The article makes a good case for "when they get to know you, some of them will fall for you."
When I was still young and at least somewhat cute, I remarked to a friend how depressing it was that women always go for rich and arrogant men. My friend's reply absolutely changed my perspective on this: by choosing socially well-accepted and successful men they actually place a lot more emphasis on the inner values than males do. In a very real sense, women love you for who you are (=rich and successful) as opposed to what you look like (=a characteristic you can't do much about).
Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important. Of course the article is correct, once you actually get to know people, this changes. But for getting the foot in the door so to speak, attractiveness and an aura of importance respectively are probably still the most important vectors.
I just want to mention for completeness' sake, and only because it would be taboo to express this in a magazine article: if you're really unhappy with the dating rat race, and it's genuinely not realistic for you to improve your chances by optimizing these superficials, it is possible to just opt out of everything. I know it's controversial and for some reason it upsets a lot of people when I tell them that I just stopped. Contrary to popular belief, this mating thing is not something which you absolutely must accomplish. I've crossed to this other side, and it's really really peaceful here. ;)
I've switched to the gay side, out of equal (physical) interest for both genders. Dating criteria are much more "on demand" depending on the way you search for people, so it's hard to generalize. I can still say that in the gay subset, you can find people with balanced interests for who you are, how you look like, your experience, how much you earn and what you live for.
In comparison, girls I have found in my native country are unevenly balanced towards social validation and wage. Plus a big burden of cross-sex relationships is gender-equality-in-the-couple challenges, so I could really say that I've opted to the gay side for the peace of mind.
Quitting the maintstream race, and find your own balance of criteria, may do you good.
I imagine it's nice to have that option, however, it's not really feasible to change what someone is sexually attracted to. If I could do that, I'd have tried it out already.
Besides, I suspect some of the same things that make me a prohibitive choice for women (and vice versa) would also apply to same sex partners -not all of them though.
But yeah, I can see how that can be worth pursuing.
> by choosing socially well-accepted and successful men they actually place a lot more emphasis on the inner values than males do. In a very real sense, women love you for who you are (=rich and successful) as opposed to what you look like (=a characteristic you can't do much about).
One might also argue the opposite: Men value women for who they are (looks included). Women value men for what they have (wealth and social status).
For women that chase rich men (not saying all women do this, but the existent and very small subset of women that do), it's often not because of the success implied. It's because of what the paper can buy.
Those women would still chase trust fund babies -- they chose to be born to those parents just as much as you chose to be cute.
Those women would still chase those that became rich out of pure luck (eg.: lottery).
Your financial success says nothing about your ability to succeed in interpersonal relationships. In fact, sometimes qualities between the two conflict with each other : being 'aggressive' in business is a sound plan to boost your competitive abilities, being 'aggressive' with your girlfriend just sounds abusive.
The whole reason the social consciousness regarding the idea of a "trophy wife" exists is to describe shallow women who emphatically don't "love you for who you are".
Also, there's a bit of philosophical conflict when it comes to the significance of "characteristics you can't do much about". The thing is, you often can't do much about any of your characteristics.
I think you're trying to argue that personal characteristics, like being smart, being funny, or being relatable, are somehow more of a choice than being pretty. But do you really have a "choice" in being smart or being funny? Isn't the grade schooler who opines after a girl who values these seemingly choose-able personal characteristics not trying his damn hardest to have those characteristics? If so, why does he fail when he does? Didn't he have a choice? No. He couldn't do anything about it, much like he couldn't do anything about his physical attractiveness. Yes, he can learn from his personal flaws and adapt his personal characteristics, but, first off : that relies on the meta-characteristic of being aware about your characteristics, which, again, not a choice or anything you can change about yourself.
Is having the characteristics to be rich or successful something you can "do much about"? Then why doesn't everyone do something about it to be rich or successful? If it's because they're lazy or aren't determined to work hard -- are those characteristics that they controlled? If it really came down to just working hard (which being rich/successful isn't, there's a lot of intuitive judgment that you either have in your instincts or don't, but that's a whole 'nother discussion), can you blame lazy people for being lazy? Did they sign up on being lazy? Do you think they chose to be lazy and undetermined? If not being lazy is so clearly better, did they ask to not be able to see that clarity?
We don't judge people based on how well they take advantage of their control, because ultimately no one has true control.
The series of actions required to become a multibillionaire with an amazing lifestyle and an absolutely lovable personality where everyone likes you is not some undefined series of actions that requires superhuman levels of magic. It's just that you don't know how or you are incapable of becoming said person; you don't know which human actions to take and decisions to make to become said person. So you become the best person your sense of control allows you to be, but did you really choose that control if it's given to you?
We judge people based on how well they suit our needs.
If one man's needs is someone who is funny and smart, so be it.
If another man's needs is someone who is physically pretty, so be it.
Being rich is an inner value? I have the impression that how much being rich has to do with your own will is still not decided. If anything, social mobility has been shown to be very overrated in recent years. And then one can ask, how much did that one person striking millions have to do with ingenuity, and how much was it just being at the right place and time (lucking out)?
One could say that, 'in a very real sense, men love you for who you are (how is how you look not part of "who you are"?) and not for auxiliary things that have nothing to do with you as a person, such as money'. It's all just semantic quibbling, anyway.
Being successful is, and being rich is one of the markers for success. I had problems with this view as well until it was explained to me from a woman's perspective. The operating assumption being, as I said earlier, that men and women use different heuristics to do preliminary mate filtering. By and large, you get through the filter by being beautiful as a woman, and by projecting success as a man. The argument goes that beauty has absolutely nothing to do with inner values, while success does (false positives not withstanding).
Then again, there might be a huge cultural component to this. I come from Germany, which has the most unapologetically darwinistic dating scene I ever experienced. German girls are by and large no-nonsense, goal-oriented, and not prone to poetic whimsy.
> One could say that, 'in a very real sense, men love you for who you are (how is how you look not part of "who you are"?)
Hey, the darker part of my epiphany story is actually up to that conversation I had believed finding a mate was about finding a partner that matches your inner essence, finding someone who recognizes the "real you". So I had dismissed both success and beauty as meaningless, because they tell you nothing about that essence. Again, I was very young at that point and had a lot of misconceptions.
There's no 'moral' right or wrong either way - both are biological indicators.
Women often look for men who can provide for their children, and who are capable of producing sexually successful offspring. In violent climates, physically strong men are valued more than financially strong men as that's what's required to protect offspring.
Men often look for women who are fertile and healthy.
In both cases, market value is simply a partner who's capable of carrying on one's genes.
Man when I realized that people were really (subconsiously) seeking some biological imperative based on child survival from superficial materialistic characteristics instead of a best friend type to spend their life with in a mate it really messed up my head about the dating game. But you got to do what you got to do.
So if we are talking about ethics, the explanation for why people do what they do from an evolutionary standpoint doesn't say much about the moral implications of it. There are probably a lot of evolutionary theories on anti-social behavior in humans, say. Maybe some people are inclined to kill people in a surge of passion because that is some latent fight-or-flight instinct that has been beneficial for the survival of the organism, yadda yadda yadda. So what, though? That is not interesting when it comes to considering what is ethical and what is not.
It may seem that I am bringing up extreme cases, when procreating is seemingly benign. There are still considerations that one might have, though; even if it is beneficial for the propagation of the organism's DNA to have a certain amount of children - maybe for example 5 is the best in order to make sure they grow up relatively well - it isn't necessarily ethical. Maybe 3 children is the best for a happy and full childhood, with enough parental attention. Maybe bringing children into the world isn't something that a certain person should do, because of some terrible genetic disease (now we're straying into eugenics, and we probably know too little about DNA to be able to say that so-and-so should procreate and so-and-so should not). Propagating DNA shouldn't even be a goal in itself, ethically speaking. Humanity might have done more harm than good in becoming 7 billion people. And I don't just mean bad for each other, but in causing stress to ecosystems and the global climate which lead to natural disasters and other organisms struggling to adapt and survive.
So what if there is some evolutionary basis for some behavior? There has to be some reason. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should endorse or encourage that behavior (whatever behavior is being considered).
Why did he kill him? Elementary, my dear Watson; first, we have to go back approximately 20,000 years ...
> I had problems with this view as well until it was explained to me from a woman's perspective. The operating assumption being, as I said earlier, that men and women use different heuristics to do preliminary mate filtering. By and large, you get through the filter by being beautiful as a woman, and by projecting success as a man. The argument goes that beauty has absolutely nothing to do with inner values, while success does (false positives not withstanding).
Is this supposed to be novel concepts to me, things that I have "problems" with? I am questioning the assumption that being rich is wholly a matter of will and inner values, I am not questioning what women like or dislike.
"I had problems with this view as well until ..." - I don't have "issues" or hang-ups with this opinion, neither is it too hard for me to understand.
Obviously if you take a really superficial, surface reading of 'rich' then it's not going to be very useful. But look at what they are making of their life - are they capitalising on or squandering their opportunities? Are they improving their lot, or settling for what comes easily, or mooching through life?
How a woman looks decide who I [try to] talk to, but a good sense of humor, intelligence and cool personality will change my "target" quickly.
From what I've seen, this is not unusual for men. (And probably the same goes for women too, I wish I had anecdotal evidence that my "good" sense of humor worked wonders. :-) )
Edit: Other people below said similar things.
Edit 2: How large percentage of relationships (in small/big cities) starts with people you meet online, these days? Is the article relevant?
Edit 3: As a clarification [and answer to removed(/reinserted?) comment]. I reacted to "Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important.". It is too much of a simplification. Attraction to women can come from other things than eyes.
A couple of examples:
- I was crazy over a woman that was far from pretty while ignoring a cool woman. (She dumped me after a year, sigh.) Her (irritated) old time friends said she always had a tail of guys.
- I ended up weirdly on a date with a fat woman a while ago, which I realized that we had both misunderstood -- she was way out of my league in "mate value" (I realized that early in the dinner, so I spent the time asking about her really cool work and previous jobs).
This is not common (large "mate value" for women not based on looks but personality, intelligence and so on), but do exist. (And can also be quite obvious, not after knowing someone for months/years.)
> From what I've seen, this is not unusual for men.
Yes, I agree with everything you said. Of course the implication here is that it's different for women. Which may well be the case.
Anecdotal evidence on my part seems to suggest that men are prone to add exceptions to their filter in order to let people in, whereas women overwhelmingly tend to only restrict their results further. In the end, this all might be explainable by supply and demand concepts, the underlying theory being that women always have a higher mate value than men. This sounds mathematically absurd at first, but it seems to fit the behavior patterns observable in the wild.
Why is it mathematically absurd? Women have a smaller reproductive window than men. This includes periods which take a full 25% of the reproductive time. Men are available all the time.
Women also bear a higher cost and greater investment in sex. So once again they are more selective. This creates greater competition among males for females than the other way around. Sure, the top guys have women competing for them but a much greater percentage of women have men competing for THEIR sex.
Well even in relationships these same considerations apply. A woman's investment in a relationship is higher since her biological clock is ticking, so to speak. She is most desirable in her teens and twenties and it falls off from there. Just ask who's chasing who after 35.
So, she will try to optimize her time in long term relationship with the best marriage / long term love partner prospect. That's why she cares about more than looks.
And what are men's considerations in long term relationships? It doesn't seem like they are just going along with the first woman who deems them worthy.
I guess there's a whole spectrum. Many men aren't interested in committing anymore. In general though men 21-40 are the chasers in the beginning and women are the chasers in the relationship.
When I was still young and at least somewhat cute, I remarked to a friend how depressing it was that women always go for rich and arrogant men. My friend's reply absolutely changed my perspective on this: by choosing socially well-accepted and successful men they actually place a lot more emphasis on the inner values than males do. In a very real sense, women love you for who you are (=rich and successful) as opposed to what you look like (=a characteristic you can't do much about).
Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important. Of course the article is correct, once you actually get to know people, this changes. But for getting the foot in the door so to speak, attractiveness and an aura of importance respectively are probably still the most important vectors.
I just want to mention for completeness' sake, and only because it would be taboo to express this in a magazine article: if you're really unhappy with the dating rat race, and it's genuinely not realistic for you to improve your chances by optimizing these superficials, it is possible to just opt out of everything. I know it's controversial and for some reason it upsets a lot of people when I tell them that I just stopped. Contrary to popular belief, this mating thing is not something which you absolutely must accomplish. I've crossed to this other side, and it's really really peaceful here. ;)