Husband-Shaped Curve

Becoming matters more than wanting

The Limits of Introspection

When people are asked in public what they’re looking for in a dream romantic partner, they often say rather silly things. They name immaterial proxies and status markers like his height or her alma mater. They refer to vague attributes like “cute” or “great vibes”. They’ll sometimes list attributes that would make the actual relationship worse, like girls who demand a man who goes to therapy and then wonder why all of their boyfriends are mentally ill.

People ignore the anticipated experience of being with a partner, focusing instead on how a partner appears on paper. They struggle to narrow down what makes someone a great match for them personally, as opposed to someone broadly attractive. They give an answer that looks good — appropriately modest, not too weird, carrying a positive signal — instead of envisioning a good partner.

Last year, I invited readers to fill out a personal guide to authentic wanting. I hoped to push people past social desirability bias with carefully guided introspection. I chose six questions and expanded on each one with more detail and examples in the form itself:

1. How would an honest friend describe you right now?

2. Your date says, “here’s the sort of relationship I’m looking for.” What are you most hoping to hear?

3. What experiences do you want to share with a partner? Think about past relationships or friendships — what did you love having, or wish you had?

4. What absolute dealbreakers or requirements shape your dating life?

5. Whose type are you? Think of skills and qualities that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea but make you really valued by those who seek them. What do your friends appreciate about you? What desires and needs did your former partners have in common?

6. What’s your deepest insecurity or shame around dating? What would it feel like if someone not only accepted it, but was specifically drawn to it?

My goal was to ground my readers in their actual lived experience and feelings that come from the gut, not from the discourse. I hoped this would create a canvas for responders to paint the partner that’s the perfect fit just for them.

Did it work?

The 49 men and 8 women who filled out my form did manage to avoid vapid mimetic signaling. Unfortunately, very few of them felt that they arrived at a clear enough picture of their dream partner, even after a follow-up chat with me. My readers’ most common gut feelings are insecurity about their lack of romantic experience and anxiety about approaching attractive strangers. Their lived experience is not knowing where to go to meet good options. Their dream partner feels out of reach, even of their imagination.

I hand-coded each participant’s sex and dating goal, then counted mentions with the help of GPT o3

It’s very hard to tell apart the responses of those seeking to settle down ASAP from those who are looking for a casual relationship or to “see how it plays out”. The chart above shows how many readers in each group mentioned a desire or experience in each domain.

The most frequent mentions for both groups were conversation (“we talk about systemic social/technological issues”) and shared leisure hobbies (6 mentions of skiing, 12 of board games, 15 of drugs). Chatting and sharing hobbies are the two things you do even with a casual or remote partner, not necessarily your spouse. GPT counted only 9 mentions of “spouse-only” wants among the marriage-seeking group, and most of these were simply restating the general desire for starting a family.

Here are a few examples of what I’d classify as envisioning married life, not just sketching out a sexy roommate:

• “no phone at the dining table or in the bedroom […] I love having systems to make sure that clutter is regularly cleaned up […] a really good understanding of finance and I could trust him to navigate macroeconomics changes.”

• “wants to raise any future kids Catholic”

• “the dream scenario is like George Eliot / George Lewes or John Stuart Mill / Harriet Taylor Mill or maybe Esther Duflo / Abhijit Banerjee”

• “I like asking for advice and then not following it.”

All four of these came from my female readers. In general, women seemed to have a much clearer vision of long-term relationships, regardless of their own dating intent, than guys looking to settle down. Guys mostly described a girl that would fit comfortably into their current lives, not how they want their lives to change with a wife. And they mostly described themselves as a man, not as a husband.

Husband-Shaped

The authentic wanting exercise was an attempt to pull readers away from the cached, socially-desirable account of who they’re looking for. I worry that instead it pushed readers towards the cached, socially-desirable account of who they are: a commitment-minded husband-in-waiting. I think many of them aren’t that, not truthfully.

It felt to me that behind many of the “looking to settle down soon” responses was a desire to skip the difficult and anxious process of early-stage dating, rather than a true yearning to start changing diapers next year. In our follow-up conversations, several of these guys admitted that what they actually really want right now is to become more attractive and more confident talking to women, or to experience sexual abundance before they lock it up with monogamy.

It’s also no surprise that men without much serious dating experience can’t describe in detail what their perfect wife looks like. How would they know? No amount of introspection can teach someone about experiences they haven’t had yet. A man can’t find out without fucking around.

(I asked one of the women I quoted above why women seemed better at envisioning married life. She suggested that in the male-dominated communities my readers are drawn from, women gain more relationship experience at younger ages.)

In The Good Men Aren’t Gone, They’re Delayed, I noted:

Women enter the marriage market earlier than men, but leave at the exact same rate of one per wedding. For any given age, eligible wives outnumber eligible husbands. This makes each woman feel that the odds are stacked against her.

Overall, this handicap is offset by the fact that women spend longer on the marriage market, not only playing the numbers game but also learning with practice to recognize and seduce the right men. But this also means they have a longer experience of frustration with the undersupply of husbands. Given the favorable ratio, men who graduate into husbandability get hitched before they have time to complain. When a guy says there are no good wives out there, we assume he’s not much of a catch himself.

That essay explored the delayed-husband situation mostly from the point of view of women. I described how the marriage market shifts sharply against women as people age into their mid 30s, and the smart risks a husband-shopper must take to counteract her disadvantage. But what does it mean for men?

At the end of last week’s post, I wrote about the “slow virtuous cycle” of abundance for men (the mirror image of the victim-minded man’s slow-then-sudden spiral into inceldom). A man’s dating success comes with confidence and with understanding what you and women really want from each other. Confidence and wisdom come from experience. Experience¹ requires some initial success.

The ideal growth curve for a man looks something like the chart above. Women look for relatively similar traits in casual boyfriends and in husbands², so a guy with no husbandly traits takes a while to ramp up any dating success. The first threshold is attaining abundance mindset, where his dating mindset shifts from grasping and competitiveness to playful generosity. From a place of abundance, a man can wholeheartedly decide that he wants commitment for its own sake, not as a bargaining chip he offers a woman in exchange for sexual access. Soon after he makes that decision, his future wife snatches him off the market.

Men can get stuck at various points along the curve. By this point on our journey, there’s a Second Person blog post for each one:

• Giving up before you even try (because you’re depressed).

• Looking for a foolproof playbook or “scientific consensus” on dating instead of seeking first-hand experience.

• Prevented from exercising your own agency by the longhouse.

• Stuck in resentment that results from the inability to understand how women are different.

• Performing for the wrong audience and optimizing for optics instead of intimacy.

• Dating with an adversarial mindset or in a low-trust environment, precluding abundance even if you’re successful.

• Being unemployed.

This upcoming chapter will talk about the bachelor’s final transition, from abundance mindset to husband mindset. I’ll describe my own journey in the next post, then I’ll lay out a blueprint for identity transformation using the framework of psycho-cybernetics. Finally, I’ll offer some observations on what makes marriage work, with an eye to confidently deciding whether to marry the woman you’re already with before you waste precious years of both of your lives.

I realize now that no step in this process requires compiling a spreadsheet of your ideal wife’s attributes. The initial selection in most relationships will be done by the woman, whether she pursues her choice directly or sets the course for him to pursue. If she’s hot enough, the man will likely be blinded by projection for the first couple of months anyway. What matters to a marriage, including the set of lifelong problems each person brings into it, can’t be planned or accounted for in advance.

In the middle of working on this essay, I got an unexpected shout-out from a happy husband-to-be:

I guess I got it right back in 2023. If you bring husbandly qualities and have a clear plan for married life, there’s little to be gained from further contemplation. Waste no time before meeting in person, and be your husbandliest self when you do.

1. If you’ve no interested in premarital partners you can still gain valuable experience by making friends with the opposite sex, working on your reputation among role models and potential matchmakers, and generally becoming someone that your community sees as marriageable.

2. It quite different from what women look for in one-night stands, which most women don’t really look for at all. Becoming the sort of guy that ONS-minded women want to take home from the bar and never talk to afterwards is quite detrimental to one’s marriage potential.