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Episode 133: Empathy, Brains vs Beauty Trade-off Male confused on a date
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today we got two main topics first is brains versus beauty is there a trade-off and the second one is can personality in personality hinder a pair bond but before we get to those we've got a kind of a small question here about the evolutionary psychology of humans being more emotionally reactive to non-human suffering versus human suffering and this listener says that he was just reading about how Hitler would describe graphic animal slaughter to convince his friends at dinner to become vegan and the penalty for testing on rats and Nazi Germany was the concentration camp so this listeners asking is it that we are at each other's throats over mating status and therefore animals are not a threat yeah I'm not I'm not exactly sure what let's try to let's try to get go to the core of the question that's being asked which is hmm you know why might some people be more upset about animal suffering than human suffering and there's a there's going to be several angles to this first of all human suffering to some degree can be can be seen as beyond one's capacity to help so it can be effectively that a lot of human suffering that you see there can be huge forces at play that that are responsible you know the big big institutional governmental you know tore tragic environmental circumstances etc so the with animals you see that the suffering that we see depicted is going to be sometimes if they're what is that the root is human decision making but it could be so different and and so that there's also a difference in in how defenseless that you might see a victim so animals a lot of times they're going to activate a parental chip inside of people's heads where and I think that you would also see that you'll also see that if the suffering creatures or humans that you see are children that's going to upset people a great deal it's going to be a greater than if it's probably adults I would assume the so there's a so part of this is hitting parental chips so animals will hit parental chips and so will as will young people now another thing all of this is being driven by empathy mechanisms all of these are actually these feelings of upsetedness about this are going to be part of the the whole suite of Moral Sentiments that make up human nature so the that what these moral sentiments are I mean I don't have a good acronym for remembering how this all fits together but it's it's basically the reason why you have the the suite of Moral Sentiments that you have that makes us very unusual as a species is that that we have we have self-interest versus group interest as being a a constant tension that sits within each individual we are an extraordinarily cooperative species the way we're built socially is just not like any other primate the there's all kinds of ways to depict this but here's here are just a few so the fact that you can see the whites of people's eyes is unique in the primates and the reason why that's going to be true is you're going to be able to watch other people's eyes and see what is drawing their attention and you can make inferences about what it is that they're thinking and because you can do this this is understand how bizarre this is usually you as a creature don't want the other creatures to know what you're thinking you want it to be cloaked from them because you want to sneak you want you are out for you and you're not looking for cooperative action out of a group you're just looking to get over on whatever it is that you can exploit that's not going to be true people so people are remarkably wide open their their thoughts and feelings are remarkably transparent and they express their emotions and they express a variety of them in ways that they give away what it is that they are thinking and feeling quite quite easily the now they can sometimes it is profitable to cloak certain emotions and so there's certain emotions that we do cloak that you can't see from the outside but a great deal of human emotion you can see from the outside and a great deal of human intent and thought essentially you can witness and make great inferences by watching the people's eyes and watching their facial expressions now it must have been far it must have been much greater profit to have these things observed then not have them absorb so in other words that's why it is that we have these characteristics of being reasonably transparent but so this is because if you can see what other people are thinking and see what it is that they want you can you could affect all kinds of trades and cooperative behavior more effectively so that's how this is how this is going to pay off however the despite that there is still ultimately a conflict between the self and the group so even we want to be seen as a good standing member of the group so people are designed by nature to essentially tout their own value as a group participant so they're out there to defend their status or they're out there too we call it earnest team they want to be valued in a central part of the value that they seek to promote is the notion that they are morally good and what morally good means is it means that I should be kept in the group because I'm a good group member that doesn't act selfishly I act according to group rules and I participate in group process I do my share and then all I seek or all I take is the share that I would be appropriately entitled to now anybody with a brain can see that this has problems in it the only people that can't seem to understand this are are people that believe in marks and socialistic you know politics apparently they can't seem to figure this out but it's it's obvious what the problem is and that is that the the individual is ultimately self-interested and we could say well that isn't quite accurate they're actually interested there's their interest goes past themselves to following their genes around so they're extremely interested in the interests of close kin very close kin they're a hell of a lot less interested in nieces and nephews than they are of their own children by quite a quite a large factor so that's strictly because of the amount of the genes of their own that are sitting inside their children are twice as many as they're sitting inside a niece or nephew so people are so there's a dynamic tension inside of people between what's in the group's best interest which versus what's in my best interest so every single individual in the group is designed by nature on average to be looking to exploit the group process so this means that it has to be monitored so people are monitoring everybody else in the group carefully and they're looking for people who are chiseling and oh so it's a surveillance of fairness so what's going to happen is that there's going to be anger and disgust reactions and outrage when we feel like people are cheating that they're gaming the system and getting more than they deserve so what people will do is that they so people are extremely concerned with fairness the look at look at professional sports or look at sports we've got really careful rules referees you know one inch decides your whether or not someone within bounds out of bounds and therefore what's fair so fairness is a huge issue and the reason is is because we are we are evolved to be cooperating but always knowing in principle and intuitively that everybody sits with the dynamic tension that they would want a little more out of the pot than they have coming to them so what we're going to get is we're going to get constant monitoring or surveillance of fairness and we're going to get gossip okay so people are going to have the little cliques and they're going to talk behind each other's backs about who does what to whom and whether or not it's fair okay and when we feel like someone is but we suspect them of being sufficiently unfair then we consult our little compatriots about confronting that individual and if if they're guilty and they've actually broken group norms of fairness it's likely that they will feel guilt and shame as a result of this so what you're going to see is the the it's not it's not just discussed but it's also anger on the part of people that feel like someone is essentially not treating them fairly or the group fairly and so then there's going to be a confrontation and that confrontation may result in either the confronted person believing that they are now being treated unfairly and it activates their anger chip and they push back or they could flip the other way and essentially feel guilty and feel shameful and now they may they may blush the in other words they may show a signal that indicates that they are a guilty party and now and that indicates that they're now going to make retribution because they want to maintain mean they want to maintain solidary and solidarity with the group so this is this is how it is this is going to go down now so within all of these processes you're going to see a very strong sense of empathy in other words you need to be understanding what other people are thinking and feeling and being able to track it okay you need to do this for a variety of reasons one if if nothing other then you need to be able to trade most efficiently with them because if you can see that they are very excited about something that you have hold in your hand then you are aware that you can get more for it and trade than if they're not that excited okay so so the if for nothing other than just the efficiency at attempting to get as much as you can out of trade we would need an empathy circuit but the empathy circuits go far beyond us it goes into monitoring everybody in the damn village and being observant about whether there are people in the village that are exploiting other people in the village and feeling the empathy for somebody that's being exploited and feeling an outrage and an anger and a desire to confront the individuals that may be doing the exploiting so this is and you can only imagine that if you believe that your child is being exploited how outraged and how close to violence appearance a parent would become so the empathy for your own child is going to be off the chart relative to your empathy for most so the concept of defenselessness gene value to you etc and the the behavior of others that is being unfair now we see why you know the people at Greenpeace want to take out you know harpoons and harpoon the people that are harpooning the whales or the baby seals or whatever the hell it is that they're doing so you could the outrage that they feel is driven by their empathy which is you know sort of super imposed on on a situation that was basically designed for protecting other humans in the group but it can easily be extended to animals that that that we can see are helpless in the face of human exploitation so I would say that it's a over overcooking the idea that we always feel this and we're the quote some people always feel this way I don't believe they do I think you have to look into its situation by situation and you know exploitative situation by exploitive situation and there's no question I have felt for example anger and empathy in situations where I felt people were being exploited including well I don't know billionaire business people where I felt like they were being treated unfairly so in other words I can feel pretty irritated about about feeling like even very powerful individuals that have a tremendous amount of resources where I feel like if they're being treated unfairly I can get pissed off about it but I'm not nearly as outraged as if I see a weak and defenseless entity being exploited and and that that entity could be human or it could be animal and and quite frankly I don't so in other words I think it's the characteristics of the situation that the lead to just how intense intensively that we feel so I could say that for myself I very often felt much more outraged at exploitation in of defenseless animals than I have of powerful people but I can feel outraged at both the but I can I can't say that I would consistently put my interests of animals about people at all so it's going to be it's going to be that the animals are are mimicking and creating the same empathy circuits as helpless people well and it will be along the same kind of dimensions how helpless how nasty is the exploitation how much suffering is going on what is the cost-benefit analytic engine that is driving the behavior in the first place and so all all of this gets strung together in a complicated cost-benefit analysis that runs through my head that activates X amount of anger so and I think that that is going to be the case for all people there was I think all people and God including Adolf Hitler for god sakes so so we're seeing that these are our pan human computations and I think these are some of the important elements that go into those computations do you believe more conscientious or highly conscientious people will have these these reactions more readily or does it have to do with certain personality traits like lowers emotional stability oh I think your oh that's that's good of course I would believe that this is absolutely going to be the case so the more conscientious more disagreeable and more emotionally unstable you are the more outraged you're going to become okay so my good friend Alan Goldhamer is it not you know a little disagreeable not super disagreeable he's quite conscientious he's not super conscientious but he's quite conscientious but he's also extremely emotionally stable so he's really unusually stable he's easily 98th 99th percentile for emotional stability and so as a result he will see exploitation of individuals that are defenseless and it irritates him and he's disgusted but he's not like ready to go to war okay so that he just kind of never is so that that's just not not in the character where I'm more naturally emotionally dynamic than he is I'm probably 80th percentile for emotional stability and so you know you'll you'll get me off the bench in a basketball game going to Frank yeah I you know you even though I half his strength I'm four times more likely to get in a fight because of because of more emotional volatility now that that being said the odds of me getting into fight are close to zero but they're a hell of a lot higher than Allen's because exactly these kinds of characteristics are in play and in this case it would be the emotional stability component so yes I think you're I think you're correct that precisely the big five is are important ingredients as to how these things wind up being computed fantastic yeah all right so we got a couple of callers on hold so we're going to go through the hottest question about brains versus beauty and then we'll take care of others okay okay dear dr. Lyle my questions about brains versus beauty there seems to be a cliche that we have that the more we have of one the more we have to sacrifice over the other however you seem to have described both of those things as a matter of mutation loads and general fitness indicators and that the overall fitness of organisms dictates their budget with regards to mate selection so not only would more beautiful people tend to reproduce with each other and more intelligent people would tend to reproduce with each other the more intelligent people might be able to get slightly more beautiful mates relative to themselves and therefore the more beautiful people would attract slightly more intelligent mates relative to themselves as well so can we expect that on average more beautiful people are also slightly more intelligent personally if I think of all of the tens that I've met even the lat even the least intelligent among them was not that stupid compared to the middle of the bell curve but if I think of the Uglies people I have met they were often some of the least intelligent as well same thing goes with the most intelligent people I have met even though probably none of them were tens in terms of looks even the least fancy among them was still not that far below average in terms of beauty do the statistics do the statistics confirm this is this all just a distortion of my own selfish genes causing me to underestimate the other shortcomings of both highly intelligent and highly attractive people because the fitness they do have would nevertheless improve the survival of my own genes I just love what you just love what evolutionary psychology does to people just turns their introspective process into a pretzel great it's like a mobius strip you're trying to keep coming around the end trying to figure it out all right the let's just look at some real basics here the they these are you let me let me see if I can formulate what it is that I want to say there's several things that come to mind first of all the the trading of intelligence for beauty is actually one directional and that is that it's only males to females so males are attempting to sell their intelligence to females to increase the beauty that that they seek and the reason why this would work is because females are willing to sacrifice some of their beauty to get male intelligence now it isn't actually intelligence per se that they're seeking but what they're seeking is resources and it's going to turn out that intelligence is going to be useful in terms of resources so the resources in the Stone Age weren't a big six-figure paycheck they were likely to be resources associated with status because their decision-making would have caused them to be seen as useful to the group and so the females are going to pick up on this the females are oh they're going to be unconsciously driven to simply be attracted to mates that are evidencing cues of increased IQ and so we can see that that we see this in the vast verbal repertoire of humans today that is you know 50 or 60 times greater than it's necessary to communicate the information that is being communicated so this huge vocabulary appears to be a Fitness indicator that the females use in order to detect individual differences in males and their brain size ie IQ essentially now the so to understand that that males are not seeking females of higher IQs and and taking their masculine handsomeness and willingness to trade down to get a woman who's smarter okay that that story is not told they're not seeking those Intel they're not seeking extra intelligence because they're not they're not needing it for for provisioning capacity for their offspring because they're not going to be impregnated so all of these so we see that if we're going to start talking about beauty and brains trade-offs we see exactly where the beauty and brains trade-offs are it's it's along these gender stereotypic lines now it's a it's also going to be true that these are essentially different categories of fitness indicators so just in the same way that a male may be staring at females breasts and then he can't stop himself he then goes to stairs that are wasted hips ratio and then he stares up at her face and he looks at her hair and then he looks back at her breasts and he looks back as like he can't stop himself okay he's got independent neural circuits he's got different neural circuits in her brain in his brain with with mating search images that is is actually taking in data on each of each independent different Fitness indicators so he may find himself looking at her breasts thinking uh just not that turned on by that though then he looks at her waist tips ratio of why I'm really turned on by that then he looks up at her face in psych I not so turned on by that then he looks at her hair it's like wow that's really nice hair then he goes back to her breasts and starts all over again okay so rat around and around his brain goes as he's as he is he's sifting through this experience and he's sort of and he's coming to a rough amalgamated average of how it how sexually appealing she is but nevertheless he could tell you what he finds most attractive and what he finds least attractive and he would he could actually track those feelings as a circuit by circuit is being activated by the sensory data okay so he could find all of those visual features attractive and then it may turn out that the way she smiles she she displays a whole bunch of her gumline and it turns out that that's really a turn-off okay so suddenly it's like gee if she just didn't do that we'd be fine so this winds up being the theme of a whole bunch of Seinfeld episodes in the 1980s that you know the girl has all of these things in a row and then she laughs and Joey is like oh I can't tolerate that laugh like that's that's just out so this is the concept of independent neural circuits okay so what you're going to have is you've got independent neural circuits and within the independent neural circuits what you have is thresholds of acceptance and this is the struggle that we have as we move move into relationships that we may be quite attracted to someone but we are very consciously aware of things that we are not finding as attractive and the problem is is that we're not really sure what our thresholds of acceptance are so this is going to be particularly the case with brains and personality so on the side for males are going to be pretty pretty clear what their latitudes of acceptances are for physical characteristics although they're going to be a little bit confused because the the regions of acceptance for casual mating are quite a bit lower in most males than there are then they are for pair-bond strategy so if the male is confused about which strategy he is pursuing for a given female he's actually confused about whether or not she meets criteria prepare bond strategy so you can start to see and of course he's designed by nature we believe to be self deceptive about which strategy he's even pursuing so it gets dicey for everybody to be figuring this out in both parties so the female is trying to figure out whether she qualifies for para bond strategy the male doesn't even know whether or not he's you know whether she qualifies or not but she certainly qualifies for casual mating strategy or he wouldn't find himself trying to close the distance between her and her DNA and so etc so all of this is swirling through this brain and this is just physical characteristics so now we're going to move over to brains so brains are going to be obviously they're going to be most important to the female in the context of a pair bond strategy that's because although intelligence is extraordinarily heritable and you would just as soon as on high IQ circuits tear to your son so that you could have them into your daughter so that she could have them but particularly to your son if if this is so called sexy characteristic but it's not that sexy of a characteristic the truth in the matter is it's a para bond characteristic it's a increase my likelihood of survival and increase the likelihood of survival of our children characteristic it is not a characteristic that we say oh my god the if my son is as smart as this guy the girls in the next generation are going to be dropping their panties and weak in the knees soon as they hear this guy talk never never going to happen okay so what do we actually see we see that that in the case of of intelligence and the male what the female is looking for is resources rather than passing on a sexually selected Fitness indicator so it's it's only going to be any good to her if he sticks around and we talked about provisioning so that's where the the male IQ is given him some credit in other words she's willing to lower her standards she will obviously unconsciously lower her standards of what is required for his physical attractiveness if he has higher IQ to a certain degree so she's running a payoff matrix on this trade which is exactly what this question is about so the female will run a payoff matrix on this trade because every point of IQ is going to increase her own likelihood of survival and her children's like that have survival by a given by a given percentage point and so as a result it's worth the fact that your genes are going to be just a little bit less sexy with every with every you know percentile point of decreased sexual attractiveness of the mammal your offspring are going to be 1/2 of a percent less sexually attractive on average so as a result you know you you you give up so you can actually see where this could even be context dependent behind behind how rough their environment has been and how complicated the problem seemed to be in the environment so you can see that the problems are complicated in the environment is very dangerous that you could see that the female might be willing to trade more of her beauty for for each IQ point okay each IQ point could become worth more in some certain circumstances now on average over most of evolutionary history it's probably been a very similar amount of trade there's a certain amount of IQ points or percentile of intelligence that the female is willing to trade down to get we're going to find that there's going to be diminishing returns so there's uh the the intelligent differences in males are only worth so much so it only you know trust me who do we want we want some Eagle Scout or Stephen Hawking answer the Eagle Scout because Stephen Hawking's got other Fitness indicators the world problem so you're going to look at an all-around score of protection provision capability that's going to have to do with the guy's you know physical strength athleticism it's also going to be personality characteristics how cool ahead but is he tough enough and is sort of enough etc how well-connected does he get with other people and is he politically strong and solid in the group is the honorable enough that he's seen us a good member of the village and therefore he's going to remain connected to all the power and potency of the village tribunal councils etc etc all of that plus we have to factor in his intelligence okay we also his intelligences advantages intelligence could be mitigated by emotional instability low conscientiousness overly open to experience etc okay so some impulsiveness and a little bit of wacky judgment you know not so now that those IQ points so look pretty fancy are now not as fancy so this is where it is that you can see this is an unbelievably complex set of calculus that's going on which is why chemistry is such a tricky business because these Cortex's are designed by nature to try to be pulling in the flow here of all these very various and sorted variances and that what the person is using as a guideline to tell them what hits a what hits criterion is actually good enough has to do with their own personal self confidence as to what it is that they can get at what levels of percentile levels out in the village so their own their own history is involved here and their own history is variable so it can change depending upon whether they've just been dumped and now their self-confidence is lower and now it turns out that their latitudes of acceptance just dropped a little bit ie we call that getting somebody on the rebound I've always been trying to get something ah your basketball player dr. Lisle we know how to read on I usually get hit in the face when I try to rebound so the point is is that so the question I think that we started with was about the the beauty versus brains trade-off and the person had some speculation about our beautiful people smarter on average then then unattractive people the answer is yes they are but it looks like probably most of that correlation coefficient is probably sitting in the bottom quarter in other words the least attractive people are on average significantly less intelligent and that may be because of some general mutation load issues I'm not I'm not sure about what happens at the high end in other words I'm not so sure that the top 10 percentile of attractiveness for people is above average in intelligence my guess is it's probably true it's probably a very small feature the reason why I would expect it to be a small feature is for exactly the reasons that I'm talking about that intelligence is not really sexy what it is is that you have minimum standards of acceptability for intelligence if you're if you're a male there's a there's a threshold on the female where she's just too low and it she's too far below you but she cannot really be she's going to be a problem because there's going to be conflicts of interest where it's going to be difficult to convince her and she's not going to see and understand your reasoning and that's going to be a problem and worse yet she can never contribute to your ability to make better decisions so there's a point and I don't know where it is my guess is it's at about twenty to twenty to thirty percent tile points below so if a guy's in 99 percentile brain it probably it's difficult for him to feel long-term pair-bond love with a female at the 75th percentile or lower he may lust after her he/she may hit every fricking circuit in his brain for a while but the truth of the matter is that one is likely to cause him to say damn you know if only you were one not smarter I would I would have I have four aces here okay but he it's likely that his love chip craving the the psychological interplay of feeling like he's with a peer or close that could actually improve his judgment okay it's kind of like being on a basketball team when you've got somebody that you really can't throw the ball to to make a play so you're it's a problem like you're you're playing around that person's weaknesses so men actually want people similar to them in intelligence wise and so two women okay but when it comes to the trading you the only trading that we're going to find along this dimension so what you're going to have is two thresholds of acceptance for intelligence for personality characteristics of various kinds so highly open people are going to find people that are not open to be very boring and very very closed people are going to find highly open people you know wacky dangerous irresponsible and freaking crazy okay so that's that's how that's going to work and along the intelligence dimension you're going to find more intelligent people are going to be willing to accept less intelligent people for mates but only down to some magical level where there's a thresholds of acceptance and and I wouldn't also say that those are fixed undoubtedly those are within a context of the person's all the person's other values in other words the whole thing winds up being an overall you know process of trying to find somebody that hits criteria on all criteria at at least a minimum level the this would assume by the way there's silent assumption that's going on and a lot of these things which is that everybody is trying to fricking you know pick a lock or get a Rubik's Cube to work and if you do what what is it and then if you don't do not have it what there is inside inside of humans is a capacity to have certain neural circuits fire at a certain intensity under optimal conditions so somewhere out there for you there is a slice of watermelon that is as good as it gets for a watermelon it just won't get any better okay and there's a hell of a lot of watermelons that won't do it that aren't even close and there's watermelons that are so lousy that even if you're pretty hungry you wouldn't want to eat them so there's a there's a continuum of exquisiteness of stimulation and along that continuum from a1 percentile watermelon which we're going to say it's not unsafe and rotten okay it's just not good you just don't like the taste all it's got its mealy it has low sugar content you know it just it's just a lousy watermelon as we move up to the 99.9 percent I love watermelons for you we're going to find what's 99 9 for you is probably 98 and above for almost everybody on earth because humans circuitry's is very similar and the experience of the 99.9% watermelon in your mouth will be like oh my god is that a great watermelon okay that's the feeling human being seek when we call following it and falling in love we seek across all the dimensions of human mating selection looks brains and personality we seek a feeling of exquisite and exquisite experience that we find inside of our nervous system nothing saying oh but if only the person was like this then I'd be happy no we would want to find this the situation where we are literally completely satiated across all these domains people know in principle that this is possible okay they seek it they want they also seek something that goes along with it which is which would be theoretically extraordinary and that is for the other person to feel the same about us to feel like oh my god you're the most attractive sexy thing I've ever seen in my life and I just can't believe how lucky I am to be with you and you know what I could see all the other people on the street and I could see all these fancy other people on the street but you are it okay you know if I had to pick between you and everybody else right now walking down 42nd Street it would be you okay the human being knows that that kind of reciprocal process is in fact theoretically possible okay and they seek it and they also feel like if they don't have it they're freaking frustrated okay because the nervous system can feel like you know what you could do a little bit better so this is a this is a threat inside the system that can keep people non-committal the is going to be what I call better dealing so it's a problem okay different people with different personality characteristics have this problem worse than others and and people also with a hell of a lot of options may have this problem worse than others so there's a lot that goes into the better dealing dilemma and in fact what we're going to find is that occasionally but not often two people meet and the nervous system of both says this is a hell of a deal and I'm taking it okay even when they feel that they can feel that in theory there could be a better deal but it's kind of like when you feel like you know what of course in theory there's a better deal but this is one hell of a deal and I'm taking it we would not expect that experience to happen very often for people because you would expect that that the competitive constraints and the objectivity of human values in this dimension is such that it's going to be hard for you to get what you consider a screaming deal very often but once in a while even a person who is a for if they keep out there and they're persistent sooner or later they're going to find something that feels to them like you know what that's the best deal I've been offered in five or ten years or maybe ever and they can have the experience of falling in love and that experience can be quite exquisite but the answer to the question of is it is exquisite it's it could possibly be and the answer is now okay the answer is no because there's a theoretical upside that they can feel that they could see how they could that they could find people that would be superior to their partner okay so people so this is part of the swirling backdrop of where this question is being asked about is there trade-offs between beauty and attractiveness and the answer is yes there are there's trade-offs between beauty between all of looks brains and personality but all of them operate within thresholds they're all involving independent neural circuits and they also involve shifting thresholds of acceptance based on the person's own ongoing experiences in life which change their own perceptions of what is that they can and can't get so this is the this is the extraordinary complexity of the cost-benefit analysis that's going on inside of human romance seeking mechanism all sitting against all playing against the clock and so that that's what is driving the emotional experiences and the the trade-offs that people make or don't make alright fascinating this list will go next well next with our next question that we'll go over next week about what personality characteristics hinder such a pair bond but we're not going to go to the written questions we're going to take our two callers on hold so we're okay first one last you load up your phone numbers 155 so caller what's your name where you calling from hey guys it's Steven calling from Ohio 3 hey welcome all right what's that I had a brief story than a question kind of relate to what you guys were just talking about ok I met a girl about a month and half ago through our like a professional social group at a soccer game and I thought she was pretty attractive and we chatted a lot and had good conversations and from that point on we kept talking online and I would invite her out and to come out and then we would go on an actual date later on and this is kind of a rare occurrence for me since I'm an average looking guy and you girls interested me this happens maybe 135 years and so we keep talking back and forth online and then one day I kind of it she started pulling back a lot and showing basically no interest in any interaction at all and I was feeling I wanted to maintain it from the relationship and so for some reason I started feeling resentful about this pulling away and I don't know if it happened because I was excited to make a move or what and I see her now and I wonder like maybe if I pass up on a quote-unquote good deal and so my question is how do you know as a guy that you found someone you want to settle down with a girlfriend and did this happen because I just wasn't that into her or am I not mature enough to recognize a good option when I see it yeah Stephen I'm a little confused about what went down so okay let me let me see if I can ask you these questions so you say you meet this girl you met her at a at some kind of an event okay and so at that vent you started how on earth did you come to be talking to each other we were sitting next to each other the whole time got it okay so just by chance you happen to be sitting next door yes okay so you actually happen my boo what's that I kind of plan that out pyramid yeah good good so you spotted her and then you managed to get sitting next to her yeah we're a part of a group got it okay and so then you so this is the first time she'd ever met you correct yeah okay so you actually managed to steal yourself and start choke out a few lines and initiate a conversation yeah it wasn't really that hard I mean we just kind of chat about the game and we kind of warmed up to me and so we got into real good conversation got it good for you okay so so this goes on and then so then what happens next so then you start you start wet chit-chatting over what text or email or how's that go down yeah we start messaging back and forth over Facebook and then I I see an event going on in the local area I was like hey let's uh would you like to go and do this and she's like yeah sure good so we have you got so this is what two three weeks in and this is like like less than a week after the first time meeting her okay this is great so so it's clearly you so you go on this little you go on essentially a date and so then so then what happens next when's the next time you see her next time I see here we we have a mutual friend who hosts like these uh viewing parties and of this TV show and I went over there too hang out with them a couple times yeah and then um and then we went to a food tasting together as a kind of a group of friends okay and then um and then she asks me if I want to hang out that weekend and we did and this whole time I'm kind of thinking that you know she's someone I get along really well with so it's drawn to I just don't feel like a super strong chemistry with yeah and okay so that's kinda where I'm confused is why I don't why was it more into her you know okay so let me get this straight so you you hang out this week on a weekend with her this is what like third weekend in fourth weekend in something like that oh yeah okay third report and hanging out that weekend what did you did you stay overnight or did you just or you guys in the same town you go home at night what happened nothing super internet we just got dinner and go play a game of minigolf yes okay all cool and so then so that's what happened like on a Saturday or so Sheba though had invited you to ask if you wanted to hang out with her that weekend basically yeah okay all right so at the end of that miniature golf and that dinner then what happened yeah hold on a second make out what the girls sleep with the girl what happened oh no nothing like that okay go all all cool so would you just give her give her a big hug and then then the idea was you probably see her soon then does that what happened uh not even not honestly we were I drove I drove her to the date and then we came back and and she didn't really make a motion to give me a hug or anything so I didn't one either Wow okay so and let's talk about why you didn't because this is now a girl that's given you all kinds of buy signals want to know whether you want to hang out with her you know it said yes when you wanted when you asked her if you wanted to go do things you've done several things but now here we are on you know a month in and now we're not moving a muscle at the end of dinner and miniature golf okay so yep of course she's sitting on her hands because this is she's into you or she wouldn't be where she is now you are you are kind of sounds like ambivalent about the signals that you're wanting to send to her because you're not so sure you want to stick your foot in any further cell right that's correct yeah okay so yeah because where you are it would seem to me let me see if I can pick my way through your brain and make sure that I understand it so let's suppose that we find out in casual conversation with her that she's got a slightly wild child chip and her attitude she starts saying a bit you know I'm just not so sure monogamy is that important or is natural in life and blah blah you know what do you think about that okay so she sends you some signals that she might be a casual mating strategy target and she's not some scheming female looking to drag you to the altar and have a couple of children and pay for them forever okay so let's let's just suppose that because on the face of it all this sounds very vanilla and it sounds like this is a standards upstanding pair-bond strategy female that you're dealing with and that's what it looks like you're reading yeah am i right that that's what you're thinking you're reading yeah yeah I don't okay exactly okay and so now the question is that you kind of my guess is you start out confused from the jump because she's attractive enough that she would meet criteria for casual mating strategy but maybe not sufficiently attractive for someone like yourself and maybe fairly conservative that if it would you know you've got both strategies in your head but if it came to para bond strategy by God you know you need to be super into her okay and so now you're finding out I'm speculating and you're going to help me to see if I'm right but it would seem to me that the dissonance about why it is that you're not reaching out to her at the end of this date is the truth is is that you're not too into this because even though she is objectively attractive enough for a casual mating strategy fling you are seeing that character illogically and strategy was this girl is not into that that in fact she's an upstanding para blonde strategy female and she really would not be open to that that's not her agenda and therefore to take advantage of that or to try to take advantage of that would be bluffing and would be too duplicitous and therefore not honorable so the honorable move is to stand right there like a stone and not signal to her that you're attracted to her because right now you don't know what the hell to do about this situation does that sound about right yeah that's right I just really feel compelled to do anything yes got it okay so yeah all that has happened here and then she got bent out of shape or whatever okay and that she should have because she's just another hat you know this is we're not going to call this a heartbreak we're going to call this what they call this we're going to call this a an atrial fibrillation break we're going to just DD a upper quadrant okay tiny wound okay so we're going to so all that all that really happened here is her her expectations were hopeful she did she never signal anything other than pair-bond strategy female and so she was hoping that your attraction and interest with her was played at that level you yourself were uncertain your design by nature as a male you're walking around with two strategies simultaneously side by side in your head and you don't even quite know half the time what what's up so you kind of pursue this strategy like a gentleman signaling pair-bond strategy but when when it turns out that you're getting by signals from the female that she's actually pretty damn interested and at this point could probably be had sexually but only under the context that this is a budding pair-bond strategy when you can see that that's what the deal is it's not a deal you want it's a tar pit do I have that right that sounds about right yeah yeah so you did the right thing okay so this isn't a mistake on your part this is this is how as I just spoke ad nauseam that we don't even know what our latitudes of acceptance and threshold are we only vaguely know and so as often we have to enter relationships and within the context of the relationship itself it may take weeks or months or even a year for us to actually discover you know what now that I am experiencing what it's like so let's suppose we got our guy with a 99 percentile brain and he's slobbering all over himself because he finds a female super attractive but he or she sits at the 77th percentile for IQ okay so now he finds himself after six or eight months just feeling like son of a bitch okay if you could just scrape up an 83rd percentile I'd be done and I'd put a big ring on your finger and call it a day but now that I see that it's actually 77th percentile said I can't do it okay you could go through it but he would feel empty inside and he would be unhappy he'd feel cognitive dissonance over it so he discovers that in fact you know Snow White they're met casual mating strategy criteria for a long time but actually did not fulfill cows pair bond strategy so very often like in this case you had to go through a process of a few weeks and several exposures to find out you know when push comes to shove the girl doesn't meet pair-bond quality standard for you at this time okay not your fault no way around it nothing wrong with you this is the standard human vetting process for a species that actually when they they have the possibility of feeling extremely excited and interested and the male is roguish as they can be can feel tremendously invested and excited in an individual female and feel like they have killed a bear and they want this thing and they want it for as long as they can imagine okay so that those are possible feelings we seek those feelings and often along the way you were hopeful that you know for all you know it could have been the case that who this person was might have flipped enough switches in your head that you could have found a lifetime partner okay or a partner for for a long-term partner but in this case you could sniff that that wasn't in the cards and you got to move on and you got to have a female that's somewhat bent out of shape the good news is no alimony [Laughter] okay thank you for calling Steve and great question
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