a red flag both for men and women surprisingly on average you know some men do prefer a virgin of course but seems to be about two to three and then as it increases it of course drops off but people seem to be pretty tolerant of of higher body counts upwards of 20 Partners in a woman for a man perceiving a woman upwards of 40 for a man and that's when people tend to start saying uh this is kind of a deal breaker you know and asking people in the survey as well have you gone on a date and uh asked about body count and stopped dating them about 10% of men and women said uh yes in a committed relationship even lower I think it was like two or 3% for women and men so it doesn't seem to be quite the deal breaker that a lot of people think that it is but it's when you get to these excessively high body counts that that it does become become a problem then people look at that they say who what's going on there exactly Andrew Thomas taught me about this and if you actually look at the curve of how it works uh zero I think for both men and women zero is about rated about as attractive as seven 7 to 10 right so it Peaks that the peak of this is round about sort of between two and four uh and then zero is the same as like you know nearly double digits uh so yeah there is this there is a little bit of an aversion did women were women more Avers to male virgins than men were to female virgins I didn't find that uh in mind and I and I think in the other one in the paper that was by Steve Stewart Williams and Andrew Thomas that you refer to I don't think there was that much of a difference I don't know if there was a significant difference or not but if there was it would have been a small one but there does seem to be kind of yeah that that aversion there I guess in practice of course you know if if you ask are women more averse to The Virgins they might be because they remain virgins right but that wouldn't be because they're virgins that would be because of whatever else is leading them to that persistent virginity I suppose what do you mean when you talk about sexual double standards then how does that get folded in here sure so the idea of sexual double standards is attitudes towards sexual behaviors that are different for men and women an example of that kind of in popular culture we have a saying that says if a key will open any lock it's a master key but if a lock is opened by any key it's a bad lock so that's kind of you know a parable or something about promiscuity the idea you know that if a man has sex with many many many women you know he's a player he's really good if a woman does it it's really really bad so there's some discourse on this more recent research has indicated okay a lot of these sexual double standards are going away they're they're closing you know some some even have kind of reversed and particularly when it comes to things like having sex with a minor or sexual assault they mostly seem to be gone so it's kind of like yeah people do seem to judge these things not as uh different for men and women at this point that's interesting what what about the sexual assault and sex with a minor thing like what's what what's going on that sure so an example of that is when a teacher who is a woman has sex with a male student when a teacher who is a man has sex with a female student are these viewed differently it seems to be you know if you look at kind of discourse on it that they are kind of viewed differently right that men and women you know if it's if it's a a woman that's having sex with a minor male students perhaps is judged less strongly although some of the recent research on that has indicated actually that's not the case that people sent to view this just as bad but perhaps in the past that was more the case that you know if it was a minor male they would view it less negatively interesting what about the guys who demand virgins what like who are these people sure so again related to body count in that case you do have people that show a very strong preference for virginity if you ask men you know how many past sexual partners would you preferring a partner we have kind of that that goldilock zone sweet spot that's like three or something like that someone who's not entirely inexperienced but you do have people that show a very strong preference for virgins and who do those tend to be they tend to be young men who probably are themselves virgins you know less sexually experienced they tend to have lower levels of Education lower levels of income so that seems to be the case that you know and it's not entirely an unreasonable desire or expectation because if you know if you're a man who's 18 years old half of the female population is going to be a virgin if you're a virgin you know you might want your first experience to be with someone else who is at that age those men you know they don't make a lot of money but what happens also is you have individuals who persist in that desire for virginity uh into an older age at age 30 or something it's like if you're a 30-year old man and you're looking for a virgin that's like you know like two or three% of the male and female population at that age women who are 18 years old and virgins typically do not want to date someone who's 30 35 or something like that and so it becomes increasingly unreasonable with age if men persist in virginity until they're mid-30s and they say oh I'd still like a virgin they're going to have to come to terms with like that's not in the cards for them yeah it's an interesting one man I I again I do especially for the young men like the in the important qualifier here is especially if you're a guy that is a virgin you know there's something it's you're you're going to feel emasculated by your partner's the disparity in sexual experience right your supposed to be here I am my first time I'm taking charge I'm finally becoming a man and oh she's teaching me all of the things that I need to do that doesn't feel like I don't know that doesn't seem like the dream that most men probably perceive for their first time yeah exactly and there's a lot that's kind of related to that so related to sexual double standards we know for example that men tend to view other men with more sexual partners is higher in status and it seems to be that it's more male male signaling than it is desirable to women so women actually rate men that are very promiscuous a little bit less desirable a little bit more negatively but for men it's pretty much a linear relationship like the more sexual partners you have the more of a man you are in a sense right that filters into all of our cultural narratives and scripts so it's often you know something that men are encouraged to believe about themselves that if they're less sexually successful uh they're less desirable they're less attractive but that often that's more messaging that tends to come from other men than women I think did you see Jeremy boring uh tweet earlier on today about what the red pill is doing to marriage no no so Jeremy boring CEO of the daily wire he's been featured on a lot of their Productions and stuff he said what uh what the red pill is doing to marriage basically sort of uh degrading marriage saying that it's a bad deal for men etc etc you've looked at a good chunk of this right what what's happening with marriage and divorces like what are the real stats that people are missing here sure so yeah as far as the red pill goes it's you know promotes a lot of very cynical narratives uh particularly in the context of marriage and it's you know not a homogeneous uh ideology or set of beliefs or whatever but you do see a lot of discourse on divorce that often just says you know 50 or 60% of people get divorced it's mostly initiated by women okay but there are individual differences in who gets divorced and who doesn't you know for every married man across the board and I think this is something gets wrong the risk of getting divorced is not 50% that's going to be determined a great deal by the individual characteristics within that relationship you know what kind of things contribute to divorce infidelity is a big one uh alcohol abuse is a big one economic problems so just by avoiding you know simple things that you know are going to cause a divorce flat out eat Don't drink don't get broke exactly yeah just these very basic things is going to drop the divorce rate way down you know if you look across demographic groups individuals with a higher level of Education men and women both much less likely to be single much less likely to get divorced so already being Within These certain demographic groups drops it way down but you do kind of have that narrative out there in the red pill and all of that that you know marriage is a bad deal for men and they hear many anecdotes about people who get divorced and they lose all of their things or whatever and yeah yeah Jeremy boring tweeted um the fact that women initiate 80% of divorce is evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common in women something society and frustratingly Christian Society has been trying to obscure since we turned over all of our moral authority to women in the 20th century that seems like a very very odd like claim to make that there's manifestations of evil that's not for me to say that like women uh initiating divorce that there's some like perverse incentives that could be going on there there's all manner of reasons why why this sort of thing Could Happen many of them are are probably pretty like unspeakable but evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common in women I don't I mean why why are women why do women initiate more divorces and and what are the reasons that they give for that sure so yeah there's a lot of focus on that that's kind of the narrative isn't it that women initiate more divorces and that kind of puts the onus on women like oh if you initiate the divorce it's your fault but there's a lot of different reasons actually the reasons why women initiate divorce is very complex topic so I I'll kind of go through some of these but because someone initiates a divorce does not mean that they are at fault for the divorce right so we do see for example you know men and women both men also will admit this you know when they get divorced I cheated at a rate about twice that of women uh they're much more likely to be physically abusive although some recent research has called that into question as well that perhaps domestic violence within relationships is actually pretty similar for men and women uh men are more likely simply to stay in relationships when the relationship is bad and if they do kind of want out they're just simply less likely to ask for the divorce we know over time over long periods of time relationship satisfaction for women it declines faster as well so there's a lot of reasons why women initiate divorces but that doesn't necessarily mean that women destroyed the relationship right A lot of the time those initiations of divorce can be responses there's also a lot of narrative for example that women get a lot out of divorce that doesn't seem to be the case when looking at uh alimony child support and all of these things It's usually the case that women enter a state of poverty and stay below the poverty line for a few years following divorce and that men tend to uh remain more financially successful following their divorces as well and there's very high agreement in divorc couples as well on why the divorce happened both couples tend to indicate that you know we grew apart is simply one of the large reasons most divorces as well if they look at like who initiated it they often ask whose idea was this or who brought it up first but if you ask like did you both want the divorce you see really agreement there that both of them are like yeah the relationship was over so that's also something to consider it seems to be rarely the case that it's simply a unilateral thing you know the relationship at that point has deteriorated both people know it she might ask for it first and that might emerge in the statistics as the woman you know initiating the divorce but it's really rarely the case that the man is just like chilling and he thinks everything is perfect and everything's going well and then she says I want a divorce and he's just blindsided I don't know I don't know why that happened and then she takes everything that's very very rare that that happens yeah Adam Lane Smith psychotherapist ex psychotherapist now relationship coach you know sat through thousands of couples across his career and he's adamant about this that they couple comes in and sits down and something catastrophic is about to happen and to the guy he hasn't it's either willful ignorance or or just straight up blindness to many many many signs for years and years and years from his partner and you know Adams is you know he's [ __ ] proen for an awful lot of this I don't think that he's got any reason to simp for women's desire to have no fault divorce or whatever I I think that he's been truthful when he just says look like you know guys can get into a habit that keeps them blind to what's going on in their relationship and the female partner gets to the stage where they say I like I I there's no more there are no more hints that I can drop we need to go to counseling and then they sit down in counseling and this woman kind of unloads all of this stuff and the guy looks across and can't believe what is coming out of his partner's mouth uh and yeah I think it's Adam Adam seemed to think that the a lot of the time Coupes counseling is done by a couple as an almost an excuse by the woman so that she doesn't feel too guilty like she's already made her mind up and it's already so far gone but she needs to finally be able to actually get all of this stuff off her off her chest so you know you could maybe say that this is a communication problem maybe maybe it's a failure of cross- sex mind reading between the Sexes that women are communicating their discontent and their issues in ways that men aren't picking up on that men aren't being sufficiently perceptive like those would be some ways but what we understand that women initiate file for divorce more than men why do you think that that's the case like what is it about women their experience within a marriage that's causing that to be them that does it well I think I think if I think there's a a situation where men will simply stay in a bad relationship almost to the end they just men are much less likely to to kind of end it when all the writing is on the wall there are very explicit things that cause divorce you know as as well drug abuse more common in men uh infidelity more common in men and just looking at those two things that already closes the Gap to who initiates but then we have other things as well like declining marital satisfaction which does decline faster in women I think women are more willing to move on in that sense perhaps I think you know we know for example that in single women uh they're much more likely to report being voluntarily single women are probably more okay than men in many ways as far as leaving a relationship and as far as uh not being in a relationship that they don't want which can go back to you know all of the evolutionary reasons women being more selective and that sort of a thing women seem to be less pressured to remain in a relationship when they're genuinely unhappy with it more ready to move on is that because ancestrally women would have had a surplus of potential suitors so for men it makes sense for them to remain steadfast and robust even in their shitty relationship because the relationship may not be that good but at least it's a relationship you know most of my male friends that they haven't got anybody well I don't know about I don't know about that for sure because sometimes we see those bottlenecks in the wide chromosome which indicates okay there were actually many more women than to men so it's almost like if they left the man would they be able to find another one I don't know for sure about that but something that seems to be very consistent across humans is we have this the dominant mating pattern is basically serial monogamy that people you know unlike the Prairie V or some other animal we don't tend to mate for life or with our first sexual partner and stay with them forever people have some girlfriends they break up they get married they might stay married 10 or 15 years they get a divorce they marry someone else so people have an orientation toward monogamy that's much stronger than many of the other Apes right and we form really long relationships compared to most mammals but they don't seem to be lifelong relationships and that seems to correspond to kind of the gestational age I guess or or the developmental age of children that there is a period of time when people might need to stay together to ensure the survival of off spring it could be also the case as well that you know not having lifelong bonding uh can increase genetic fitness from genetic diversity so if someone you know has a long-term relationship 15 years they have some Offspring they get to the end of that time period they divorce they might still have some time to have new Offspring with a new mate so we still have this long-term mate formation but kind of with some diversity of Offspring in that case how do you think we should uh balance the scales that if what you say is right and I I I believe that you are right as well I don't think that Christopher Ryan and sex at dawn is is perfectly accurate serial monogamy seems to be what makes sense ancestral monogamish I think it's sometimes referred to as but we've created a cultural world where that is looked you know Jeremy boring is is a probably a pretty good example of what the last 500 years of of uh marital advice has been that you're supposed to stay together through thick and thin in sickness and in health till death death to us part um we have constructed a value system even outside of you know people that are a superch Christian that you know breakups and divorce and stuff it's it's not something that you're supposed to do and you made your commitment to the partner and you're going to stick together forever do you ever think about this uh cultural mismatch to our sort of evolutionary predisposition yeah definitely certainly we have you know the last 2,000 years of of rules that say you are married to someone you stay with them for life and at the same time yeah we have that mismatch between that and what people seem to want to do and looking at research on on love for example there's different kind of stages of Love or different components of love one is called passionate or romantic love and that seems to be the feeling neurobiological that people experience when they say they're in love and that usually doesn't persist for decades and decades and some people it does but it usually doesn't and that tends to wne after about 3 to 5 years somewhere in that area and that's kind of consistent with you know that developmental trajectory you know people fall in love they have kids the kid is a little bit old enough now past that point people are going to be a little bit more willing to move on but of course then there's committed love and all these other facets of love where people still maintain really strong bonds almost as a friendship in a relationship but then that comes to a point you know 15 years down the line people might think okay I'm with a partner I'm very committed to them we're like best friends uh we have a lot going there but at the same time you know that passionate love is missing they want something else in addition to that and so they're kind of faced with that that choice or decision you know do they just continue in that relationship or do they kind of move on and restart the process so to speak and there's not a good solution or a good answer there as far as like prescriptive what should people do and and that's of course where all of these beliefs like religion and things come into play that tell people like you should do this you should do that and I think even you know even when people fall out of that passionate love even if they have a bad relationship breakups are still often really really hard for them so it makes a lot of sense that you know Norms would emerge it say like just stay together forever it avoids a lot of problems even you know if the relationship is not ideal in that sense yeah it's interesting man this I don't know I I wonder what a a different kind of uh religion would have been that said marriages supposed to stay together for 10 years and then at that point there's some weird ceremony where you you have to prove that you still care about each other enough and both partner has to do it independently and some weird RW shark lie detect a test and then you come back together and if it works you do I don't know but um yeah when you fold on top contraceptive Technologies and liberated sexual norms and a sex positive society and stuff like that it really doesn't surprise me that we're seeing divorce rates increasing you know there's there's an awful lot of embedded uh genetic predisposition in there to encourage us to okay like I'm like we're done we're done here now um you know one of my favorite ones is um couples that have stayed together for quite a while before having children can often find themselves randomly falling out of love with each other and there's an evolutionary explanation for this which is all almost never would you and a partner have stayed together for a long period of time without trying to have children the only reason that that would have been the case is if one of you had a fertility issue and you don't know if it's you and you don't know if it's them but you definitely know that there is a 50% chance that you're going to have this problem fixed if you decide to move on and this is you know one of the concerns for um extending prolonging the pre- child section of any relationship uh you know couples that get together University they're 20 21 22 and they think yeah you know we we we'll we'll start having kids when we 30 there can be some risks associated with that if this Theory turns out to be right yeah exactly and and that's another thing too kind of related to romantic love transitioning into committed love uh people past that point they have invested into the relationship so there's a question of like what things in that relationship Drive Commitment if there are kids that might be a reason to stay together and be committed and try to work things out for a longer period but if not you know you have to wonder I read a blog post from you that was called the Normie gets the girl what do you mean when you say the Normie gets the girl sure so I did this with some vignettes descriptions of different individuals this was related to kind of uh the ambivalent sexism inventory which has constructs of hostile sexism and benevolent sexism and I created vignettes a man who was basically like a hostile sexist which is often kind of negative sexist attitudes toward women and then benevolent sexism is another facet of that and this is It's called sexist by the individuals who created this inventory but I think there's reason to question if these are sexist behaviors they seem to be more traditional attitudes toward women like women should be first on the Lifeboat that sort of a thing uh and I had women rate you know how attractive is this man for short longterm and all of that so short longterm yeah it's pretty closely related but you see that men high in hostile sexism they get rated pretty low men high in benevolent sexism tend to get rated a little bit higher and then I have these other vignettes one was like a manosphere beliefs black pill kind of beliefs rated really really low by women kind of related to hostile sexism there and then a Normy vignette a guy who just thought you know things are fine I don't get into these you know uh gender War ideology or whatever the case may be and that's kind of rated the highest and so that see you know and there was another that was an egalitarian or feminist man kind of rated medium so there's of course a lot of discourse on that what kind of men do women like you know and all of that and it seems to be the case that women don't want someone who is super egalitarian or someone who is super uh feminist necessarily in a man they don't want a man at the same time who is highly misogynist or kind of the manosphere ideologue they want a guy who's a normal guy basically who has kind of normal status quo ideas about women and sex roles and gender roles did this change based on the political leaning of the women in question did you find that left leaning women were more open to having a feminist male partner and vice versa a little bit but not much I asked women for feminist identification or not and the women who did identifies a feminist they they did rate the egalitarian vignette a little bit higher but mostly you still see the same pattern that the normi is still the most attractive benevolent sexist man still gets rated higher than the Hostile sexist man that sort of a thing what was second was benevolent sexist man second I believe the benevolent sexist man was second uh and I I think for the feminist condition the benevolent sexist man was second and I think for the non-feminist condition there was a man who was kind of a traditional masculine vignette and I think that was second but across all of them yeah kind of the norm guy was the one that you know the women said they related to the most well don't forget you know kind of like we said um somebody's body is not just the body it is a representation of many other things about them their worldview and the way that they show up and their personality and all this sort of stuff the things that you believe about men and women is also an implication of how much time is this guy going to spend on Twitter how much time is this guy going to spend arguing with people on Reddit like how often am I going to have to sit at dinner and hear him hop on about some weird YouTube video that he's just watched or whatever you know there's an implication Downstream from a lot of this yeah exactly people see that and they I think when people see extreme beliefs and ideology they wonder you know how stable is this person going to be and all of that if someone sees someone who's kind of normal they relate to them more because you know most people aren't extreme red pillars or extreme feminists or something like that most people do kind of share a mix of attitudes and you know they might lean a little bit left a little bit right but for the most part you know they're not typically focused on this gender War ideology and if they think like yeah especially if it comes to hostile attitudes toward the opposite sex you know hostile sexism mosphere whatever the case may be then it's almost like you know is my partner going to hate me you know are they going to getting into a relationship with a racist as a black person yeah yeah it's pretty much like that these are these are beliefs that do not help people in in dating you know and they probably manifest in behavior and even if people never share them in very subtle ways that are not going to be entirely fulfilling for the opposite sex did you see those Tik toks floating around about a month or a couple of months ago of uh liberal women lamenting the fact that they couldn't find any traditional men that would hold the door open for them and consider paying on the first date because all of the liberal men that they were trying to date they basically what they described was a like Cookie Cutter conservative man is what they wanted yeah exactly and and I think that's closely related to that what's called benevolent sexism in the literature you know and and I I would dispute myself personally this is not something I would call sexist but that's what they called it and it's kind of you know there's been research that indicates women prefer men who score a little bit higher in benevolent sexism and these are kind of like traditional conservative attitudes and beliefs there are things like holds the door or something like that even if the women identify as more left so it seems to be that on the one hand you know if they think about uh their conscious preferences they might think you know I want a man who is uh more egalitarian but when it comes down to a lot of behaviors they still expect behaviors that are very congruent with traditional gender roles with the man paying for the bill the man holds the door he picks her up at her house and so on and and even physically the same you know as far as like a man who is uh behaviorally dominant who's physically masculine and and all of that yeah it's uh stated in revealed preferences kind of coming to the front yet again what's that Talib quote he says something like um uh around my family or in the home I'm a socialist in my neighborhood I'm a communist at my state level I'm a Libertarian and at the national level I'm a conserv some something like that it kind of feels a little bit like that that you've got um what a woman might want Men at Large to be like you know I would prefer to not have hostile sexism from this entire 50% of the population sent toward me and my girlfriends I would prefer that we had a more egalitarian world I would the sufferings and the challenges of women are understood and the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah but when it finally comes down to it the meat and potatoes brass tax of getting into bed and getting into a relationship with somebody you know this is the problem I think that has largely gone under the radar but may come back to bite her in the ass a little bit further down her career Alex Cooper from call her daddy uh was you know spent made a career extoling the virtues of casual sex uh you know treat him like you don't like him how to have sex and not catch feels you know like relationships are kind of useless and pointless but for the last three years it turns out that she's been having this Whirlwind romance with the guy of her dreams and then she released a maybe it was a podcast or a post talking about how beautiful The Proposal was in a rose garden and he got down on one knee and it was exactly as she'd envisioned and you go this wasn't the story that you promised your audience this wasn't the life that you said that all of the people following you the millions and millions and millions of women that were listening to you should lead and I think you know I've got this theory about how hypocrisy is a purpose-built malady for the intellectual uh technological social media rage because you can show it's basically a before and after a cognitive before and after photo right this is what you said previously and this is what happened in the future you said that getting into a relationship and marriage was totally pointless and you extoled the virtues of your rose garden proposal you it it just the dissonance like just bleeds out of all of these conversations and uh yeah I think stated and revealed preferences what is it that is politically socially popular for women to post about on the internet compared with what are they actually going to want to get into a relationship with at the end of the day yeah exactly I think as far as people talk about you know there's research uh from a feminist perspective that talks about you know the man should do more chores in the house and the sex will be better and all of that but at the end of the day I think it really is the case you know that women do not want to be the man in the relationship they don't want the man in the relationship to be the woman they do kind of seem to want those roles to some extent even if politically those uh stated preferences are for a highly egalitarian uh organization and there's probably some balance you know where they don't want to be bombarded with uh the most restrictive kind of gender roles in a sense but at the same time you know a man who's more dominant who's going to take charge who's gonna lead who's GNA drive the car and pick the restaurant you know and that sort of a thing yeah it's just you know there are certain elements there are they Associated typically with masculinity yes but you like being iive standing well under pressure uh like it's it is where do you want to go for dinner tonight I'll just there we go we'll choose um yeah I think it's uh it's funny that the memes and the cliches kind of often hold some of the greatest truth in them there was this uh Katherine Walter study on uh testing assumptions about human mating psychology deal breakers and mate preferences 50,000 participants from 56 countries both men and women prefer short-term Partners who are kind healthy attract Ive women had higher ideal preferences for short-term mates than men did and most participants 59 to 80% preferred the same type of Ideal mate for short-term and long-term relationships what's the implication of that yeah brilliant and I think this is that study is very consistent with pretty much all of the past research in evolutionary psychology on short and long-term mate preferences somehow it has gotten into the popular discourse that you know an entirely different kind of person is who is desired for short and long term but really it seems to be like no the same traits are desired in short and long term but some might be weighted a little bit differently in small ways on average so you know a man who's funny and charismatic longterm short-term both perfect a man who's physically attractive yeah he's also desirable both as a long-term and short-term mate but in short-term mating context you know physical attractiveness it might be a little bit higher preferred but it's kind of like yeah anyone who's desirable as a long-term mate is also going to be desirable as a short-term mate and vice versa yeah man I don't know the the um this metameme of having wildly different mating preferences for both that being said we said it earlier on you know the person that you're going to fantasize about is not necessarily the person you but even with that let's roll another filter as you said the hyper masculine guy might be great to think about when you're behind the safety of a page right but if you have this very overbearing physically sort of dominant guy there's an awful lot of probably Associated fear that comes with that in some regards it can be sexy but in other regards it's just going to be terrifying you know in a sort of a post me too world I wonder I wonder what um sort of times up in me too as a cultural phenomenon has done to women's preferences when it comes to male um behavior and body type and stuff like that I would not be surprised if we see women um you know inculcating this concern about uh two men that are overly dominant um and it really wouldn't surprise me if the end result was we should opt for more feminized men uh even if it was only a little bit uh it would it would be very surprising if it was the other way yeah exactly you can see kind of that shift culturally perhaps towards men who are less dominant or less threatening and there's a lot of assumptions about that kind of related to the dad bod thing I I posted an image and it was kind of like Yeah the more muscular man is is going to be more threatening someone said you know he looks like he might be a misogynist so you see a man who simply because he's jacked they think he's going to be a misogynist so you already have kind of that that Association there so what does that mean that like the skinny weakling is is going to be a feminist or something like that we have kind of those those associations and if that's what they think they want is like the feminist man maybe they're going to pick the skinny guy but at the end of the day you know there's probably not too large of an association between attitudes in that sense Jim Bros have a branding problem man they need to go through a an advertising agency to fix this [ __ ] yeah yeah and there was a recent study that was pretty interesting on that that found okay men who are more muscular are perceived as being more conservative on average and I think there's also some research in the past that indicates that as well that men with a higher grip strength for example also tend to be a little bit more right leaning and they tend to score a little bit High in Social dominance orientation so sometimes these perceptions that people form they can kind of reflect accuracy and that's related to Something in Psychology that that they don't like to talk about very much it's called stereotype accuracy because you know we always say don't judge people based on stereotypes but at the same time some stereotypes we form them because we see frequencies base rates in the population a lot pattern recognition yeah pattern recognition exactly six main red flags gross clingy addicted promiscuous apathetic and unmotivated perhaps unsurprising to have those and these sort of broad buckets seem to be quite well replicated like within each of them there's sub genres of promiscuity and apathy and whatnot my the most interesting thing that I learned from that study was women find promiscuity even less attractive than men in shortterm relationships yeah and that's I think a thing that a lot of men get wrong and you can tell them this and show them past papers that found this that women do not desire men with a very high uh sexual history in a sense and you know there's good reasons for that even in a short-term mating context you know why are women more averse to short-term mating one reason we know women have higher disgust sensitivity than men do as a sex difference disgust sensitivity a fear or disgust uh aversion to pathogens we know that women can contract STDs or STI more easily than men can and that sort of a thing so every sexual partner a woman has is a risk uh of exposure to disease in that sense so a highly promiscuous man okay at the same time every sexual encounter a woman has even if it's shortterm also represents a risk of I guess a lack of resource a risk of pregnancy a lack of investment so it's kind of like if this is someone that's having sex with a lot of people and I get pregnant how willing are they to invest in me and I don't think that's a explicit cognition that women have that would be something under the surface in a sense you know from The evolutionary perspective but yeah there's a lot that signals you know and and I think as well aside you know we we kind of draw this line short and long-term mating but I don't think it's entirely clear that people always perceive of their short-term mating as simply unre you know strictly casual sex a lot of short-term mating especially in actual behavior is kind of the jump off point to long-term mating you know you have a one night stand is it because you intended to have a one night stand or is it because you liked the guy and you wanted to continue dating and then he ghosted you you know or whatever the case may be so or or the same with like situationships and all of that people start you know saying well we're g to have sex every once in a while but what are we down the line six months you find both people have fallen in love and now they're in a relationship so it's not always the case that you know there's a clear line between long and short-term and actual Behavior yeah so just to reiterate those six main red flags gross clingy addicted promiscuous apathetic and unmotivated and before I read the results I tried to think what would be the highest what will be the the the big biggest red flag for men and for women and I thought for women it would be gross largely because of the disgust sensitivity but the the highest rated one was clinginess that that's the biggest red flag for women what why do you think that's the case what does that say about women and why the [ __ ] is no one talking about this on the internet I'm not entirely sure why clinginess would be the highest one but I think something in kind of the mating psychology of women is that they do want a man who they can depend upon and not someone that they have to be a mommy to in a sense you know so if it's the sense that you know this is someone who's not independent who's not emotionally stable or strong that you can lean upon that could be a big red flag to women in that sense clinginess could also represent a a threat kind of like a stalker as well someone who's very clingy and all of that like you know uh could they behave in a way that's emotionally volatile and perhaps hurt me but not entirely sure these are just kind of guesses that come to my mind I read uh models by Mark Manson which is probably 10 years old now so most people will know Mark for subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] really great book but he actually wrote a I guess you call it kind of like ethical pickup Artistry book toward the back end of the Neil Strauss hero in 20134 uh and he identifies the I this study wasn't out maybe he read some stuff but it seems to just be like field tested advice uh and he he called it something different he called it neediness not clinginess but I think that the sentiment is the same and he just drills up the one lesson that everybody that reads models takes away is that neediness is the number one Turner for women and for guys can't be too needy one of the or a few of the things that I reflected on after reading that were over o being overly pliable as a man is a signal of low status that if if you can it's why that you know the simps never get the girl as a meme right the simps sing for women is a ineffective mating strategy because what it suggests first off is that you have no other options if you did H if you were spending eight hours a day messaging me I know that you're not spending 8 hours a day messaging some other girl as well unless you've got a really good AI bot assisting you uh secondly it suggests a a low bar a low um a very low standard to the point where it's probably a concern that somebody else some other woman could come in and quite easily slipstream this exact same low level of self-esteem from you so your level of dedication to me is going to be less and then finally I guess there's just some Brute Force playground logic that I want the thing that other people want right I don't necessarily want it when I can play with it and whenever it's available to be played with me I want the thing that's a little bit more sort of mysterious and aloof and it's a little bit more difficult to get so that's my three-pronged bro science theory about clinginess yeah I think so and these are kind of deal breakers or red flags in early relationship formation as well so that can signal something very different from down the line so let's say we have someone who is very uh invested in the relationship but it's really really early and then you might have kind of a in congruent signal like why is this person uh already so attached to me we've only been speaking for one week but if you look at a married couple and you say okay they text a lot or something like that then it's kind of like oh that you know that might actually be more desirable that might more like commitment than need yeah yeah women seem to really want commitment and investment and attention and time but somehow at the beginning of a relationship that can signal kind of uh the it can be the opposite of what is attractive and then later on down the line it can be kind of more appropriate in that sense yeah what about uh you talking about marriage and some of the stuff that's going on uh alpacino is he who's the guy there some Hollywood celebrity that's just got into another massive age Gap relationship I can't remember who one of those like kind of old Legend actors what do you think is the reason for age Gap taboos so one idea that I had was intersexual competition right the idea that you know if you have a mating pool it's going to be people similar to your own age so or a mating pool of mates that are more desirable that have more res resources or something along those lines so it could be the case that when people see an age Gap relationship they are thinking you know uh this is someone being pulled from my mating pool in a sense by someone outside of that range if that were the case we might see age differences between men and women in age Gap uh taboos so I looked at that but I didn't find an age difference for women women seem to approve or disapprove of age gaps about the same across the board so sometimes we get that discourse that says you know it's old women that are jealous of young women or sometimes you uh say hear people say no it's young women that disapprove more because you know old people are gross or whatever the case may be but it doesn't seem that there's an age uh difference like that for women but for men there was so young men disapproved of age gaps more than older men which maybe does is kind of congruent with that self-interest perspective or with intersexual competition but rather than in men it would be in women in that case because if young men see you know age gaps is pulling women from their dating pool and women do already date up in age they might be more threatened by that they might say yeah age gaps are inappropriate why well because they're stealing the women from you basically in a sense you know and I've even heard people argue that explicitly they said you know serial monogamy and age gaps are stealing the young women and that's why young men are are are single or something like that so that could be one thing but I don't think that explains all of the taboo I think a lot of it is kind of cultural you you you have kind of a narrative of power imbalances but at the same time you know I looked at hierarchical relationships where there might be a power imbalance you know someone a boss an employee that doesn't seem to have as much of an effect as age gaps either so you know that's kind of one explanation you often see from feminists this idea that you know there's a big Power imbalance in age gaps there probably often isn't and people don't seem to disapprove as much of power imbalances when the age is close so it seems to be the case that there is this taboo that's not entirely explained and I think it might just come down to kind of kind of an ick in a sense for some people and that's kind of you know a feeling that people have is just kind of a a visceral revulsion and I think why that might occur is when people think of dating someone who is much older they just simply think from their own experience I'm not attracted to much older people I could not imagine dating alpacino you know a woman who's 20 she alpacino look at him that's gross and that's all it comes down to a lot of taboos can simply emerge from that visceral feeling like yuck and then the rationalizations come in is because of lack of consent or a power imbalance or somebody that's being manipulative with their wealth or their status or whatever it might be exactly yeah people that's what happens a lot of the time we experience emotions first and then we come up with explanations for those emotions and I think that can be what happens when people feel that visceral ick you know you know they they think e gross and yeah then they come up with rationalizations to explain why it's gross maybe those aren't the real reasons you know but that's what they felt in the moment and and that's how they feel now interestingly something I found there was people who had had age Gap relationships of course they were more approving of age gaps so because I see some discourse on that as well that says you know a lot of people have had an age Gap relationship a lot of women true and they said you know they learned from their bad experiences and if that were the case you would expect people that had age Gap relationship to disapprove but it was the opposite so it doesn't even seem to be the case that they're driven by like bad experiences you know those people actually seem to support them more interesting what you said about how uh women dating older creates a death of potential female partners for younger men because the younger women are captured by slightly older men I I there's not really a way to bestow this wisdom onto younger men but like one day in a couple of years time you will be those older men I it it seems I I totally get it like you know if if you're a guy who's 22 and all of the girls are getting flown out to God knows where by 38y olds like yeah that's that's going to suck but ultimately it's just like a like a diluted gerontocracy right yeah exactly and that's kind of related you know we have like the Pew statistics that say you know like 60% of men are single between 20 and 30 and you know 30% of women are single why is that are they sharing the men what's going on a lot of that Gap can actually be explained simply by women dating outside of that age range on average so for the and and it's much more pronounced among you know 18 to 25 than it is even among 25 to 30 so it seems to be the case that it's a real effect if you're a man who's like 18 to 23 or something like that you know a lot of those women that you could otherwise date they're going to be dating dating up you're 18 now so you're probably not going to date down you know which is what the older men are doing so you do kind of see it balance out down the line but it does kind of create a a singles Gap especially for like really really young men and I think you know I don't know if that's always super obvious looking at the landscape or if they think you know the women are sharing like the same Chad who's in their class that's the same age but a lot of that yeah is just women dating up a little bit and there's you know the average age Gap is not huge it's you know two to four years or something like that but a lot of people are dating outside of the average and when you total all of those up you know you get something like around 20% of women who are between 18 and 30 we're dating men older so that yeah already pulls a big big chunk of women out yeah I I love the less conspiratorial uh explanations for this stuff that's one of the reasons that I really like your work man like for all that we both get accused of being blue blue blue pilled cooks or or misogynist bigots depending on who it is that's that's looking at what we've written or said um you know it's like it's just a calming pretty well balanced nice gentle look at what does the data say what do we know about human psychology how can we marry these two together isn't that interesting the world's probably not quite as [ __ ] as you think it is like it's just it's a very peaceful way to look at what is quite a chaotic world I think yeah exactly it's human psychology very complex so many variables so you always have to have a very nuanced perspective it's rarely just as simple as X Y and Z there's always so many different things going on and if people can calm down a little bit look at the big picture and you know be a little bit stoic about it if if they're in a difficult situation it's not always you know roses but it's usually not the full black pill either in that sense what are you researching next what can people expect from you so right now we're looking at some data on only fans on attitudes about only fans and only fans workers and this is just going to be some descriptive data this is looking at uh because this seems to be a topic that actually people might be afraid to explore in the research a little bit because they're afraid that it's kind of stigmatizing but at the same time people do seem to have you know overwhelmingly negative attitudes about this and and as far as impacts of only fans on future uh relationship prospects will someone date an only fans worker will this hurt their future job offerings and also related to that what kind of political attitudes or beliefs might predict support for that kind of work or the opposite of of support for that kind of work very so you are delving deep into the archives of only fans is that what I'm hearing yeah that's what we're looking at now we're looking at attitudes about it I can't believe you finally managed to get your Recreation and your work to to come together appropriately Alex I I these episodes dude I look at the clock and it's been an hour and 40 minutes and it feels like it's been five I really appreciate the time I get to spend with you uh where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing sure so we got the website dates psychology.com on Twitter at daty and YouTube alex. daty thank you man catch you next time thank you if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to [Music] subscribe