Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (23 page)

You also don’t want the clingy, needy types who can be recognized by the twenty phone messages they leave asking where you are, and the barrage of e-mails and gifts they send, or who tell you they can’t live without you or they’re in a bad relationship and want an escape route. In other words, you should avoid people who intend to make
you
responsible for their happiness. It’s hard enough being responsible for your own happiness without taking on someone else’s problems.

They’ll make all the promises necessary to convince you that being with them is in your best interest. They’re like the people who buy the Super Duper Ab-Master they saw on late-night TV—deep down they know that it’s a waste of time and money and that it will soon be shoved under the bed.

Remember that all relationships aren’t forever—most will be simply fun and a stepping-stone to bigger and better things. Approach relationships on this basis and don’t look for perfection in every relationship. Look at each date you have as a fun, short-term relationship that may or may not work out in the long term.

Overall, men love women’s bodies in all shapes and sizes, whereas women don’t have men’s body shapes as a high priority in a potential partner. Anyone who wants you to look like the people on the cover of
Glamour
or
Men’s Health
won’t want you in the long term for who you are. These are usually insecure people who need a handbag on their arm in public to bolster their own insecurities or their lack of self-esteem. It’s all about them, not you. Only a small percentage of people can
rate ten out of ten in the Mating Rating stakes, and they are attracted to others with the same rating. Most of us are less than perfect, and so our ideal mate also has imperfections. That’s why we are attracted to and form long-term relationships with those who have the same Mating Rating as us. If a person has a Mating Rating of, say, seven out of ten, that person will be attracted to someone who is also a seven. People may admire or lust after someone who rates a ten, but most will eventually settle for someone with the same score as themselves. The fact that they have flaws like us makes them more real and more human. After the attachment stage, they will love you even more because of your shortcomings. That’s how long-term love works. This is why the person who constantly finds faults in you and is always nitpicking has not entered the attachment stage and is
not
the person for you.

If the chemistry isn’t there with someone, your relationship will always be a logical, orderly one. The ability to create a chemical reaction in a partner is what sustains long-term passion and desire. There are two types of chemical reactions: natural and created. Natural passion happens when hardwired factors come into play, such as immune-system difference, pheromones, and our love-map criteria. Sustained passion is when both partners continually work at creating an environment for passion to flourish.

Evolutionary psychologists Peter Todd at Indiana University and Geoffrey Miller (author of
The Mating Mind
) at the University of New Mexico used a computer simulation to determine mathematically how someone chooses from a number of possible partners at a party that has, say, 100 potential partners. They found that by the time we have assessed 9 possibilities among the 100 in the room, we have decided what our aspirations will be. This means that at the party with 100 possible mates, you only have to study the first 9 you randomly encounter before you choose. Examining less than 9% means you won’t have enough information to make a good choice; examining more makes it likely you’ll pass up a good choice.

This fascinating experiment gives you a clear message—if you have limited time, don’t search indefinitely before picking a mate, because you’ll run out of either time or possible partners. After you’ve checked out 9% of the available talent, you’re ready.

It takes at least a year and a few good arguments to begin to know who someone really is. Finding a suitable mate is a logical process that needs to be approached in the same way you would approach hiring someone to run your business. Never commit yourself to any person in the early stages of a relationship because you are crazy in love—it’s likely to just be your hormones talking. Hormones eventually subside, and when they do, you’ll be left looking at the cold, hard facts about whether this person is suitable to live your life with. Doesn’t it make more sense to undertake this evaluation
before
a new relationship gets too far down the track?

It’s your life, and you are responsible for it. A great myth is “When you’re not looking, that’s when you’ll find true love.” This old cliché will definitely prevent you from taking positive action with your love life, so forget it. Write a list of the minimum you’ll accept in a partner and stick to it. Don’t commit early to anyone, and never settle for second best in your relationships—and don’t let anyone put you second. If you feel that a person has what you want to make your life easy and fun, encourage that relationship. If the person doesn’t but it still feels good, stay with it till it wears off, then move on. Never use someone as an interim measure until “the right person comes along”—that causes more pain than pleasure, prevents you from focusing on what you really want, and is an abuse of the other person.

Write a detailed list of exactly what things you want in an ideal partner and then become socially active so you meet as many people as you possibly can. Play the numbers game.
Why settle for second best when there are about 1.52 million potential perfect partners in the world for you right now? But you’ve got to be active and get out among them. Don’t wait to be discovered.

You will need to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince or princess. You need to be committed to obtain your dream, and it takes a lot of hard work to make it happen. Start right now—write your list.

T
he information in the next two chapters is about men and women and their urges, desires, and obsessions. If you are a female reader, some things about men may surprise you, shock you, or even make you angry. It’s important to understand that we will be talking directly and plainly about these things and have not sugarcoated them to be politically correct or to say what someone might like to hear. When you have a realistic understanding of these things, the opposite sex becomes easier to handle and live with.

There are many things that irritate, annoy, and infuriate men about women, but top of the list is sex. Men want sex any time, often all the time. There are plenty of statistics around demonstrating that a forty-year-old man thinks about sex once every four minutes and an eighteen-year-old once every eleven
seconds. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University says that 54% of men think about sex at least every day, 43% think about it a few times a week or month, and 4% once a month or less. Women, on the other hand, are popularly believed to think about sex rarely—and then only when there’s absolutely nothing else on the agenda.

Sex is often the basis of the tension that arises between men and women both within relationships and outside them. All research shows that sex is the single biggest factor in couples having problems getting on with each other, whether it’s about different levels of desire, different timing of desire, or simply one person no longer fancying the other. When it comes to complaints about sex, men usually say there is not enough and women claim there is too much. The question is, Does lack of sex contribute to a bad relationship, or does a bad relationship lead to less sex? The answer is both.

It’s reasonable to assume that man’s erotic instincts remain constant in every generation, and denying this fact means that the expression of those instincts causes pressure in relationships. Squeezing a balloon does not eliminate the air; it merely forces the same air to distort the balloon’s skin in another area.

Any woman who has ever had a love relationship with a man knows that she doesn’t need an alarm clock to wake her in the morning—instead, as the sun rises, so does his penis, and she feels it poking her in the back. This is caused by two things. First, a man’s testosterone level is highest at sunrise, just before he sets out for the day’s hunt, and is lowest at sunset. Nature ensures he has a last opportunity to pass on his genes before he heads off—in case he doesn’t return. Second, the erectile nerves that instruct the penis to stand at attention are wrapped around the prostate gland, which sits immediately below the bladder. A full bladder presses on the erectile nerves and can
make the penis rise. Because a man is not psychologically or visually aroused at sunrise, however, the best a woman can usually expect is a morning quickie as Mother Nature completes her sunrise task.

Professors Raquel and Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are the MRI pioneers who found that the anterior commissure, which connects the left and right brain hemispheres, is 12% smaller in men than in women and that the corpus callosum—the cord that lets one brain hemisphere exchange information with the other—has up to 30% fewer connections in men than in women. These differences account for why men are better at working in one mode at a time. Imagine that most male brains are a honeycomb of small rooms, each containing one specific skill that operates independently of the others. This gives men their “one-thing-at-a-time” approach to everything they do and is why they can focus more intensely on single tasks than women. Having a “monotracking” brain lets men focus intently on either sex
or
love. Sex can be just sex, and love can be just love—and occasionally they happen together. This allows men to do something that women don’t understand: have sex with women they don’t like.

For a man, it can be just sex and then he can forget about it. He doesn’t need to discuss it or ever bring it up again, unless he’s bragging to his friends. When a cheating man is asked by a woman why he had sex with another woman and he claims, “It was just sex,” he’s probably telling the truth. Men’s brains can compartmentalize sex into a simple activity like shaving—after you’ve had a shave, you don’t think about it again till the next time. But to a woman, “It was just sex” is not a believable response. For her, love and sex switch on together in the brain, and one is the consequence of the other. In fact, one usually equals the other. Sex is rarely just about sex for a woman—there must be some feeling attached to it. If not, she’s likely to be using it to boost her self-esteem. Even if a woman has the urge to have sex just for physical gratification, she still searches for a man who appears to fit at least part of her list of appropriate partners. Not so for a man—when he feels the urge, all he needs is something with a hole in it. For men, sex and love don’t necessarily happen together.