THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Unrealism in Modern Dating

Unrealism in Modern Dating

I have a story that rather reinforces what the wise woman below says:

I was sitting in a Wimpy restaurant in Kings Cross years ago having some late lunch. There were no other customers about so I overheard the two waitresses talking to one-another. Discussing relationships, one of them said "I'm waitingfor my millionaire". So who and what was she? She was short, overweight and with short bleach-blonde hair. Millionaires have choices and none would choose her. But she seemed to believe that she had prospects of partnering with a millionaire. Extraordinary unrealism

When I was in college, a woman a few years older than me gave me this piece of advice. “You deserve a 10. Don’t settle for less.”

So — what exactly is a 10? Whenever I ask single women what they want in a partner, it usually sounds something like this:

“First, I have to be attracted to him. He should be tall, have good hair, and a fit body. Lots of other girls should find him cute, but he shouldn’t have a ton of exes or a high body count, cause he’s gonna need to be loyal and committed to me.

Oh, and he needs to have a REAL job, like one that pays enough that he can have his own car and apartment and pay for dates and take me on vacations.

He should come from a nice family, and be educated and classy. But his family can’t be judgemental of me. And he should have lots of friends and a vibrant social life, but they shouldn’t be girls because that’s suspicious.

He should love me the way I am and call me beautiful every day. And want to marry me and have kids. He needs to fully trust me with finances, cause I’d never sign a prenup. Also, he can’t have any kids with other women cause that’s a dealbreaker.”

There you have it, folks. He’s the 10/10. There’s just one teeny, tiny problem —

He doesn’t exist.

Why does everyone assume that they deserve a perfect partner?

Nobody ever imagines that they will end up with a man who’s short, chubby, with a regular job, and flaws like everyone else.

There’s always a wishlist of requirements. Attractive, six-figure salary, similar hobbies and interests, humor, great body…you get the gist.

What amuses me the most is when women have high standards for men, while they aren’t offering anything of value.

We love to list the qualities we’re looking for but seldom stop to think about what we can offer.

It’s socially acceptable for women to assert their standards and have other women cheer them on. Nobody is brave enough to ask, “And what are you going to offer a man in return?”

And if I do ask, I always get a shallow, completely lacking in self-awareness response that amounts to nothing more than, “well…he gets me!”

Out of all available women, why would he choose you?

Imagine if the average man had a similar response when asked about his standards. Picture a group of guys at the sports bar, talking about women. One of them says:

She has to be beautiful. Blonde, D-cup boobs, long legs, and nice butt. She can’t be taller than 5'6 or heavier than 120 pounds. She should be a virign (or close to it) cause I don’t want a woman who’s been with everybody.

But she has to be amazing in the bedroom, and willing to sleep with me after a month or two cause I’m not wasting my time in a sexless relationship. And she can’t be jealous and crazy over the other women I’ve slept with. That’s not her business.

She should be educated, but not too educated cause I don’t want a radical feminist who thinks she doesn’t need me. She also has to make her own money so I know she’s not a gold digger.

She has to want sex at least three times a week, and be able to keep my apartment clean if she lives with me. She can’t have any serious exes who she still talks to or any kids with any other men. She has to let me go out with the boys whenever I feel like it. She can’t nag me about marriage cause that’s a dealbreaker.

Would it be a surprise if this hypothetical man is single? Would it be shocking if he — an average man — couldn't attract this type of woman? Again, out of all the men this ideal fantasy woman could date, why would she choose him?

The “never settle” mentality only works if you’re prepared to be single for the rest of your life. At some point, compromise will be necessary.

We should take note of the types of people who are attracted to us. This may be a good barometer for the value that they bring to potential partners in the dating sphere.

Are you attracting the types of people you desire? If not, this may be an indicator that your perceived value to men (or women) is not quite accurate.

We would all do better to have more realistic standards. Because guess what? Perfect people don’t exist.

Final thoughts

Should we have standards for the people we choose to spend time with? Of course. But we shouldn’t let those standards get so out of hand that we find ourselves waiting for an imaginary dream guy (or girl).

Rather than making a checklist of all the things we want, we should make a checklist for how we will better ourselves and strive for virtue in our lives.

Until we do this, choosey beggars will be single.

https://medium.com/hello-love/modern-dating-where-every-beggar-can-be-a-chooser-e044a7c951cf

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Unrealism in Modern Dating

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