It’s a confusing time to be a man, trying hard to relate to women, to find and maintain a strong, healthy relationship that becomes a mutually satisfying partnership. It doesn’t seem to be as easy today as it was in the day of our fathers and grandfathers.
The truth is, it wasn’t easy then, either. That’s not to say it never was, but we’ll get to that.
What is easy is being a player: pick-up culture is easy to join, and the protocol is readily available in books and rip-off coaching subscriptions and YouTube videos. If all you want is a hook-up, they’re easy to find.
But that’s what boys do. You’re a Grown-Ass Man, and you’re looking for the real thing. You want a deep connection with a woman of great value, a woman worthy of the deep investment you’ve made in yourself – and you want to invest deeply in her. You want to partner with a woman who will inspire you to bring out the best in yourself and offer it to her. Or you are in such a relationship already, and you rightly desire to do what you can to continuously improve it.
To get there, it’s essential to understand just why it’s so hard to find and maintain that deep, meaningful relationship, so challenging to make it as mutually fulfilling as it needs to be. What exactly is standing in your way?
The answer is simple.
Patriarchy.
You’re trying to be a Grown-Ass Man in a world that defines manhood as poorly as possible. You’re trying to stand up in a world where other men, misguided men, are constantly kicking your legs out from under you. You’re trying to connect with a woman of great worth in a world where lesser men deny women their worth as a matter of course.
Patriarchy. It’s toxic, it’s inexcusable, and it’s your greatest obstacle. It’s a deep and unforgivable insult to women, and it is, by far, the greatest threat there is to healthy masculinity – the honest, mature masculinity the Grown-Ass Man pursues.
Patriarchy is the victory of self over selflessness; the triumph of aggression over compassion. It is the substitution of lust for tenderness, the substitution of superficial achievement for consummate honor. It demeans women, reducing them to property; it demeans you, stripping you of the dignity and integrity that healthy masculinity requires of you.
It’s been this way for much longer than your lifetime, and your dad’s and grandpa’s lifetimes. It’s been this way for more than 10,000 years. It’s been this way ever since humanity became ‘civilized,’ when we invented agriculture at the end of the last ice age.
When we invented agriculture, we invented wealth; with wealth came the concept of property, and with property came power. And it became possible for men to dominate one another, and to dominate women overall. This is our original sin.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because we’re learning more and more, from anthropologists and archaeologists and geneticists, that before we made all these mistakes, human beings lived very differently – especially when it came to how men and women got along.
Men and Women in Prehistory
Let’s examine what’s different between then and now with the big one: human beings are not naturally monogamous. The idea of one-to-one mating pairs, though common in many species, is not present in primates, with very rare exception. Our closest genetic cousins, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, are not even remotely monogamous. And if it weren’t for constant social pressures and the patriarchal structure of human society, we wouldn’t be, either; many if not most of us have had multiple partners, sometimes contemporaneously. It’s how human beings really are, beneath our dubious layer of civilization.
We have much more to go on than this, in making this determination. Genetic variety, for one thing; when humans reproduce with only one person, there is far less genetic diversity. And since we’ve cracked the human genome and done global studies of gene distribution, we know that our ancestors were bursting with genetic variety, demonstrated by their super-charged immune systems as they began out-migrating throughout the world, even when their total numbers were only a small fraction of what we have today.
There’s more, but let’s focus for a moment on exactly how that polygamy worked. The first bit of news here is – women were in charge of it, not men.
It’s easy to assume, based on the behavior of ancient kings, and chimpanzees, and gorillas, that this polygamy was all about alpha males and the creation of harems. Not even close: women were the sexual choosers in this polygamous dance, not men. How do we know this? Two big pieces of genetic evidence: smell and size.
Here’s an interesting fact about human females: given two prospective mates, all else being equal, she will make her choice based on which of them has a more sexually attractive scent. How do we know? From the research of Claus Wedekind, a Swiss biologist who determined in 1995 that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is mating-dependent.
Without getting too technical, that means that the sexual attraction human females feel for men who smell “different” spurs very advantageous genetic diversity; put simply, the man who smells “different” is more genetically distant from her male relatives, and the greater the difference in MHC-genes in a mating pair, the stronger the immune systems of their offspring. When a woman mates with a man genetically distant from her, their kids will have greater survival potential. And the woman is led to this choice by her sexual attraction to male scent.
That trait is present in all women, whether they realize it or not; and for that to be true, it had to evolve; and for it to have evolved, women would have to have been actively selecting their partners for uncounted thousands of years.
Then there’s size. And by size, we mean exactly what you think we mean: male genitals.
The cliché conclusion here is that men with bigger organs do better with women, and to a degree, yes, that’s what we’re concluding – but not for the reasons you might assume, that alpha males have bigger organs (they don’t). Size really doesn’t matter in the ways we don’t want it to matter.
The reality is that all men are pretty respectable, size-wise, when compared to the primate kingdom as a whole; human males have organs that are larger, relative to overall body size, than any other primate – even the mighty gorilla.
But... if women were doing the sexual selecting (we’ve already established that they were), then they, not the men, are responsible for that genetic reinforcement.
What was prehistoric life like? In any given human tribe, an adult female would have had not one but several male partners at any given time, favorites that she actively selected; males, on the other hand, would belong to several female groups. It wasn’t a free-for-all (and it isn’t with the other promiscuous primates, either); it was a structured sexual community, with decisive, deliberate partnerships. This was easily sustainable and satisfying to both genders.
Prehistoric sex in an all-too modern world
What does this mean for the Grown-Ass Man?
Obviously, it’s not practical, society being structured as it is, to abandon monogamy. Even if it were, the modern era has shown us that monogamy as a conscious choice, rather than a patriarchal imposition, can be a beautiful, healthy, rewarding long-term choice. Sex with multiple partners might be fun, but a lifelong one-on-one love with a strong, devoted partner can be nourishing to the soul. That’s what most Grown-Ass Men are reaching for.
How does an understanding of prehistoric sex help you get there today? In several ways.
She is the chooser; never forget that. She wants you to choose her, too, of course, and most women love being pursued; they enjoy the back-and-forth of those early exchanges as much as we do. But it’s a mistake to chase a woman you want because you want her, if there’s no signal that she wants to be pursued. Ultimately, she picks you, not the other way around. The Grown-Ass Man is okay with that.
If the women are choosing, your days of going to bars and fishing are done. Women are attracting you, but if you want the right woman to choose you, you need to be the man who isn’t fishing; you need to simply be a Grown-Ass Man in the world, living responsibly, standing up, displaying his values and his strength and his worthiness simply by the way he serves the tribe. The right woman is going to notice that, and be attracted to you, and give you a green light to pursue.
Once you have that green light, you need to keep in mind that as the gatekeepers of sex, women have more options than men – she has far more choices than you do, patriarchal society notwithstanding. And always keep in mind that her ideal state, she’s as comfy with sexual variety as you are in your craven, adolescent heart: she’d be as at-home in a polygamous society as you would (and we know this for certain; most of the societies on earth are not monogamous,1 we just don’t see much of them because they’re very small – and it’s clear that the women in those groups are very content with having an assortment of male lovers). Your job, then, is to offer your partner fulfillment by being all that she needs, however much that is.
The implication is that you must become many different guys in order to keep her happy. There’s the old joke where one woman is telling another woman what she really wants in a man:
“I wish for a man who’s great at his job, with a successful career; I wish for a man who can cook and keep things organized; I wish for a man who’s fantastic in bed; I wish for a man who’s a great dad; and I wish that these four men never meet...”
The answer is simple: if you’re a Grown-Ass Man, going in, you’re 90 yards downfield already.
You’re responsible; you’re honest; you’re reliable. You’re confident and strong, and striving for success not to acquire power or impress others, but because you are infused with purpose. You offer your strength and resources to those you love without hesitation, living generously, and you are guided by your values, not your desires.
The woman you’re looking for is looking for all of that. You just have to let her see you. When she does, she’ll let you know, and you take it from there...
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