Committing to Your Woman Will Cause Her Libido to Wane

Various voices in the blogosphere think that the way to a happy, healthy long-term relationship for a man is to obtain a "deeper" connection with their woman. Doing so gets past all the games and allows the couple to flourish on a spiritual, emotional, and mental level. I'm all for getting deeper - doggystyle is good for that.

Now, a male writer for Double X, Daniel Bergner, has posited the question of why womens' interest in long-term relationship sex wanes quicker than mens'. The only major study on the subject (which the author doesn't cite) posits that men's libido remains relatively stable in the LTR while the woman's declines within the year or two after the relationship has begun.

Bergner, says:

"It’s an idea that runs somewhat counter to the assumption that female desire tends to depend a great deal on the depth of relationships, on intimacy."

Yes, these assumptions come straight from the Todd White and Conor Friedersdorf School of White-Knighting (I hear they have the best "Pedalstry" program around).

I came across an academic paper Women's Sexual Strategies: The Evolution of Long-Term Bonds and Extrapair Sex that should be the Bible of evolutionary psychologists and Game enthusiasts alike. The authors, Elizabeth Pillsworth and Martie Haselton of UCLA, proffer a great working definition of evo psych as it applies to women's mating/dating strategies:

"The working hypothesis of most evolutionary psychologists is that the mind contains many specialized adaptations akin to the different organs of the body; each organ in the body has a specific function, and so to should the mechanisms of the mind. Because mating decisions play a central role in reproduction, and thus in human evolution, our expectation is that there will be many richly specified adaptations underlying womens' sexual behavior."

Women have two different strategies for mating: coupling for long-term partnerships and dual mating - or cuckoldry - to maximize fitness of progeny. Given natural constraints on ability to choose mates, women have to make tradeoffs between the two strategies. They desire both investment from the father and superior genetic investment from another more fit male. Up until now, it seems that we've assumed that women adopt one or the other strategy and stick with it for life. Recent research suggests that strategies are contingent on life-stage, environment, underlying sex ratios, overarching structural power hierarchies, and contraception use. Sorting through this to answer the question "What do women want?" is quite a chore indeed.

How does this apply to long-term relationships that you and I might be in? How does a woman's evolved, disparate strategies affect men's behavior in those relationships? Also, how can we bring all of this information together to advocate LTR Game? The research that Bergner alluded to comes from this piece (HT: Randall Parker) that shows that women's sex drives in long-term relationships decline markedly while the male partner's remains the same. While the study is a novel piece of pop psychology, there are other academic studies that show the same trend.

In their research Women's preference for dominant male odour: effects of menstrual cycle and relationship status, Havlicek, Roberts, and Flegr show that women in long-term relationships favored the scent of more symmetrical - thus more genetically healthy - men than did single women.

Pillsworth and Haselton summarize the researches findings:

"This effect was considerably stronger in women who already had
long-term mates as opposed to those who were single, suggesting that the effect
could be driven by adaptations specifically for extrapair meeting."

Likewise, in their paper Partnership status and the temporal context of relationships influence human female preferences for sexual dimorphism in the male face shape, Little, Jones, Penton-Voak, Burt, and Perrett show that partnered women prefer more masculine faces than single women. These two pieces of research - among others - shows that women in relationships have preferences for more genetically fit men. At some point, they trigger a strategy for securing superior genes from fit male partners. They switch from the coupling strategy to the dual mating one. If this switch weren't the case, single women would exhibit the same preferences, but they don't. For the sake of my analysis, I'll assume that the different pieces of research accounted for age's effects on a woman's libido. In other words, a 25 year-old woman in a LTR will be more attracted to genetically superior men than a 25 year-old single woman.

Again, what does this mean for us men in LTRs?

I'm sad to say, but it compels us to forgo commitment if we're looking for a sexually equitable relationship. We can remain monogamous, but providing the traditional signals of loyalty - engagement rings, vow exchanges, promises - only undercut our potential happiness. Men in relationships have an incentive to develop strategies to prevent women from switching their strategy from long-term coupling to short-term dual mating. Game serves to keep the relationship always in the short-term - at least in her eyes.

In short, we have to employ LTR game that Dave from Hawaii preaches. Serving everything up on a platter of chivalry does nothing to secure your woman. Telling her your deepest desires, secrets, hopes, and dreams and offering your life to her only activates the mechanism by which she will seek out another man. Assuming that she's thoroughly socialized against cheating (she's aware of the social shaming or she's properly dogmatized), a woman will merely be less physically attracted to a man she thinks is totally committed rather than actively cheating. From a sexual satisfaction standpoint, the effects are the same for the man. Men need to neg rather than suck up; stay physically fit rather than accepting grand notions of her unconditional love no matter how big your belly; maintain the air of having options. If options aren't available, at least make it known that options could be available and your exploring them isn't off the table. None of these behaviors have to be immoral lies like some traditional conservatives would have us believe; they are merely counter-strategies to a woman's biologically-driven battle plan.

To tinker with the words of the Chairman of the Board, this is what women sing when they have a committed man:

"I've got my man on a string
I'm sittin' on a rainbow
Got my man wrapped 'round my finger
What a world, what a life, he's in love."

Some argue for extreme measures to solve the problem of a waning female libido. While I don't personally advocate cheating, complete devotion, capitulation, and commitment to a woman does not serve us men best. We may initially feel good because we buy into some notion that we have become a certain woman's Prince Charming, but we are merely telling ourselves that to justify our choice. Traditional conservatives believe that humans should overcome our evolutionarily ingrained behaviors and attractions in order to take their relationships to a higher level of satisfaction. I'd argue that what they are arguing for it merely akin to putting a bottle of soda in a hot car. Rather than liquid coming out, steam will slowly escape. Likewise, a "proper" traditional relationship - without the taint of Game - will have other problems. If the man commits himself wholesale - blindly in the name of chivalrous love - and telegraphs such information to his wife or long-term partner, she will invariably switch strategies. She may not seek out another partner, but she will abide by the "Savanna Principle"; she will still act in accord with her primal roots. While she'll uphold the facade of traditional partnership - forgoing cheating, her libido will wane; the relationship will be devoid of the sex a man needs to remain in tune with his partner. If traditionalists and anti-Gamers want men and women to have higher-planed relationships, they'll have to nullify men's sexual appetites and desire for sexual relationships. If they succeed in muting those desires - after all, our higher calling is to slough off our evolved desires and behaviors - we will cease to be men at all.