A lot of the stories told on r/relationships refute this claim.
OP: “My husband/boyfriend is a giant manbaby who doesn’t work and only plays video games, so we’re stuck living in my parents’ basement with no hope of ever escaping. Sure, he’s always been a slouch but I thought he would grow up. I thought that once I got pregnant, he’d kick it into high gear and get a job.”
Reddit: “WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL WITH THIS LOSER!!!”
OP: “Because he’s really a sweet guy! He’s funny and gentle and loves the baby. Breaking up with him is NOT an option. I just want him to CHANGE.”
Some “females” (ugh) look for men who are good providers in a financial sense.
But some are attracted to men who are “sweet and he treats me nice”, because maybe they have shitty self-esteems or they’ve spent their whole life being abused. So someone showing them a little kindness gets their panties wet. There’s a reason why ne’er-do-wells with a modicum of charm never struggle to find girlfriends. Are these girlfriends mutants or something? Or is it possible that “females”–along with everyone else–are a lot more influenced by their developmental history and environment than the wires in their brains.
Some are attracted to men who treat them nice because they have excellent self-esteems and have no intention of spending the rest of their lives being abused.
Being nice to other people and being competent and willing to pull one’s weight are not mutually exclusive. There are actually men who have all of those characteristics.
This doesn’t refute what PunditLisa said - it directly supports it. Sure, the woman says she’s won’t leave this man because he has other good qualities - but she wishes he had a decent job. So for her, having a decent job is obviously desirable characteristic in a mate.
I don’t think anyone wants to be with a person who just sits around playing video games all day long. I’m not guessing a whole lot of guys would want their wives to sit around the house eating bon-bons all day, hence the existence of this trope. Laziness isn’t an attractive quality in anyone.
At any rate, read my post a little more carefully. The hypothetical OP obviously isn’t attracted to guys who are “good providers” since she fell in love with a bonafide slouch. Right now, there are millions of young women who are head over heels over some guy who makes her laugh, who listens to her, who treats her nice, and is good-looking but he’s a fuck-up with zero career aspirations. If women are hard wired to be attracted to good providers, then there must be whole lot of women with some loose wiring. And maybe that really is the case? Because I swear r/relationships has convinced me that love can make people both blind and mentally handicapped.
I did read it carefully. You’re attacking a straw man - nobody claimed that being a good provider is the only quality that’s important, or that it always overrides all other considerations.
This may be part of the issue in a conversation like this. When I see the word dating and relationship, I see the process of seeing someone over the long term for both sexual and emotional intimacy - and likely financial intimacy as well. I don’t see “hooking up”
Women hook up. But women have more to consider when hooking up.
Is he safe? Will I end up dead in a ditch. Will this get violent? If birth control fails, will he take responsibility? Am I going to get some sort of disease? On this abbreviated list of the “is he safe” evaluation men might think about an STD. They don’t tend to think “is he going to kill me?”
Is he considerate? It isn’t a given for a woman that sex with a man will be any more satisfying than sex with her shower head. In fact, she is much more likely to reach orgasm through masterbation than through sex with a stranger. Why hook up under those circumstances? Also, if I get accidentally pregnant, whatever choices I make, I’d like the other half of the responsibility for this to be considerate and involved in whatever process I follow.
Is he sexually attractive? Since sex for us happens as much in the brain as in the body, if he doesn’t turn you on, he can be as considerate as possible, but it isn’t likely he will be more fun than the aforementioned shower head. This can change within the confines of a relationship - a guy can become more sexually attractive over time based off other factors - like consideration or sense of humor - but it isn’t likely that for the purposes of a one night or two night stand you are going for anything other than “I find you hot.”
Thus women have a lot more risk in casual sex - real safety risks and just “wow, that was a waste of my time.” That doesn’t mean women are less sexual creatures, but that we are somewhat less likely to turn to the opposite sex for our sexual release - outside of an intimate relationship. It isn’t certain we will get it there, and it isn’t safe.
When someone says “females” are hard wired for anything, they are gonna need to bring some evidence to the table. Because I don’t see any evidence of that in my world. I see men and women acting all kinds of ways that defy evolutionary or biological reasoning. “Just so” stories are just that without any facts.
If PunditLisa had just said, “Women tend choose to settle down with guys who have decent prospects of being a good provider”, I wouldn’t even be posting in this thread. But she made an appeal to “hard wiring”. To me, that’s like saying guys are hard wired to be attracted to slender blondes, despite all the evidence showing that guys are attracted to all kinds of women.
Having 10M is something so outside the realm of my experience that it doesn’t so much appeal as confuse me; it just falls into “lots”. But being 10K in debt due to anything other than car and house would certainly be a problem*; so is living above one’s means in a way that seems to be long-term, and this is something I’ve seen people in all kinds of income levels do. I’ve known multiple people who “didn’t know where the money goes!”, including a boyfriend and a roomie; I could have told them easily, in fact anyone who’d known them for a week could have.
My mother is dangerous with expenses: Dad used to “hide” money from her (she knew the account existed but didn’t know how much money was there - it did not bother her), now Littlebro does the same (at her proposal, in fact), because if she sees it she’ll spend it just out of anxiety. Now she knows that if she happens to have any kind of reasonable expense she can cover it, but the money doesn’t “burn her hands” so long as she doesn’t know how much there is. This kind of mindset isn’t one I’d want in a mate, but I also never had the expectation that any man I married would always make more than me: in fact, my expectation was that there would probably be times I’d be making more, or when he’d be out of work and my income would need to be enough to support the family. I had a few classmates in college who were quite interested in their Mrs’s (preferably from a guy who came with his own multigenerational family business), but even those would have been offended by the thought that they wouldn’t be able to support their family if needed: none of us went to engineering school on account of the diploma being decorative.
Not necessarily a reason to break up, but if you’ve got that kind of debt it’s highly likely that I’m better with money than you are, so cough up the paperwork now and let’s see how can we attack that mountain. And don’t give me any “it’s not your problem” crap, I’m not marrying a guy who doesn’t understand the “for richer and poorer” part.
Again, I think you are overinterpreting “hard wired” to create a straw man. It means that there’s an evolved instinct to do something, a genetic predisposition. It doesn’t imply absolute genetic determinism - it doesn’t mean that there’s no variability in the strength of the instinct, or that other factors (genetic or cultural) can’t come into play to create a complex interplay of motivations with many possible outcomes.
Or are you really questioning the fundamental idea that human females have an evolved instinct to prefer males who can provide for their families? I know that some aspects of evolutionary psychology are “just so” stories, but surely not this one. Humans are obviously an altricial species, and we have one of the highest levels of Male Parental Investment of any species. It would be shocking and counterintuitive if natural selection had not led to a significant genetic predisposition to prefer males with the abilities, resources and inclination to care for their families.
Personally, I question that such a preference is species-wide and gender-limited. I don’t think monstro is Basque, but some of us were raised in cultures where people are expected to be able to provide and people are expected to be able to take care of themselves and of each other, and for centuries our neighbors used to refer to those expectations to try and insult us (it didn’t work).
I think you’re just attacking the same straw man that it’s the only thing going on. Cultural norms for a cohesive and supportive society are not mutually exclusive with an instinct to seek out a partner who can help care for your children.
As for the latter question - well, it’s a widespread biological reality in all species with a similar reproductive process that females are likely to be more “picky” about assessing a prospective mate’s qualities, simply because a pregnant mother cannot abandon her unborn child, but a father can. In other words, a pregnant mother is biologically “locked in” to 9 months of huge parental investment, but a father is not.
But in choosing a long term mate to commit to and raise a family - sure, a man will also be inclined to look for a woman who is likely to have the temperament and resources to care for their children well.
I think if you asked what most people think when they hear an appeal to “hard wiring”, they will say they hear someone arguing from a biological or evolutionary psychology perspective. You may disagree with this interpretation of “hard wired”, but this does not mean I’m arguing a point that was never made. I’m arguing against the argument I’m assuming someone is making by using the loaded words “hard wired.”
I don’t see evidence of this “instinct”, no. What I see are cultural and economic factors that push women to seek out good providers, but these cultural and economic factors are not universal. And not everyone responds to these factors. I don’t see evidence of women being attracted to good providers. I see evidence of women being attracted to guys who make them feel wonderful and warm and tingly between their legs and in their hearts. If a guy meets the “good provider” condition, then a woman may decide to take things to the next level if she is ready for that next level. But for a ton of women–like women who just want to have some fun–that is a 100% conditional option. Guys aren’t the only ones who like having some fun.
From an early age, girls hear that they need to get a man who can take care of them, who will provide for them. A guy who will buy them nice things and put them up on a pedestal and make them feel like a queen. You hear that messaging enough times and hell yeah you’ll be driven to find a man who will be a good provider. But that’s not “hard wiring”. That’s “social programming”. And there’s a big difference between “My vagina is pulsating right now because this guy has a fat wallet” and “I really want to start a family with this guy because his fat wallet represents stability and security and social status, since in the society I inhabit, it is hard to have a family without any of these things.”
If this were the case–that women have preferentially selected men who are “good providers”–I would expect a lot less laziness in our population because we’d all be bearers of “good provider” genes*, including women. And I’m not averse to the idea that we are a lot less lazy than some other version of humanity that’s in some alternative universe where people have random sex with any ole dick and pussy they can find. But I don’t see any evidence that women are attracted to financial stability more than other traits. Like, if we want to be as non-thinking as we possibly be with this topic, we could say that women are hard wired to be attracted to guys who are good protectors, since our ancestors were subjected to raiding hordes and dangerous wild animals and women have always been too physically weak to deal with these things alone. And surely lots of women do like them some strong muscular guys. But plenty of women don’t give a fuck about muscles or being protected…probably because they aren’t cowering in fear that a lion will drag them out of the cave while they are asleep. Are women like this mutants? Are they in denial of their evolutionary history? Or is “hard wiring” really not the best way to describe the motivations pushing people together?
*There are a lot of creative, charming, funny folks in society who aren’t interested in making a lot of money. They aren’t necessarily lazy either. They just aren’t pragmatic. Over all the hundreds of thousands of generations of human history, while the hard-working husbands were out hunting or working in the fields, guess what the dreamy, artistic, fun-loving guy was up to? He was having sex with the wives left with all those babies in the cave or in the hut. We’re no doubt all related to that guy, which is why we’re not all accountants and engineers.
If you look at the most desirable men (ie. the richest, most powerful, and most famous), their wives and girlfriends do tend to be slim, and a higher than average percentage seem to be blonde. It seems like, when men are in a position to have their pick, they more often than not seem to pick women who fit that stereotype.
Similarly, the slimmest and most beautiful women - the women most able to have their pick - seem to disproportionately end up with rich businessmen, actors, and professional footballers rather than charity workers, professors, and stand-up comedians, even though the former set aren’t generally known for their stability, loyalty, wit, or sparkling personalities. Just an observation, but it seems to hold remarkably well.
Could you be a little more specific? It would take me about five minutes to find a study showing that male attractiveness strongly correlated with wealth, but would that answer your question?
I’m interested in what you might find, so go ahead and show me such a study.
But I hope you’ll keep in mind that correlation does not equal causation.
You can find studies correlating thinness with wealth, but that is not evidence that wealthy people are blessed with genes that make them thin or that skinny people are endowed with special traits that make them more likely to be successful. It is much likely that the wealthy simply have more leisure time to devote to exercise and the wealthy can afford other sources of pleasure besides the $4.99 combo at Cook Out. The wealthy can also afford therapists to help them deal with their emotional baggage. For the common person, all they got is Sara Lee and Ben & Jerry.
Again, all I have to do is look around me to see that a supposed finding like"male attractiveness is correlated with wealth" only goes so far. There are a shitload of really handsome guys who do really well with the ladies but don’t have two cents to rub together. These are drop-dead gorguous guys who look like they could be models. But they are broke. Some of them are even criminals. But they still have a certain je n’ais se quoi that makes them attractive to the ladies. You will never find guys like this posting about how they are oppressed by natural selection on Incel boards. But you will find guys with good paychecks posting at those places. Cuz it turns out money isn’t everything, even in a materialistic society like ours.