Understanding Intersexual Dynamics
The facts you won't get from the mainstream
As a man, it’s not enough to turn yourself into a high quality person, into the proverbial high value man.
Being a high value man put you into a position where you are credible as a potential partner to a woman.
But that doesn’t mean women will simply flock to you as if drawn by a magnet. That only happens for the true “Alpha+” men - the baller, the billionaire, the extremely good looking guy, the celebrity, and so on.
You still have to work to earn and keep a woman’s attention and interest. That means you have to have a good understanding of intersexual dynamics.
Sadly, not only are most of the key authorities and institutions of society not going to help you understand this, they are going to give you bad information about it.
Quiz time: Are women attracted to servant leaders who buy them fancy dinners, give them a dozen red roses, open car doors, and send long, heartfelt emails about how great she is and how much he cares?
No.
They are attracted to men with power and status, confidence and charisma, looks and style, and resources like money.
As Jordan Peterson put it in 12 Rules for Life, “Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.”
I’m not running a blog about how to meet women, but I have written a number of pieces on intersexual dynamics that can provide a beginning foundation for understanding this important area of life.
Here are some of my key writings on the topic. I will continue to update this page with any future pieces, and put a link to it in the sidebar for easy future reference.
The Basis of Attraction
This piece describes what actually does make a man attractive, as well as the critical difference between being attractive and being marriageable. You need to have both.
Women and Attraction
This companion piece to the above talks about what men find attractive in women. It also discussed the “attractiveness curve,” or how men and women’s different attractiveness factors leads to a shift in the “balance of power” between the sexes over time. Women are holding more of the cards in their 20s, whereas after age 30 this shifts to a male advantage in the relationship market.
I also wrote a piece on why beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder.
The Neoliberalization of Relationships
This piece looks at the challenged introduced by converting relationships into multiple, often disconnected “marketplaces”: the sexual marketplace, the dating marketplace, and the marriage marketplace.
Hypergamy
This essay talks about how women want to marry up - or at least not marry down. Hence men falling behind women in getting college degrees and in career - in certain segments of the ladder at least - creates a mismatch that makes finding a spouse harder.
Getting Out of the Friend Zone
How to get out of the “friend zone” and into a relationship is a common point of discussion. I explain this situation, why being friends with someone of the opposite sex can create a lot of problems, and the only sure fire way to get out of the friend zone. I even provide a flowchart!
On Online Dating
Online dating has become the top way couples meet. One thing it enables is research based on hard data about what people actually want and how they actually behave on these platforms. I wrote a piece summarizing some of the findings.
In general, I do not think online dating is the best environment for men to meet women.
On Divorce
Women initiate around 70% of all divorces. Given the divorce rate, it’s sadly not uncommon for men to be divorced by their wives. I wrote two pieces about this situation. The first is about what to do when your wife divorces you.
The second is how to help a friend whose wife divorced him.
I also wrote about the contagiousness of divorce, and how you need to beware of how divorce spreads through social networks.
The Battle of the Sexes
I’ve also written about the growing “battle of the sexes” between young men and women, and how this contributes to and relates to political polarization and decline in marriage.
For those unfamiliar with the realities of intersexual dynamics, these pieces should be a good primer on the subject.
A lot to digest here...and a lot before I was a subscriber. Trying to understand this new dynamic since I'm from a different generation and have been married over 44 years and never divorced. I agree with the attraction information, women have always been attracted to status, power, etc. But when married while those qualities remain important, men need to value loyalty and commitment. And as I have pointed out many times here, parents need to be involved in their children's selection of a spouse not only because this is charge from God, but because it will affect them too. Leaving children to figure it out on their own is a recipe for disaster usually.
There is a huge problem with this approach: Most men aren't and can't become
alpha men"-- just as most women are not, and won;t become, "alpha women" So to some extent the advice here rather resembles someone advising a debt-burdened person to win the lottery or inherit money from a rich uncle.
What is needed is some hard talk with women: Most of them have no chance of snagging a rich guy just as most guys have no chance of snagging a gorgeous beauty queen. In the not so distant past (and for many centuries) families and communities did their best to steer young women away from flashy cads of the love-em-and-leave-em type and toward men who would make good husbands. Of course people are fickle and enough women made that kind of mistake to serve as cautionary tales. Somehow we need to duplicate that wisdom today too. At least among committed Christians the churches could help in this area-- as can families even if they don't have the authority they once did.
Some years back Megan MacArdle wrote a column advising women who were no longer quite so young that they should resign themselves to settling for Mr. Good Enough since most of them would not land a Prince Charming.