CHAPTER 16: BEGGARS MUST BE CHOOSERS
(MATE PREFERENCES)
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
—Gustave Flaubert
If you used to be desperate to get any woman and you follow the advice laid out thus far in the book, soon you’ll reach a point where you can attract many women.
That shift from any to many, from scarcity to abundance, can happen very quickly. And that’s when you’ll face an entirely new problem: choosing among the women who are attracted to you.
This is a very good problem to have. Like billionaires having to choose how they will get to work tomorrow: will it be the limo, the helicopter, the jet, or the boat? People call this an embarrassment of riches, but it’s still a problem, and handling it well will be really important for the rest of your life.
By choosing the best women possible for you, given your preferences and mating goals, you’re doing your future self a real solid. He’ll be really grateful that you got so wise about women when you were still so young.
HOW MALE MATE CHOICE DIFFERS FROM FEMALE CHOICE
You’ve already learned how women seek men with good genes, good boyfriend potential, and good dad potential.
What you probably didn’t know is that you can use the same insights when you’re seeking good genes, good girlfriend potential, and good mom potential in women.
Women differ in all the same traits and proofs that men do, like physical fitness, emotional stability, IQ, self-control, empathy, popularity, income, and style. Almost all of these traits and proofs predict good partner and good parent potential to very similar degrees in both sexes.
Where men and women differ substantially is how they compete in the mating game. Generally speaking, it works like this:
Men compete more for short-term sex, and women compete more for long-term commitment.
For most young men, getting laid is the ultimate sexual outcome.
For most women, getting a guy to go steady as her boyfriend is a major milestone; getting him to propose marriage is the ultimate outcome.
Read that section again and again until it is seared into your brain: men compete for sex, and women compete for commitment.
Because of this, in most interactions with women, there’s a power dynamic in mate choice that goes back and forth like a sexually-charged pendulum:
1. Approach choice: Men choose which women to approach and talk to. Guys usually pursue women who seem hot enough to fuck, fun enough to talk to, and sane enough not to create drama. This doesn’t seem like a “mate choice” at all to most guys. It just feels like instinctive lust, intriguing chemistry, or a romantic crush. But it is still an unconscious form of choice.
2. Sex choice: Women choose which men to have sex with. As we’ve seen, women usually select guys who have the traits and proofs that offer good genes, good partner potential, and good dad potential.
3. Relationship choice: Men choose which women to date. After the first real hookup(s), guys start getting choosier about whether a woman is actually compelling enough to keep dating, and women tend to try to keep the guy around (assuming the woman is into him).
To recap: Boy meets girl (approach choice), girl might agree to sex (sex choice), boy might eventually commit or propose marriage (relationship choice).
This third step is where things get really interesting, because not only is post-sex choice by males rare across mammals (males in most species don’t form long-term pair bonds or invest much in offspring), but in humans it is also where males have most of their mate choice power and most of their bargaining power within relationships.
If your main mating goal is short-term sex, you’ve probably felt the sting of thousands of rejections from women who didn’t show any interest in fucking you. But among the handfuls or (if you’re Tucker) hundreds of women who did fuck you, many of them probably felt the sting of your not pursuing them afterward—and you didn’t even realize it.
The guys who think that women have all the power in mating are too focused on trying to get laid (sex choice by women); they’re ignoring what happens the morning after: men failing to follow up after sex is often women’s biggest frustration. It’s what provokes women to share these kinds of confused, exasperated complaints with their female friends:
“He didn’t text me after we hooked up!”
“He just never arranged a third date!”
“He’s just not that into me, even after I let him try the back door!”
“He got cold feet before the wedding and left me at the altar!”
These are all examples of post-sex choice by men. They all involve men deciding not to continue a relationship and not to escalate their commitment. Women have learned to fear that post-coital shift from male lust to male indifference. It’s when their power of female choice is weakest, and your power of male choice gets most brutal.
That’s the step when you can get very choosy about which lover becomes your girlfriend and which girlfriend becomes your wife.
It’s also a real test of your mating ethics. If you do post-sex rejections of women by going ruthlessly “scorched earth” or pulling a Houdini like an asshole, it ruins their dignity, spoils their happiness, and embitters them toward men—making the whole mating market worse for everyone.
So how should you act?
POST-SEX CHOICE IS YOUR RIGHT AS A MAN; JUST DON’T BE A DICK ABOUT IT
Women have an absolute moral right to decide who they have sex with and who they don’t. Just because a woman agrees to a date or a kiss doesn’t also mean she agrees to sex. She still has the right to evaluate every aspect of your mate-value, to say “No, stop!” all the way through to the end of any sexual encounter, even if she’s agreed to play your little game of “just the tip.” And if she rejects you before sex, you have no right to call her a “stuck-up cunt who needs to loosen up.” That reaction alone would prove she made the right choice when she gave your penis the Heisman and ran the other way.
But this goes both ways. Men have an absolute moral right to post-sex choice, deciding which women we continue to have sex with and which we don’t.
Assuming you’re open and honest about your mating goals, just because you and a woman have agreed to have sex doesn’t mean you’ve agreed to become her boyfriend. You still have the right to evaluate every aspect of her mate-value all the way through your interactions with her. And you have the right to say “No, thanks!” right up until the moment you marry her. If you reject a woman after sex, she has no right to call you a “needle-dick loser who needs to man up.”
This is very important for you, because it impacts your whole mating life. You have to get comfortable with asserting your post-sex choice rights, to have any hope of ending up in a well-chosen relationship with a high-quality woman.
If you don’t do the hard work now of practicing that open, honest post-sex assertiveness, you’ll find yourself becoming a boyfriend for months, or a husband for years, maybe with the wrong woman. If you don’t have the guts to say no to commitment with a woman who pushes her way into your life, because you’re too concerned about being nice and not upsetting her, your weakness is doing neither of you any favors. You might regret a decade of bad marriage for the rest of your life.
Post-sex choice puts a special moral burden on men, because we have to exercise it when we’ve already gotten to know a woman intimately. For women, the most awkward rejections they’ve had to impose on guys have been things like ignoring a stranger’s shitty pickup line, or telling a coworker that they just want to be friends. They don’t know these guys very well, aren’t empathically intertwined with them, and don’t feel much guilt about spurning them. And mature, confident guys can shrug off such rejections by thinking “if only she got to know me better, she probably would have liked me more.”
By contrast, if a man cuts off relations with a woman he’s already had sex with, he knows her much better and they’ve probably had some moments of real emotional connection. It’s hard for her not to take the rejection personally. She’ll second-guess everything. He’s already seen her boobs, so she wonders if they are too asymmetrical. He’s heard her orgasm (if he’s any good), so she wonders if she sounded too much like a bellowing hippo or a wounded songbird.
The pain of rejection gets exponentially worse for women if they’ve been dating for months, so he knows everything about her past background and future ambitions, her friends and family, her career and interests, her tastes and attitudes. Male post-sex choice at that point can be deeply wounding, because it really is a judgment about her whole worth as a woman from a man who quite possibly knows her better than her own parents do.
So remember: with the great power of male post-sex choice comes great responsibility.
Make no mistake: if you take our advice in this book, improve your attractiveness, and get more successful in dating, you will end up disappointing a lot of women who fall for you. The question is how you reject them.
Do you break their hearts like a tenth-grader—messily, stupidly, awkwardly, and insultingly? Or do you find the courage to break up like a grown-ass man—with empathic kindness but decisive clarity?
Be honest, be straight, be kind, but end it and move on. A well-managed breakup is also almost as important as a well-managed courtship, because it protects your self-image as a good guy, so you have more self-confidence about your mating ethics when you get back into the mating market.
If you know that a girlfriend wants a long-term relationship, and you know that you don’t, the earlier you break up, the better for her. If you’re both 25, she’s only got 15 more years of decent fertility, whereas you’ve got at least 35 more years. A pointless 5–year relationship would burn through 1/3 of her potential motherhood years, but would only waste 1/7 of your potential fatherhood years. Respect how precious her reproductive potential is by letting her go, sooner rather than later, so she can find her real Mr. Right.
CLARIFYING YOUR MATE PREFERENCES: WHAT KIND OF WOMEN SHOULD YOU SEEK?
When your guy friends ask you what kinds of girls you like, you’re probably used to rattling off a bunch of physical traits, and maybe one personality trait to show you’re not a superficial douchebag. These are basically just whatever forms of cuteness would catch your eye in the first minute of gawking at a woman. You might say, “I like nice boobs, a cute butt, a pretty face, and a good sense of humor.” But that kind of reply is too vague, meaningless, and misguided, on several levels.
First, you’re not identifying your specific preferences. You’re just listing features that every normal adult male human likes.
If you share your real preferences with your male friends, they will be baffled by some and try to argue passionately for the opposite, like “No way! CrossFit girls are scary and look like dudes!” Provoking reactions like that is a sign that you’ve been specific and honest, not that you’re weird (unless you describe your mother right down to her age, gray hair, and mom jeans).
Second, saying that you like women who are “nice,” “cute,” “pretty,” and “good” doesn’t describe exactly what you’re seeking. Those adjectives only evaluate women at the vaguest possible level. Imagine trying to have phone sex with a girl who uses those kinds of words to describe how she looks and what she’s wearing. Great, so you look like my five-year-old niece at bedtime. <click!>.
You have to get more specific: What does “pretty” mean to you? What does she do to be considered “nice” or “good”? Also, what exactly do you mean by “good sense of humor”? When she tells jokes, are they more like Sarah Silverman or your great-aunt Sarah with the Great Big Book of Puns?
Third, you’re focused way too much on what guides your approach choices rather than your post-sex choices. If you’re interested in any kind of interaction longer than one-night stands, you need to clarify what turn-ons would lead you to seek a second night, and what turn-offs would drive you away by the fourth night.
Different men show very strong agreement about which women are attractive enough to approach, but they differ quite a bit about what drives them nuts in relationships. It’s especially important to get clarity about your post-sex choice preferences, since they’re unique to you, and they’ll do a lot of the heavy lifting in sorting the A+ girlfriends from the B+ girlfriends.
Exercise: Let Yourself Be Your Guide
To help you clarify what your distinctive, specific mate preferences really are, think seriously about your past crushes, lovers, and relationships.
Make a list of every memorable female from every point in your life who was sexually or romantically attractive to you, even if you never hooked up or even expressed that interest. For each one, list every single one of their pros and cons.
The key here is to be distinctive (things you liked or hated that other guys might react to differently) and specific (exactly what turned you on or off about the person, rather than vague evaluative terms).
You also need to be brutally honest. This is the one domain of life where you are allowed to be as choosy, narrow, sexist, racist, elitist, and judgmental as you want. It’s your life and your penis.
Remember your people-centered morality: There are no bad preferences, only bad ways to treat other people.
Everybody has some kinky, quirky preferences that just can’t be explained rationally, and you ignore them at your peril. It’s not fair to get into a relationship with a woman who doesn’t match your quirky ideals and then break up with her eventually, just because you couldn’t admit to yourself that she wasn’t what you were really looking for.
So include everything that you reacted to about lovers and crushes past, from the lowest form of raw physical lust (huge tune-in-Tokyo nipples) to the most enlightened form of spiritual connection (studied comparative religion at Berkeley).
Once you’ve filled your table with your whole list of women and their positive and negative traits, you’ve got your reference guide. Read it again and again. Study it. This is serious detective work into your own sexual circuitry. Look for patterns. Tick how many times you listed particular turn-offs and turn-ons, so you can start developing a master list of your key preferences.
This is not the list you will post on your Match.com profile; it is for your eyes only.
But it’s important, because it’s your personal sexual compass to what you truly like and don’t like. This list will help you understand what you are looking for so that you can now go find those specific women in the mating markets where they are spending their time.
HOW TO SELECT WOMEN FOR SHORT-TERM MATING
After you’ve clarified your general mate preferences, you can figure out how they fit with your mating goals. Let’s say you just want short-term interactions for now. That’s great, but do it right. Here are some key things that guys overlook or get wrong when in hot pursuit:
1. Focus on women who send signals that they’re open to short-term mating.
We get emails all the time from guys saying things like, “I met this girl and she says she wants a boyfriend and is thinking about marriage and kids soon, but I just want to hook up. What can I say to make her just want to hook up?”
Nothing, you fucking idiot! Leave her alone! She doesn’t want what you want. She even told you that specifically!
Trying to deceive and seduce a long-term-oriented woman into a short-term interaction violates three of our five principles: it fails to understand women’s perspective, it’s dishonest, and it tries to impose a win-lose relationship on an unwilling victim.
Not only that, it makes things so hard on you. The way to make things easy is very clear:
If you just want to have sex, find girls who just want to have sex.
The tricky thing is that these girls into short-term mating don’t go around wearing T-shirts that say “Please Fuck Me & Forget My Name.” Very few women list “casual sex” as a goal in their OkCupid profile.
Why not? Because women face the risk of slut-shaming from other women, so they need plausible deniability when they send signals of openness to short-term sex.
Also, lots of clueless men confuse selective promiscuity (a woman’s openness to one-night stands with amazing, funny, hot guys) with indiscriminate promiscuity (a sex worker’s openness to one-hour transactions with almost any paying customer).
In fact, high-quality, sexually-open women can often be more selective about their short-term partners than lower-quality monogamous women can be about choosing their husbands. If you’re one of the guys who mistakes selective promiscuity for being a whore, you’re one of the main reasons why women don’t advertise more clearly that they’re DTF if you’re H-O-T.
In our experience, here are some cues of women’s openness to short-term mating. Remember, none of these clues are anywhere near 100 percent reliable. You have to cultivate your short-term mating-cue radar to detect them with even moderate accuracy.
Where She Is
Women make choices about where they go socially based on what they want sexually. Just like you select your mating markets to fit your mating goals, women do too.
Sex Parties: If you’re handsome and witty and downright lucky enough to get invited to some kind of private polyamorous fuckfest, that would obviously be an ideal place for meeting a woman who’s into short-term mating. They still have the power of female choice, but the women have clearly come to play, and it’s quite likely that they’ll fuck at least one person here. If you play your cards right, that could be you.
Bars and Clubs: The expectations aren’t as clear as at a sex party, but women who are just looking to hook up with cute male strangers know that they can find plenty of such men in bars and clubs and sort through them very efficiently. However, although hookup-seekers are there in a higher proportion than almost anywhere else, most women in the bar or club still aren’t looking to hook up—they’re there to hang with friends, dance, get drunk, whatever—so don’t assume.
Holiday Spots: At spring break resorts, airport hotel bars, or conferences—any place she had to take a two-or-more-hour drive or flight to get to—a woman knows that whatever man she meets is unlikely to become a long-term boyfriend, simply because he’s outside her dating radius. So if a woman’s showing any mating effort in her clothes, makeup, and attitude, she’s probably open to short-term mating—if the right guy shows up.
Online: Few online dating sites are as blunt as the gay male app Grindr, where you can find a dude to give you a blowjob within about five minutes in any major city. But some of the heterosexual sites come close, like AdultFriendFinder or Zoosk.
Otherwise, use Tinder, Hinge, or other dating apps that don’t require much verbal detail in your profile. As a rule: If the typical profile includes more than two photos but fewer than twenty words, people probably aren’t looking for longer-term relationships. Even on the more respectable sites like Match.com or OkCupid, some women will tick that they’re open to “short-term dating,” which is as close as they can get to saying “casual sex” without being slut-shamed or attracting too many male idiots (though they will attract a lot of male idiots regardless).
How She Looks
If a woman’s going out to a bar seeking a short-term mate, she’s more likely to wear her sexiest outfit that accentuates all her best qualities rather than a bunch of layers that hide her shape and make her blend into the background.
When movies and TV portray women on the prowl for men, the actresses are usually dressed far sluttier than any normal women dress, so that male viewers can enjoy ogling their bodies. This is confusing to guys. Don’t expect normal women seeking short-term mates in real life to dress as slutty as girls do in sex comedies or porn.
You have to learn to spot the difference between stylish (seeking boyfriend) and flirty (open to a hookup). You also have to remember that just because a woman is dressed flirty does NOT mean she wants to hook up with YOU. She’s not “asking for it,” and she’s not “fair game”; she’s simply signaling her potential willingness to be approached by the right guys who have their shit together.
Some women signal their mating goals in more permanent ways, like tattoos. The larger and more numerous the tattoos, the more open a woman tends to be toward short-term mating. Likewise for piercings or any kind of body modification.
Again, this does NOT mean that every girl with a “tramp stamp” or a nose stud is DTF with any random guy. It’s just one partly reliable cue among many.
How She Talks
A woman who’s open to a hookup might signal it through saying things like this after a few minutes of talking:
• “I just want to have fun.”
• “I’m not looking for a boyfriend right now.”
• “I just want to meet a lot of new people and explore my options.”
• “I just got out of a long relationship and am ready to party.”
• “I want more excitement in my life.”
She will usually NOT say any of these things within the first hour of talking with you (unless she’s really drunk):
• “If this night doesn’t end with something in my butt, I will be pissed.”
• “Just looking for cock right now.”
• “I just want to fuck a lot of new people and explore my fetishes.”
• “My ex’s dick was too small, I’m looking for a huge one.”
• “I want more orgasms in my life—you in?”
She might be thinking these things, but she won’t say them in case anyone overhears her, or you quote her.
Of course, a woman’s direct statement of interest in short-term mating with you (e.g., “Wanna get out of here?”) can trump any cues based on where she is, how she looks, or how else she talks.
But even then, she might be running a kind of bait-and-switch—hooking up with you in hopes that she can convert you into a longer-term boyfriend. If you want to be confident that she’d be comfortable having sex and not expecting a second date, the other cues can be important.
The freshman virgin at the Indiana University frat party who says “Wanna get out of here?” probably has very different expectations than the twenty-eight-year-old Goth with full-sleeve tattoos in the Bronx who says the same.
2. Focus on the women who seem interested in you.
You might meet a hot woman at the bar, dressed in red leather, with “DTF” tattooed on her neck, but if she’s working hard to ignore you, leave her alone! Focus your mating effort where it’s appreciated.
That’s very simple to understand, but many guys get this incredibly wrong. They try to find the hottest girl in the bar and spend all their time trying to flirt with her even when she’s clearly not into them. This annoys her, wastes your time, and makes you look like a douche to every other woman there.
If you really just want a short-term hookup, it’s better to take the opposite strategy: start with the woman who’s paying the most attention to you and who you’d actually want to have sex with. If you get her back home, she’ll feel almost as good in the dark as the hottest girl in the bar, and your chances with her are about twenty times higher.
3. The Dangers of Crazy Women
Some of the best women in the world are really into short-term mating with the right guys. So are some of the worst, craziest, most dangerous women. That’s why short-term mating is such a high-risk game.
There’s a stereotype that crazy women are easier to sleep with. Yes, some types of “craziness” make women easier to get into bed without much courtship. But the ease of courting them is negated by the horror show that they can impose on your life.
There is a big price to pay for crazy, and you won’t know just how big it is until you find yourself still paying it off months afterwards. The blast radius from a one-night stand can reach far and wide, torching your reputation, your career, your mental health, and your self-confidence.
You might not suffer it the first three or ten times you hook up with a crazy woman. You might think “That was so easy! She was so spontaneous! The sex felt so good! I never texted her again and she didn’t seem to mind!” And then you hit the one who saves your sperm or burns your fucking house down.
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t hook up with lots of willing women if that’s what you desire. You just need to know what the warning signs of crazy bad promiscuity are and seek out the signs of good promiscuity. If you swim in shark-infested waters without looking for the big fins poking up through the surface (and they always will) you’re going to get bit sooner or later.
HOW TO PICK A WOMAN FOR LONG-TERM MATING
Good girlfriends and great wives make everything easier, happier, and more meaningful. They’ll shape your whole subjective experience on a day-to-day level. If you’re with a woman who’s positive, stable, adaptable, and fun, that’s going to rub off on you. It’ll make setbacks bearable and victories sweeter. But if you’re with a woman who’s miserable, angry, critical, contemptuous, or snarky (and you don’t do anything about it!), that’s going to grind you into dust. Spare yourself that horrible fate.
1. What Matters the Most? Not Looks
Kim Kardashian’s amazing booty? Kanye West was probably tired of it within a few months. Angelina Jolie’s amazing lips? Brad Pitt probably took them for granted within a year.
After they get used to a woman’s face, the shit that guys get tired of usually resides behind her face, in her brain. All the same traits and proofs that women are seeking in you will become things you start getting choosier and choosier about, the longer a relationship lasts and the more experience you get in longer-term relationships. This is where Kim’s vocal fry, and Angelina’s compulsion to turn her family into a UNICEF ad, might start to grate a little. If a long-term girlfriend proves to be less healthy, less interesting, less conscientious, or less caring than you need to live the kind of life you want, no amount of beauty will compensate.
We’re not telling you to value deeper traits above their superficial attractiveness because that’s morally the right thing to do. It’s purely practical.
Bright guys who make some money and then chose a gorgeous but brainless trophy wife are usually miserable within six months. It’s a waking nightmare to live with an intimate companion whose company you find boring. And the boredom eventually shades over into sexual disgust and emotional resentment.
You will have a better experience with her if she’s smarter and more organized and has her shit together and runs her life effectively, because those qualities will help create a better life for you. That’s what makes a good girlfriend.
2. Traits to Look for in a Girlfriend
The same insights we’ve hopefully baked into your thick skulls about how women choose men also apply when you’re picking women for longer-term relationships—you just have to modify a few details, because the sexes differ a bit in how they express some of these traits, and how good versions of the traits cash out into real-life benefits. Here are some traits that will matter hugely in any long-term relationship you develop with any woman.
Her mental health: Mood is contagious, so cheerful, upbeat women will keep you happy, whereas depressed, pessimistic women will drag you down. Positive women will have more and better sex with you. Mentally healthy women avoid addictions, obsessions, and compulsions—so they spend less time, money, and energy on alcohol, nicotine, shopping, or cat-collecting. They tend to have mentally healthy relatives, so your in-laws will be more pleasant and helpful—if you have kids, there will come a time when your mother-in-law’s mood and skills as a grandma can become hugely significant.
Her intelligence: Smart women make a point of feeding their brains every day with new ideas, facts, and insights, so you’ll have plenty to talk about forever. Most women work, even after kids, and smarter women work better, get faster promotions, run more successful businesses, make more money, and manage it better. Smarter women give consistently better advice that can save your career from disasters (no Jim, don’t email your boss and tell him to go fuck himself) and nudge you into brilliant opportunities.
Plus you’ll have much smarter kids, so they’ll require less help with homework and less guidance to keep them out of trouble, and the scholarships they’ll get will save you a ton of tuition money. She’ll also keep your kids safer—brighter women are safer drivers and better nurses, and they can sort through health insurance claims more effectively. The key is to recognize that she will probably not be interested in the same things you are interested in; so if she doesn’t know about football strategy, engine fault codes, organic farming, or whatever else gets your rocks off, it doesn’t mean she’s dumb.
Her willpower: Highly conscientious women are more reliable, honest, orderly, and healthy. A high-willpower woman’s less likely to cheat on you or to get fat and lazy after a baby. She’ll take better care of her face, her body, her mind, her house, her career, and her kids. Whatever your income, she’ll handle saving, spending, and taxes more effectively. She’ll plan awesome holidays that go smoothly; she’ll handle social arrangements reliably and consistently.
Her tenderness: The caring part of the tender-defender trait is especially important in seeking women for long-term relationships. A woman with good empathy, kindness, and compassion makes a much better partner, mother, and lover. Kindness helps avoid arguments, and resolve conflicts, and it sparks better make-up sex. It means that when kids arrive, a woman’s first response to their distressed crying will be nurturing comfort rather than violent rejection.
Her social proof: Women on average don’t care as much about climbing dominance hierarchies as about fostering tend-and-befriend connections with other women. But a woman’s popularity and the quality of her social networks can still be really useful in your career and your quality of social life on evenings and weekends—because typically, the woman’s friends and acquaintances account for most of a couple’s socializing. Also, the more and better friends she has, the less burden is on you to be the sole entertainer and confidant in the relationship.
Her aesthetic proof: A woman with a great sense of personal style looks great and helps you look great. If you end up living together, her sense of beauty will have a big impact on the quality of your home environment and your day-to-day mood. However much money you have, a woman with good taste can create a gorgeous, functional home; a woman with bad taste will waste ungodly amounts of money on trashy clothes, ugly furniture, and badly designed houses.
Sex drive and history: Sex is obviously central to sexual relationships, and if there’s a mismatch in sex drive, it’s disastrous. If you end up with a wife who wants a lot less sex than you do, you will suffer for years, have resentful, frustrated affairs, and then get divorced. If you end up with a wife who wants a lot more sex than you do, you will feel nagged, unmanly, and annoyed; she will suffer for years and have the affairs, and then you’ll get divorced.
Likewise, if a woman orgasms early and often when you have sex, that makes for a much happier relationship. Some women just don’t come very easily, and they can usually learn to if they work on it, but it’s dicey to commit to a woman who hasn’t already learned how her body works.
As for her sexual history: Women go through life stages just like men do, and they tend to grow out of short-term mating, but earlier. If you’re looking for a win-win longer-term relationship, you want the woman who’s already sown her wild oats and already had some practice relationships. Don’t be jealous of her ex-boyfriends; they helped make her the good woman you love, and now you’ve got her.
Takeaways
• Men have the most mate-choice power during post-sex choice.
• It is your right to exercise post-sex choice, but you have a responsibility to do it kindly and respectfully. Don’t be a dick about it—no scorched earth, no Houdini vanishing acts.
• Your exes are a great guide to helping you figure out your current mate preferences. Do a full inventory of all their pros and cons; then be explicit, specific, and brutally honest. You should arrive at a much clearer understanding.
• If you’re interested in short-term mating, look for women interested in the same thing and pay attention to where they are, what they wear, and what they say. But beware of the crazy ones!
• If you want a girlfriend or a wife, pay attention to the same traits and proofs she is looking for in you. If you’re not sure which of those are most important to you, the qualities you admire and dislike in your mother are a good place to start.