To be fair, me and someone tried a “select on building properties, try to cultivate entertaining properties later” strategy.
We read eachothers’ dating docs, calculated an optimism-inducing amount of goal alignment and compatibility, and took a crack at being charming and funny and sexy to eachother.
It did not go as planned. I was a little shocked—surely my monkeybrain needs would cooperate with (or be coerced into aligning with) my actual life goals, right? With hindsight I’m kind of honing my ability to recognize “just reverse engineer the ‘spark’, how hard can it be” as a special kind of stupid.
I don’t think it’s particularly stupid to think this might work; it is in fact how most of our ancestors oriented to relationships. We just have higher standards, these days… for good and for ill.
I think after all you will end up spending so much time together, there has to be something that overcomes the general human crazies that will pop up in that large amount of time. I remember a quote from one guy who went on an expedition across the arctic with a team: “After two months in close quarters, how do you tell a man you want to murder him for the way he holds his spoon?”
Desire and chemistry have a nice effect of countering at least some of that.
There exists a school of thought that looks roughly like “the dating docs people are stupid; top-down design of selection effects can obviously never work, plugging the monkey brain into the meat market is a better strategy for arbitrary dating goals” that I became more sympathetic to, but I’m still deeply resistant to adopting it completely.
I’m not really being scientific, I’m much more interested in “leading by example” and paving the kind of dating culture that I think is superior relative to my values than I am in updating my beliefs against the unfeeling stone of Reality.
To be fair, me and someone tried a “select on building properties, try to cultivate entertaining properties later” strategy.
We read eachothers’ dating docs, calculated an optimism-inducing amount of goal alignment and compatibility, and took a crack at being charming and funny and sexy to eachother.
It did not go as planned. I was a little shocked—surely my monkeybrain needs would cooperate with (or be coerced into aligning with) my actual life goals, right? With hindsight I’m kind of honing my ability to recognize “just reverse engineer the ‘spark’, how hard can it be” as a special kind of stupid.
I don’t think it’s particularly stupid to think this might work; it is in fact how most of our ancestors oriented to relationships. We just have higher standards, these days… for good and for ill.
Or, as The Red Pill would put it: You Cannot Negotiate Desire
I think after all you will end up spending so much time together, there has to be something that overcomes the general human crazies that will pop up in that large amount of time. I remember a quote from one guy who went on an expedition across the arctic with a team: “After two months in close quarters, how do you tell a man you want to murder him for the way he holds his spoon?”
Desire and chemistry have a nice effect of countering at least some of that.
There exists a school of thought that looks roughly like “the dating docs people are stupid; top-down design of selection effects can obviously never work, plugging the monkey brain into the meat market is a better strategy for arbitrary dating goals” that I became more sympathetic to, but I’m still deeply resistant to adopting it completely.
I’m not really being scientific, I’m much more interested in “leading by example” and paving the kind of dating culture that I think is superior relative to my values than I am in updating my beliefs against the unfeeling stone of Reality.