Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (20 page)

For most of us, relationships begin by accident. Although an increasing number of people meet through dating agencies
and the Internet, about half of us bump into potential partners through the course of our work, and the rest meet accidentally at clubs, pubs, bars, discos, barbeques, and on blind dates. Most of us meet our partners by accident without any planning or clear goal setting, yet we wonder why divorce rates are so high.

If you were the HR manager of a company and you were hiring a top-level senior executive, you’d insist on a CV, health report, financial statement, bankruptcy and credit checks, and you’d want references from previous employers. If the applicant had been in jail or was a mass murderer, you’d want to know, right? So why would you entertain a new relationship with someone you’ve just met in a club or pub and about whom you know nothing? Well, that’s exactly how most of us get started with our partners—by accident. During the first year or so of a new relationship, people work at minimizing their negatives and highlighting their positives, and so for a long time they don’t really find out who that person is.

The perfect person for you is the one you have
absolutely no doubts that you definitely, positively, absolutely want in your life forever
. There’s no hurry. Age is no longer a major issue, and there are plenty of people available for you.

When it comes to choosing a long-term partner, good judgment is far more helpful than emotions and feelings. As we have said, early love is based on a combination of brain chemicals that are designed to propel you into reproduction with little or no consideration for whether someone is suitable for you. Any life-changing decision you make about a partner should be carefully structured if you and that person are to be
a good match. A bad match can have serious consequences and make your life miserable. The most intelligent way to approach finding a life partner is similar to the way you would handle a high-profile job interview. Why let a complete stranger change your life because you’ve experienced an overdose of hormones?

Finding the right partner is entirely dependent on two things:

1. Knowing exactly what you want in a partner
   

2. Being able to give what that person wants in return
   

As you have now discovered, ancestral women wanted resources in men. Consequently, men have evolved to be accumulators of resources, to gain power, or both. Ancestral men sought reproductive ability in women; thus women have evolved with the motivation to do whatever is necessary to appear young, healthy, and fertile. Consciously or subconsciously, men and women understand what the opposite sex wants. Just as a fisherman baits his hook to attract a fish, so men and women do what is necessary to attract a potential mate.

It’s here that current generations of young people have become confused. Young women have been brainwashed into believing that because men and women are supposedly now the same—that is, “equal”—today’s men now want extended romantic encounters with long bouts of courtship, foreplay, discussions about feelings, and game playing. The truth is that the men of the twenty-first century are hardwired to want
exactly what their forefathers wanted: as much sex as possible with plenty of variety—and as soon as possible.

Experienced men who understand women’s basic needs will participate in the romance and courtship routines to get what they want, but the higher the status of the man, the less time he’s prepared to invest in doing it. Although Brad Pitt could probably bed an attractive woman in less than thirty minutes, it could take Joe in accounts at the local bank six months of courtship rituals to bed her.

Although a man’s resources and a woman’s health and youth are the initial hardwired motivators for human attraction, all studies of what makes lasting relationships have come to the same conclusion—those that endure do so because the partners have the same or similar core values and beliefs.

Core values are:

1. Attitude to raising children and to discipline
   

2. The division of domestic chores and responsibilities
   

3. Finances—what, where, and how money is spent
   

4. Cleanliness and living standards
   

5. Social and family—involvement, activities, and frequency
   

6. Sex and intimacy—who needs what and will it be given?
   

Core beliefs are:

1. Spiritual and religious
   

2. Ethical and moral
   

3. Political and cultural
   

There is no such thing as a compatible couple. Most couples disagree about the same things: money, sex, kids, and time. A successful long-term relationship is about having chemistry and similar core values and beliefs and about how you manage your differences. You create compatibility. Remember that after one to two years, the rush of love hormones subsides for most people and it is similar core values and beliefs that keep couples together. When you meet someone new, that person will usually be on his or her best behavior for about a year, so it takes time to find out what someone’s core values or beliefs really are.

Here are three simple questions to test Mr. or Ms. Right’s potential in the early stages of a new relationship:

1. What are the person’s base values?
   How does the person treat others, such as friends, relatives, and coworkers? Is he or she caring, attentive, loving, and affectionate? How someone treats a dog or deals with a waiter in a restaurant is how that person will eventually treat you.
   

2. What do the person’s actions say?
   A person can tell you anything, but his or her actions reveal the real person. If people say you’re the only one for them but spend more time with their friends, their actions reveal the truth.
   

3. What do your friends think?
   Although your own opinion is the ultimate one, close friends can see things that a hormonally charged, besotted lover is blind to. Friends can help you be objective about the reality.
   

Most people will identify with what is written here because most of us have made these partner misjudgments at some time in our lives.

When people fall “madly in love,” they make decisions based
on their feelings at the time, not on the suitability of a potential long-term mate. As discussed in
Chapter 1
, in the lust/romantic love stages, the brain is flooded with hormones, creating a druglike state. If you feel you are about to commit yourself to a person because that person “has something magnetic about him or her … a magical feeling you just can’t describe,” take a cold shower and read
Chapter 1
again. It’s your hormones talking to you, not your brain. Sure, go for the fun of the ride of exciting new love, but decide in advance that whoever you may fall for, you’ll let time pass before you make any decisions about the future.

You may deny to yourself that the person has problems that you may have knowledge of, or refuse to listen to others about flaws your lover may have. You may focus on the lover’s positive points and see the lover only as you want him or her to appear. Any information you receive about the person should be used to make an intelligent, considered choice.

You attract people who plead that they need you and you spend your time “being there” for them and constantly trying to fix their neuroses. Eventually, you’ll become tired of this and will look for someone else. Alternatively, if you are the needy one because you’ve just been dumped, divorced, or separated, you become a candidate for being a rebounder. Give yourself time—10% of your previous relationship time—to get through the bereavement period. Then find someone who wants to be with you, not needs to be with you.

You spend your time desperately avoiding any disagreement
with your new love, trying to make him or her happy and avoiding doing or saying anything that might upset him or her. You become a “yes-person,” but no one respects a yes-person. By being passive and compliant, you soon build anger and resentment in yourself, and it teaches your partner that you have no real feelings or that your feelings don’t count for anything. Consequently, you leave yourself open to emotional abuse. You need at least two to three good arguments or fights with your new love before you can get a realistic handle on how that person really is.

“I know he’s had a bad history with relationships, but when he’s with me, he’ll be different. He’ll change.” Uh … no, he won’t. People who believe they can change a person or that someone will be different with them are always asking for a tough life. Many women believe that the magical power of love will create a new man before their very eyes, but what normally happens is that the new lover simply reestablishes his past bad habits in the new relationship. It normally doesn’t happen until much later in the relationship because in the early stages of romantic love, most people show their best side and hide their bad habits.

Every person has a rating number known as his or her Mating Rating, and it’s usually a number between zero and ten. It’s a measure of how desirable each of us is on the mating market at any time. We all rate others consciously or unconsciously by using this measure, and we do it to every person we see or
meet. The rating is based on the characteristics men and women want in a partner.

When we look at a couple sitting in a restaurant or walking past us, we rate both sexes out of ten and decide if they are an equal couple. We assess whether it is a mutually beneficial relationship and whether they could be getting what they want from the relationship—that is, do they look like they fit? We evaluate their presentation, attractiveness, body shape, symmetry, resources, beauty, and so on.

For example, supermates Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would both rate a ten for many people because they seem to have it all—money, fame, power, and attractiveness. They have the same Mating Rating. Yet with some other couples you shake your head and fail to see what she sees in him and vice versa—or how the relationship even works. You think, He can do much better, or She must be desperate.

If you get the opportunity to talk to the couple and get to know them better, you will then either increase or decrease their rating. If they are rich, funny, kind, or intelligent, you increase their Mating Rating, whereas if they are mean, calculating, boring, or broke, you decrease their Mating Rating.

All studies of human mating agree that each of us has the best chance of a successful long-term relationship with someone who has the
same Mating Rating
as us. Someone who is a seven, for example, has the best long-term chance with a partner who is also a seven. They may fantasise about Kylie Minogue or Brad Pitt but will usually end up with a mate just
like themselves, and if that mate’s core values and beliefs are consistent with theirs and there’s chemistry as well, you’ve probably got a perfect match. Relationship problems happen when one partner’s Mating Rating significantly changes. For example, the man increases his resources by getting a big promotion or winning the lottery and moves from a 7 to an 8.5, or the woman decreases her rating through self-neglect or becomes overweight and decreases to, say, a 5. He then becomes critical of her, while she starts to overcompensate with her performance to try to make up the gap.