From the Chateau: When men get into comfortable relationships, what normally happens is a slackening of the masculine drive to excel. There is even scientific evidence for this; after marriage, men in a variety of occupations — science, math, business — experience a reduction in their productive output. The most parsimonious explanation for this phenomenon is that once a man has landed a woman and codified it with a marriage contract or a commitment to date exclusively, the fire in his belly slowly burns out because he no longer feels a compulsion to impress potential mates….
Women naturally tease, feint and misdirect because it is in their nature to do so; such behavior helps screen the unflappable alpha males from the bewildered betas. Men do not naturally tease because all their screening is done within seconds of seeing a girl; her beauty, or lack of it, is comprehended instantly.
But once a woman falls in love, as you have done, she surrenders all possession of the faculties which served her well during the courtship dance. A woman in love is a woman stripped of all her armor; she is exposed. You are exposed. Your emotional nakedness prances around every word you write like a frantic sprite.
CHATEAU: Any woman truly falling for you will wind up blurting out an EOB against her better judgment. A woman in love can’t help herself.
Maxim #26: Women secretly hope that you won’t rob them of the opportunity to make themselves vulnerable before your alpha inscrutability.
STUDY: Women, being from Venus, have a reputation for being the first to spring “I love you” in romantic relationships.
But men actually are more likely to utter those three loaded little words first, and men admit thinking about confessing love six weeks earlier than their female partners, according to an article to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
That doesn’t mean men are bigger saps. Taking an “evolutionary-economics” perspective, the article concludes that gender differences in the timing and function of saying “I love you” are related to whether a couple has had sex.
“Men may be more impulsive in the way they express love, but what love means to men and what love means to women may be very different,” said co-author Josh Ackerman, assistant professor of marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management.
In a series of surveys, researchers found that two-thirds of couples report that the man was first in confessing love. Men also reported being significantly happier than women to hear “I love you” one month into the relationship if they had not yet had sex, while women felt happier than men when they heard “I love you” after the onset of sex in the relationship.
The researchers theorized that a pre-sex love confession may signal interest in advancing the relationship to include sexual activity – which is what men want, evolutionarily speaking, so as not to lose an opportunity to spread their genes. They want to “buy low,” as the article put it. Women, who have more to lose if they get pregnant, prefer a post-sex confession as a signal of long-term commitment. They prefer to “sell high.”
Furthering the point, the men happiest to get a pre-sex love confession were those interested in a short-term fling, while both men and women seeking a long-term relationship were happier hearing “I love you” post-sex.
Despite birth control and egalitarian values in modern society, these primitive patterns persist in the subconscious, Ackerman said.
The researchers hope exposing the biological underpinnings of these behaviors can help people understand the hidden meanings and motivations behind professions of love, which are ripe for misinterpretation.
CHATEAU: So what is this study telling us as it relates to game? You have to read between the lines a little, but basically it’s saying that expressions of love are intimately tied up with men’s and women’s sexual market value. Women who wait to say ‘I love you’ until after the man has said it are subcommunicating their higher value. (A high value woman juggles interest from many men, and can make a man wait for sex much longer than he is comfortable until she is satisfied his commitment to her is genuine.) In contrast, men who rush to say ‘I love you’ subcommunicate their urgency to extract sex, and thus their lower value. (A high value man is never urgent for sex because he is getting all the sex he needs from other women in his informal harem.)
