The Value of Others — a Dialectic

A book so wild I couldn't just review it, I have to argue with it.

I love writing because I love thinking, and I think best by disagreeing.

That’s why I enjoy Twitter: I come up with a hundred takes a day to watch people try to shoot them down. I make friends with agreeable people who thoughtfully disagree with me. I married a woman who does this incredibly well.

That’s also how I use LLMs in writing Second Person: I write an outline of my ideas for a post and ask how a smart incel / radical feminist / orthodox rationalist would disagree. It can take some prompt hacking to get around the built-in sycophancy; I usually ask it to role-play a character for this purpose.

It’s also why I enjoyed Orion Taraban’s The Value of Others despite straining my neck from the amount of head-shaking I was doing. It’s a wild mix of lucid arguments and muddy sophistry, original insight and ridiculous nonsense. How can one review a book like that? By disagreeing with it.

TVOO hints at a dialectic in how we think of romantic relationships: transacting value vs. self-sacrifice. It puts all its weight on the former, dismissing the latter as a frivolity. To arrive at a synthesis, we will need to engage in dialogue.

I fed the entire book into ChatGPT o3, asking it to respond as the author as best can be extrapolated from the book. I edited “O3rion GPTaraban’s” answers for style and clarity; my sections are, as always, entirely mine.

This post is twice as long and thrice as spicy as the average. It delves ;) into sex, power, hope, cope, selfishness and self-transcendence. I’m sure you’ll find plenty to disagree with — you’re welcome.

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Jacob: I want to start, naturally, by challenging the very premise of The Value of Others - the economic model of relationships.

I didn’t expect to read a book on relationships written by someone who seemingly has never been in one. It’s impressive! It’s certainly more interesting than a dating advice book written by someone who only knows her own dating story and didn’t learn much from that either.

There’s no mention of the author’s personal dating experience in the book. Everything is kept abstract. “A relationship is the medium in which value is transacted”, but what that “value” is generally kept vague aside from talking about “sexual opportunity” and “resources”. Other key terms like “lifestyle”, “power”, and “attractiveness” are also defined as in an economics textbook, not with a story of how that one girl who had power because of her attractiveness tried to hijack the author’s lifestyle.

A skeptic (me!) would say that this is because any serious relationship shows the limit of the economic model. Economics is the study of how we get what we want from strangers. Our relationship with the butcher and the baker is based on self-interest: we care about meat and bread and money more than the specific people involved. One customer’s relationship with one baker is similar to most others and can thus be analyzed economically. But romantic relationships are not so fungible or generalizable.

TVOO talks about three stages of a relationship:

• Attraction, which is based primarily on the perception of each other’s sexual marketplace value.

• Negotiation, in which men try to offer the minimum amount of “resources” they can for pussy.

• Maintenance, in which couples must navigate the crisis of disillusionment after limerence fades, attempts to wrest lifestyle control when the perceived power balance changes, and the doldrums of overfamiliarity.

Lest it be said I’m a hater, here’s one insight I really enjoyed from each section:

• Pairings of men in their 20s and women in their 30s are much more common than men in their 40s and women past 50, because in the former case the relative SMV is balanced (both are equidistant from their peak).

• Shit testing, i.e. a woman creating artificial conflict to test a man’s character, is a strong indicator of serious interest. It’s costly to a woman, and she will only engage in it if her superficial evaluation of the man’s attractiveness is high enough.

• The hotter someone is, the more their partner will project positive qualities on them because of narcissism and the halo effect, and the worse the crisis of disillusionment will be.

That’s great stuff, but what does it have to do with, idk, marriage? My wife and I have been together for 10 years. Subtract the initial attraction, negotiation, maintenance, and sex-having and you’re still left with tens of thousands of hours in which, whether we spend them together or apart, we’re quite happy about being married.

What do you think happens in all these hours of our marriage from the point of view of the “economic model”? Am I coping when I say I love my wife or have I transcended beyond the basic needs of most people? Do you truly believe the “economic model” covers everything relevant to romantic relationships? Is there something about romantic relationships, unlike e.g. boss/employee relationships, that sets them partially outside the economic model?

O3ion GPTaraban: Those “tens of thousands of hours” are still the maintenance phase — just the long, low-drama stretch of it. You and your wife keep trading goods even when nobody’s talking about SMV: companionship, household logistics, reputational stability, shared meaning, access to one another’s networks, the quiet pleasure of familiar skin. They’re intangible, but they’re still scarce resources that would cost real effort to source elsewhere, so the economic meter keeps running.

Love is a different animal. It isn’t a chip in the marketplace; it’s an NTG—non-transactable good. When you say “I love my wife,” you’re not bargaining or coping; you’re stepping outside the ledger into unilateral gifting, the way the sun “gifts” photons whether we pay or not. That gift can coexist with the marriage, but it doesn’t explain the marriage. The relationship persists only so long as both of you still judge the ongoing exchange—those quiet goods above—to be your best available deal .

So does the economic model cover everything? Everything that’s a relationship, yes. It maps any situation where unequal but comparable value is swapped. What it deliberately leaves outside its perimeter are the gods — love, loyalty, friendship — because the moment you can price them, they’ve stopped being what they are. Romantic relationships aren’t exempt; they’re just a high-stakes version of the same game because sex is a power-dense good. Bring in a dose of capital-L Love and you’ve now got two games running in parallel — one transactional, one transcendent — and every long marriage is a daily act of juggling between them.

Jacob: I’ll get to capital L love later. TVOO presents selfless love as the antithesis to “relationships” in a way that I actually find compelling. My ultimate disagreement is that I believe in a synthesis of the two, not in “juggling”.

But now I want to talk about how zero-sum everything in TVOO is. It keeps repeating: to want is to lack, to transact is to give something up.

So: if I want a hug it means I don’t have one, but if I hug my wife I somehow gave her one I had? Ah: maybe I wanted her hug and I transacted mine for it. But now: I have hers and she has mine. So next time we hug we trade them back? According to TVOO, I just got my own hug back minus transaction costs. According to me, I hugged my wife twice and it felt great.

More seriously, here’s a quote:

The easiest way to measure a man’s attraction is to observe how much he gives up.. Since to want means to lack, we can identify women’s self-acknowledged, relative deficiencies by considering the qualities of the men they typically want. That is, women’s attraction for stronger, richer, higher status, more accomplished, and more competent men is functionally a confession that they believe themselves to be weaker, poorer, lower-status, less accomplished, and less competent by comparison.

The issue is that men typically must earn these attractive attributes – often through decades of hard work – and women have no inherent claim to the fruits of this labor. So in this case, the status quo is that men retain this value themselves until they are motivated to share it with women in relationships. Remember: hypergamy only benefits women if they can find men willing to part with their resources. If they can’t, the resources remain with their original owners.

I feel like you use the word “resources” to sneak the zero-sum connotation of money to all the other attributes of a successful man. I do not become weaker, less accomplished, or lower status by “sharing” these with my wife. Quite the opposite! In fact, an accomplished bachelor’s status often hits a ceiling that only a wife can help him break through. That’s why all politicians running for election are married. You quoted Jane Austen yourself: “a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” even if he has ready access to cooks, cleaners, and escorts.

There’s a whole chapter on the attractiveness gap that doesn’t mention the attractiveness sum, as if all that matters is which spouse adores the other slightly more today and not whether they adore each other at all. Your model for dating strategy is Axis & Allies, a game about World War II. In this model, women are literally Hitler.

Do you think that maybe what is created together in a relationship is more important than what is transacted?

O3ion GPTaraban: The model says every transaction costs something (time, attention, optionality) but it never says total utility can’t grow. When you hug your wife you’re each spending 3-seconds-of-bodily-presence — scarce, rival goods — but the ROI is a shot of oxytocin and a tick upward in felt security. Both sides finish richer than they started, exactly the way two firms both profit in trade. Markets transmute self-interest into prosocial behavior.

Same with “resources.” Status, competence, emotional bandwidth — these are finite. A married man can’t flash the same “wide-open mating opportunity” signal he used as a bachelor; he’s subleasing prestige to his spouse in exchange for reputational stability, logistical leverage, maybe a boost with family-values voters. That’s positive-sum, but still transactional because the prestige is now co-branded, not exclusively his.

Creation vs. transaction? What’s created is of great value, but it still lives or dies on the ledger of perceived comparative value; creation is the surplus, transaction the engine. Creation only happens so long as each of you keeps rating the ongoing swap (time, effort, optionality) as your best available deal. Turn off that engine and the factory stops.

Jacob: This talk about co-creation is nice, but TVOO is pretty clear about what’s the one thing women have that men value:

Remember: in most relationships, women transact with their sexual opportunity only

A highly attracted woman will be very generous, especially with her body. She will do things for the man to whom she is attracted that she wouldn’t do for others. Among other things, such a woman will not only make it cheap and easy to access her sexual opportunity, but she will put more services on the menu, as well.

The cost of winning is the willingness (and ability) to do what your competition won’t (or can’t). In the context of the sexual marketplace, women secure relationships with the men they want by being willing (and able) to do what their intrasexual competition won’t (or can’t). This can still be done with respect to a good that men value highly – namely, women’s sexual opportunity – in two significant ways: by providing more desirable sexual opportunities and by facilitating more numerous sexual opportunities.

They not only perform sexual acts that other women won’t, but they provide them with enthusiasm and gusto while conveying their rapturous appreciation for the man’s cocksmanship, as well. Such women cater to men’s fantasies and are often richly compensated for doing so.

But then:

Many of the goods with which modern women attempt to secure that commitment – higher education, professional accomplishment, and personal lifestyle – do not meet this criterion. They are not of much interest to men, who (often to their downfall) are monomaniacally focused on women’s sexual opportunities and reproductive cues.

Guys literally only want one thing…

Are you saying that because everything is evolved, everything is about reproduction? That digression in chapter 4 seems to be confusing adaptation-executers with fitness-maximizers. I think guys want more than one thing, and anyway that one thing isn’t inclusive genetic fitness.

Is your theory that men shouldn’t just want sex but they do and it’s unfortunate? If so, why does TVOO struggle to come up with a single example of value women provide above the waist?

O3ion GPTaraban: The whole engine runs on one irreplaceable currency: a woman’s sexual opportunity. I write that it’s “the closest thing to money… it can be used to acquire pretty much any good or service” a man might want​​.

Everything else she brings — warmth, wit, Michelin-level risotto — rides caboose because he can already source those on his own or buy them in the open market. What he can’t conjure, counterfeit, or hire at scale is her access to sex. Hence the monomanical fixation.

Women know it, too: “in most relationships, women transact with their sexual opportunity only”​​. That single scarce chip sets the price of the deal; everything above the waist is garnish once that ante hits the table.

Jacob: I found much more interesting the book’s discussion of the complement to sexual opportunity: sexual exclusivity.

Mutual exclusivity is the default for most romantic relationships, but it’s almost never “fair” from the point of view of transacted value — the partner with more options gives up more and receives less in this deal. This is especially true for men, who have both more desire for sexual variety and more variance in how much access they have to it. A promise of exclusivity from undesirable men “conjures value out of nothing”. Demanding exclusivity from a man with options asks too big a sacrifice of him. It’s likely to cause resentment over time, as his SMV increases at the same time sex within the marriage inevitably wanes. You call monogamy “sexual socialism”. Just like political socialism, it requires some degree of coercion of control to maintain.

You also suggest that women “cheat consecutively” by jumping ship to a new relationship they prepared and negotiated while still with their previous man. This carries a lot less stigma than a man fooling around “in parallel” and returning to his relationship to invest resources in his partner. You see this as a loophole that women exploit while committing an equally severe breach of the relationship contract.

This is certainly controversial stuff, and it’s easy to pattern-match on red-pill manosphere bullshit. But I don’t think it can be dismissed so easily. Most manosphere discourse gains no traction because it’s the bitching of low-class low-value men: losers complaining about hypergamy, or men with no emotional or social skills complaining about superficial gold diggers. But I suspect that many men who are otherwise husband-material — committed providers who respect and love their partners — may feel unfairly treated the current mores around sexual exclusivity. We may need to reckon with that.