Romance in the time of SMV

A plea

she’s only with him for his social capital. She’ll cheat on him when a buffer, more charming ogre comes along

I know what I said about what women want and what we like to look at, but hear me out: those were all generalizations based on population-level data, educated guesses, and the intuition I have from being A Person. Of course even my own contribution to the torsogate discourse was influenced by my own aesthetic preferences that I attempted extrapolating to the population as a whole while ignoring certain things I didn't relate to for the sake of making a more compelling argument that wasn’t littered with irrelevant exceptions.

What I'm saying is that we all have our "type(s)," those types don't always perfectly map to evolutionary predictions, and even though they average out they're actually all over the map and are often, at least in part, culturally and socially influenced, and historically (before The Apps, anyway), most people have done all right with that setup.

The problem of over-generalizing

The identitarian left often makes the critical error of conflating population-level concerns, such as the gender pay gap or racial hiring trends, with individual realities in the real world. Its present-day proponents are routinely criticized for their oftentimes over-the-top or melodramatic responses to inoffensive, everyday occurrences that the majority of people wouldn't think twice about from either side, and they seem to take everything just a bit too seriously and literally.

The evopsych dorks¹ on the right are doing the same thing, though, and all of us obsessive nerds² are getting lost in the weeds about it, perpetuating our own misery and annoyance. There's a popular female writer and streamer on Substack who recently got married, and she (extremely gracefully, somehow) fielded a number of appallingly rude comments about whether or not she was actually attracted to her husband.

This obnoxious behavior is too cynical and black-pilled to sustain us, folks. When you're so obsessed with your sexual marketplace value (SMV) and that of those around you that you can't even just be happy two people found love no matter how unlikely it seems, what role does dating even play for you in terms of its meaning in your life and those you interact with? Why are you even in this game? You've lost the plot. It's making people forget what it's like to love someone, or even like them for more than what "value" they provide to their "status."

You can't convince status-obsessed people to give it up save for sending them on some ayahuasca retreat in the mountains or giving them the right drugs at Burning Man or something, but we can at least stop acting like this is the way that normal people operate, consciously or not.

This has been pointed out many times, but most people ultimately date and marry people similar to them in educational and economic backgrounds as well as age and appearance, and it is simply absurd to claim that all of those people are actually unhappy because they are not married to Chad or Stacy or that they would abandon their partners or families instantly should Chad or Stacy express interest.

What this also means in practice is that the coveted twenty-year-old virgin girls of the world aren't actually routinely trying to attract the attention of 45-year-old rich men, and when they are, it's often for more transactional reasons than genuine attraction-based reasons, and a sincere, mutually affectionate relationship isn't likely to result from it. Handsome, wealthy men are equally as unlikely to pluck cute 19-year-old chain restaurant hostesses and community college students off the street and turn them into champagne-swilling elite housewives who attend fancy galas and vacation in Europe.

It’s weird to realize I’m just regurgitating a different version of the “don’t be so shallow” argument, updated for 2025.

I'm not even judging. If this kind of superficiality and structured transactional nature is really what you want out of a relationship, by all means, you do you; this is more about being honest with how and to whom you're extrapolating your personal brand of relationship autism. Outside of the kind of elite social circles where marriage is apparently just another way to secure status and business connections, genuine attraction and connection drive most romantic pairings over overt status. And, as has been repeatedly brought up with torsogate, only like 9% of men actually have a body type like the dehydrated bodybuilder in the after photo (or bigger). There aren't enough to go around even if that is what we all demanded, and women are less single than men, indicating not just that women are more picky, but that a lot of these dudes are just cheating on them. She's not winning any games here by getting the Chad if she's looking for anything more than a meaningless hookup.

Speaking of cheating, men still do it more than women, although women are catching up and even leading in some age categories.

Why does this matter? Because as soon as a guy lands a woman people think is out of his league, people start looking at her with suspicion. Shallow bitch if she goes for Chad Alphington, future cheater or gold digger if she chooses anyone else. The nearly universally agreed-upon idea that women don’t put as much importance on appearance as men do and that we need to get to know a man before deciding he’s attractive goes out the window when a woman actually chooses a man generally considered less attractive than she is, as evidenced by the response to the aforementioned conservative writer's marriage. These men could've celebrated the fact that she did what men like them complain we don't do, which is choose to prize a man's personality and other qualities over his appearance (or believe her when she says she genuinely likes his appearance), but they're so cynical and black-pilled that they can't even see it as a win.

For every TRP dude who makes fun of “Alpha Widows” because women only know how to “date up” and constantly secure more and better resources, there's another informing us that we're incapable of knowing whether a man is attractive until we've spoken to and sniffed him. Unsurprisingly I'm more likely to agree more with the latter, although the former would just tell me that, as a woman, I'm incapable of actually knowing what I want so what I say doesn't even really matter.

I get why this is so fun to sit around analyzing and picking apart because I’ve been doing it myself for literal decades now and still am for some damn reason, but don't you guys remember liking each other at all?

Is this just another Rich People Problem?

I've been reading Red Pill, PUA, and general dating strategy and gender war/relations content for an absurdly long time now, and I think it was a mix of fascination with such shamelessly-expressed sexism and also the hint of truth I hated to admit I found behind many of their observations that kept me interested for so long — ironically the same things that kept me reading feminist blogs around the same time.

When I first started reading it, though, I really couldn't relate to most of it (kind of like with the feminist blogs!). The kind of guys I was attracted to didn't look or act like these dudes did and I couldn’t imagine the appeal beyond generic good looks or money that you could only hope he spent on you in the ways you wanted. The way these guys talked about dating was incredibly foreign to me as a young, working class Millennial woman whose experiences did not line up at all with what they preached. Of course, part of my blind spots back then were related to the fact that I was a young woman who was also reasonably attractive, so naturally, the truth of some of their statements didn’t land with me yet and I was focused on the ways in which I was an exception to their AWALT observations. In the 20 or so years since I started reading this stuff, I’ve gone from thinking I was an exception to realizing I wasn’t, and then back to discovering that perhaps maybe I am, along with other women (and the men they tend to marry) in my cohort, sometimes a bit of an exception after all, only for different reasons than I originally thought.

Furthermore, dating among my peers just didn’t look like that save for a handful of rather goal-oriented women I knew. From a section in my essay about Tony Soprano’s attractiveness:

I always thought “marrying up” was for old-fashioned types and people who were already rich; it felt awkward and gauche to watch my fellow working-class acquaintances nakedly attempt the same thing, and to often disastrous results. One complained that her dude refused to go down on her. One complained that she never had orgasms with hers and then explained the mechanics of their sex life — she was basically describing banal, male-centric porn where the whole woman could be substituted for any random hole and no one would notice, and I was perplexed at how she didn’t see the connection. Another was straight out of a CoHo novel and ended up abused, isolated, and pregnant, pretty much the property of this psychopath she met online after exclusively filtering for rich guys.

These other women’s experiences only drove home the point to me that trying to date in such an “old-fashioned” way in modern times was not only pointless and unromantic, but also potentially dangerous. What good was money if the guy who had it was controlling and abusive? What kind of life even is that? How could you enjoy that money with someone's boot on your neck? And you were expected to fuck the asshole on top of it?

Of course the negative experiences of these women made sense; as noted previously, people tend to date and marry those who are most similar to them and rich guys don’t typically select from a pool of gas station cashiers and call center customer service representatives. These normie girls were trying to throw themselves at any man displaying any obvious or gaudy symbol of wealth in a desperate attempt to secure class mobility for themselves and had next to no chance of actual success without the background necessary to even be seen by most of the guys they thought they wanted. The only ones they could find were the abusers and cheaters or guys who were just horrid boyfriends and husbands for other reasons that kept less desperate women away. Hell, maybe these women could have benefitted from some RedPillWomen advice, if that’s what they really wanted.

The women in Tony Soprano’s universe were like those women I knew, wanting status and wealth but having no easy or realistic way to acquire it in the way she wants, so instead must choose from her own community's available pool of men who can provide her with some version of the material wealth she is looking for.

It is clearly the case that these “rich people” status games and dating patterns among men and women continue to operate within so-called “lower-status” circles; they simply operate according to their own internal logic and to a smaller degree and with perhaps less importance placed on the material, which is more scarce. Where money would typically indicate status, social capital is traded in. Where elite gentlemen with manners might be found in the world they're trying to enter or emulate, insecure, possessive men with violent tendencies dominate in the shadow realm of Lower Normie World where that kind of extreme wealth can be found because those personality traits are necessary to keep it.

But in the real world? People meet folks at work, at school, at social activities, at bars, at parties, through friends. They see each other regularly and fondness and attraction grow and they start dating, get married, have some kids, and are about as likely as they are not to be happy with their decision. Normies are not looking to “secure a high-status mate”; normies are looking for someone to connect with, to love who loves them back and who will be a good mom or dad to their likely children and a good companion for them as they age together. Normie men and women don't have the rich-people-burden of being expected to maintain generations of family wealth and acquiring new business partnerships or whatever it is that wealthy people concern themselves with, freeing us to date and marry for love and compatibility and happiness instead of cold spreadsheet numbers and impersonal “marketplace values.”

I’m just saying that maybe, while a lot of this stuff is demonstrably based on real phenomena likely related to evolutionary mating strategies, taking it to such an extreme also feels like a bit of an envious LARP for a lot of folks who resent that they weren't born a Rockefeller.

Does not wanting kids make a difference?

My working theory for why I've personally found it difficult to relate to the experiences of the men and women who date in this manner and find themselves consistently disappointed is that I've really never wanted to be a parent, and so much of these strategies are based on securing good DNA for your offspring and making sure that, if you’re a woman, the man can provide for and protect the family. There was just never really a point in my dating life where I looked at a potential mate as though he could be the future father of my children because I simply didn't want any of those. It just didn't occur to me to find a good provider; I expected to take care of myself because I was going to be an adult and that’s how it was supposed to work. And, probably also due to the way I grew up, I also just didn’t automatically assume that a man would financially take care of me or any kids. Based on what I had seen it seemed like success in that regard was based on pure luck or enough money for a good lawyer.

Instead, I was looking for someone who would sustain my own interest and attraction. All I cared about when it came to money was that he could support himself so that I wouldn't have to. And without kids, I didn’t have an incentive to stick around even when I didn’t want to because he was supporting me or because leaving to be personally happier would break up my family. I primarily lived in a liberal city for most of my adult life, as well, making it incredibly easy to meet like-minded people — so much so that it was easy enough to forget that we actually were exceptions to the rule, according to the data. I was disabused of this delusion once I moved to Virginia.

It's maybe weird to want the fairytale romance and marriage with no corresponding noticeable instinct to create children to go along with it, but I did. Growing up, I always imagined my adult life with a husband who was definitely going to be my soul mate, but I almost never imagined that future or that marriage including kids. I was obsessed with finding my true love ever since the concept began to make sense to me. In my fantasies, I was a number of different things that changed on a whim, but I was never a mother.

Perhaps people with a consistent lack of interest in parenting are "wired" to be attracted to the type of person whose chosen lifestyle is incompatible with parenting or who is also just simply uninterested in having children, who prioritize other things, or who are just ambivalent. These types of people already tend to live similar lifestyles, so it's hard to say whether something like this is ingrained or more culturally influenced. But I've never had a hard time finding like-minded guys who not only shared my lack of desire to parent but who also appreciated whatever non-traditional, “alternative” aesthetic I had going at the time, the tattoos, the short hair, and even the pointy face that didn't look fourteen, all of which men allegedly don't like much in women!

I'm just saying that the people who don't “fit in” tend to find each other given the right environment and circumstances, and they're generally not sad about their lack of Stacys or Chads since they never wanted to be Stacys or Chads, themselves, anyway, and don’t particularly care for the whole vibe they bring to the table.

Some Vicious Mole

wrote about his experiences with the whole pickup artistry thing and concludes:

None of this is about whether I slept with the most women. It’s about the fact that, even if I had, I am now 100% sure that it still wouldn’t have made me happy. In any case, my number is very high for a man who spent most of his life in multiple long-term relationships and never cheated on anyone. By my calculations, breaking 50 is nearly impossible for an unfamous heterosexual male non-cheater unless you just do not have relationships as a rule, and that life never interested me even at my worst. I like having a girlfriend, and I like being married even more than that. I like saying “I love you” and having it said to me.

Emphasis mine.

Most people — most normal, everyday people — are just looking for pretty basic stuff. Most of us don’t have an actual conscious need to maximize our DNA output of whatever and even if it’s subconsciously controlling our lives, the actual real world operates pretty okay as it is — the world where people generally get with people like themselves because that’s just how people are and how they always have been and probably how we always will be unless something drastic happens.

Looking at every damn thing through this unforgiving and kind of hilariously strict evospych lens really does help give people a framework for overall self-improvement and a general understanding of the opposite sex, but its social viability seems to decrease as it scales. We can take these lessons to better understand ourselves and our tendencies — positive as well as negative — but leaning too hard into the cynical, bitter realm only serves to further sanitize and take the soul out of the dating experience and romance as a whole, and we do not need any more of that, do we? If we really believe that families are the backbone of a strong country and want to encourage more people to create them in the face of a dwindling birth rate, the least we could do is not be the kind of insufferable nerds who turn sex and love into an overly-complicated math problem.

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The Digression Sessions, Vol III: Breastfeeding Chihuahuas (Terrible Dating Advice)

Why Tony Soprano and JD Vance are hot

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1. I say this with love

2. Why are so many of us “obsessive nerds” actually married Millennials who “caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam",” anyway? Don’t we have better things to worry about than the dysfunctional dating habits of Gen Z?