ACT I
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For the past 5 episodes we’ve been talking about many different ways men’s and women’s reproductive instincts affect how we think.
That can lead to a lot of misunderstandings and disagreements. But if we use human biology as our common reference point, we can see each other’s points of view fairly easily.
In aviation, relationships, or anywhere else in life, intelligent people can make bad decisions by misinterpreting or overlooking some vital information. Getting the right answer consistently in complicated situations depends on you focusing your attention on getting, and using, the information you need.
That’s what we’ve been doing throughout this series. We talk about first principles of science because those are facts that are always true. When you know that these things are always going to affect you, that means any good decisions you can make happen within those parameters. Because when you make decisions by ignoring relevant facts, or without knowing them, things are guaranteed to go wrong.
So here are some things for men to remember to help figure out what to do about the fact that women have higher standards than men on who they date, have sex with, and marry. How do you make good relationship decisions within those parameters?
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First, think of your life as a story.
What’s it a story about?
What kind of women would want to be part of that story? Those are the women who are the most attracted to you. Because they’re the ones whose reproductive instincts are making them think the two of you could be a family.
What kind of women do you want to attract? And what can you do to turn your life into a story they want to be part of?
The competition with other men isn’t as desperate as it seems if you let women get involved. All you really need to win in the long run is to be a hardworking man who cares about other people, who makes good life choices overall, and who knows enough about whatever is going on around you to be able to make some kind of a life for yourself and to have enough left over to share with someone else.
That’s what winning the competition looks like to most women.
You don’t need to be the #1 champion of the entire world. You just have to be someone a woman you like can imagine having a future with.
ACT II
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Here’s the next critical step.
When you try to have sex with a woman, you’re trying to make friends with her in the most intense way ever. When you’re alone with her, the competition with other men is over, at least for the moment. You won. You’re not competing against them directly anymore.
Now she wants to see how you feel about things that are important to her and how your feelings fit with how she feels about those things. She’s testing you.
It’s still a competition to see which guy makes her feel the best. But it’s only indirect now. You’re trying to make her feel good in all the areas of her life. Focus on that.
Maybe she’s only looking a short term relationship, and she just wants to feel like she could have a good future with you, even though she doesn’t intend to.
Whatever happens between you two, you win if you make her feel good in a way you feel good about.
Even if things don’t work out between you, she doesn’t have sex with you, and she goes off and has sex with another guy the next night, you still gain from it. Because you’ve learned stuff that you can use in your next relationship. Especially the part about not feeling like your life depends on having sex.
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You might’ve noticed that I’ve said one reason we use the term rape survivors is because when women get raped it makes them feel like the future of their families has been pushed toward extinction.
But I’ve also said that men have to have sex with women to get them pregnant, and if they don’t, they feel like they’re destined for extinction.
The difference is that for women, the amount of violence it takes to push the future of their families toward extinction by raping them makes it very hard, if not impossible, to separate the feelings of their survival instinct from their reproductive instinct. Also, rape means a man is trying to steal 19 years from her life.
But for men, not having sex and not getting women pregnant, doesn’t put your life in danger at all.
What you’re feeling isn’t your survival instinct.
It’s your reproductive instinct.
You might think it’s your survival instinct because you’ve never felt your reproductive instinct this strongly before.
You probably didn’t realize you could feel it this strongly.
But seriously, no matter how much you want to have sex with a woman, and no matter how completely you’ve forgotten about your entire life beyond a few minutes from now, her changing her mind and you watching her walk away isn’t going to kill you.
ACT III
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Here’s the next part.
Think of your relationships with people who you want to be friends with on any level as an open ended question. You’re going to wonder what’s going on with them, and you’re going to leave it up to them to fill in the answer. There is no right answer.
Whatever answer they give you is going to be more than you knew before. A relationship that lasts is going to be one where you both keep wondering what’s going to happen next and wanting to find out.
It’s okay to want to have any kind of sex with anyone. But here’s what it means to think of relationships as open ended questions.
If it’s really the person you care about, then No is as good of an answer as Yes. Not the answer you wanted, but it’s still a good answer.
If you don’t feel that No is a good answer, then you’re not really thinking about having sex with them as a question you’re asking them.
Being friends with someone means that you feel that what they want is as important to your relationship as what you want. That’s what being equal partners in the relationship, and mutual respect, mean.
If you can’t accept the other person saying No about something, then you’re not really friends. You’re just trying to extract something from the other person.
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That means that any kind of good relationship with anyone depends on both of you having a good sense of humor about it.
Have you ever wondered what makes jokes funny?
A joke is an unexpected situation that has a positive outcome. Those are the kinds of things you can laugh about.
In any kind of relationship with anyone, unexpected things will happen. A good relationship is one where you can find a positive outcome to them. Which means laughing about them afterwards.
If you resolve your unexpected situations in ways that one or both of you don’t feel is positive, that’s not how a joke works, and that’s not a good relationship.
So what’s an easy way to tell if the two of you might have a good future together?
Tell her a joke or two. Then tell her a funny story about something that happened to you.
If she doesn’t want to laugh along with you, she doesn’t share your sense of humor. And if she doesn’t share your sense of humor, what are you two supposed to do together when something goes wrong?
Women usually know this trick. They’re already playing a bigger game here than you are.
If you tell her a joke and she laughs, it’s not really the joke that made her laugh. She laughed at your joke because she feels like there could be something between you.
If she doesn’t laugh, she doesn’t feel that way. Forget it. Move on.
It doesn’t matter how funny your joke was. She won’t laugh at it just to get you to stop talking to her.
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Finally, why do women so often go along with relationships they don’t feel are fair?
Remember, your genes are molecules that make copies of themselves. They don’t care how you feel about it.
What does a woman need most to reproduce?
A woman needs to have sex with a man in order to get pregnant, but she can always find a man to have sex with.
What she needs most is someone to help her through her pregnancy and to help her with some of the work that it takes to raise a child. What she needs most is a stable relationship.
But a stable relationship doesn’t automatically mean a good relationship. How much is she willing to sacrifice to keep a relationship stable? If a man has expectations of her that don’t fit with her life, how much is she willing to put up with for the sake of keeping him on her side?
If women are willing to put up with more from men than men are willing to put up with from women, it’s because women need men’s help to reproduce more than men need women’s help.
ACT IV
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A good relationship is one where you both feel good around the other most of the time.
If you go into a relationship with expectations from the other person that they never actually agreed to, your relationship is only going to go so far. If your expectations are based on some kind of ideology where your side decided what they want from the other and they didn’t bother to figure out ]]why the other side would want something different, and you tell the other person what you expect from them, as if they’re doing something morally wrong if they don’t do what you want them to do, again, your relationship is only going to go so far.
Is it religious fundamentalists blaming women for not doing what their religion says women are supposed to do?
Or is it feminists blaming men for not doing what feminists have agreed that men are supposed to do?
Those are the same thing. You’re not trying to have a relationship where you both feel good around each other most of the time. You’re trying to have a relationship where one of you feels good around the other most of the other time, and the other feels a moral responsibility to make that happen.
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If you think of relationships as open ended questions, where you don’t have expectations of people, and you try to find outcomes to unexpected situations that both of you feel are positive and that you can laugh together about in the end, it will take you longer to find long lasting relationships, but when you do, they’ll also be good relationships.
Along the way you’ll get to know a lot of people of the opposite gender.
Some you’ll like enough to be friends with but realize that you’re not really each other’s type, so you won’t pursue romantic relationships with them.
Some you will pursue romantic relationships with, but then realize you’re not really each other’s types, so you can break it off and still be friends. Instead of getting mad every time the other person does something you don’t like and getting in fights with each other that you never really get over, until you hate each other.
The more good relationships you build up, the better you get at relationships, which will help you have better relationships with people who do turn out to be your type.
Along the way, you’ll help show your women friends how good a relationship with a man can be, so they can have better relationships with other men. They’ll expect more from men, but they’ll also be better prepared to express what they want in ways that let them both see each other’s point of view.
Think about it, guys. Which would you rather have?
A girlfriend who always goes along with whatever you want whether she likes it or not?
Or an ex-girlfriend you’re still friends with, who thinks of her relationship with you as the turning point in her life when all her relationships started getting better?
Or a female friend who thanks you for showing her how much better a relationship with a man can be than any she’d ever had before?
Then when you do meet a woman who turns out to be your type, and she realizes that there’s room in your relationship for her to be who she wants to be, how do you think she’ll feel about that?
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We’ve been building up to this from the very beginning.
This series started out as a story about math and physics.
But what is the story of Being Human on Planet Earth but the outline of a relationship that’s big enough for all of us to be in it?
