Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (7 page)

But two things are now certain: Women use a man’s resources as their base measurement, and men use a woman’s youth, health, and beauty as theirs.

When you were four years old, you wanted to marry your mother, father, carer, brother, or sister. Scientists have now found that we lose any “romantic” interest in those close to us by about age seven, when people who are more distant, remote, or mysterious become attractive to us. This aversion to familiar people operates on a chemical level in the brain, as demonstrated by the famous “sweaty T-shirt” experiment. Women were asked to smell the T-shirts of a range of men and to rate their attraction to each T-shirt. The result was that the
closer a man’s immune system was to a woman’s own immune system—such as her brother, uncle, or father—the less appeal the T-shirt had. The more different a wearer’s immune system was from hers, the more stimulated she was by the T-shirt. This phenomenon is seen in other mammals, and it evolved to stop us from breeding with those who are genetically too close to us, which could lead to biological problems in our offspring. It’s survival of the fittest in action.

Timing is also a strong factor in attraction. If you are experiencing emotional highs or lows such as depression, loneliness, or divorce or are celebrating success, your brain searches for people who can satisfy the needs you have for love at that time. The changed circumstances alter your hormone levels, and your love maps become activated. A change of environment will do it, too—studies show that when people are on holiday or at a work-related conference, when they are excited, relaxed, and free of their usual domestic obligations, their dopamine levels are elevated, making them more susceptible to falling in love or starting an affair. In both instances, the underlying fact is that hormones are at play.

An actor is a professional liar, and the actor who most convinces us of his character wins an Oscar. Hollywood is all about fake images, pretend romance, and artificial glamour, but men and women are expected to emulate these images in real life. Actors create believable illusions and use special effects on the screen that can’t be duplicated in reality. These artificial images have been pumped into our heads for two generations and have resulted in women taking drastic action to emulate the perfect goddess presented on screen, while men are expected to be more exciting, stimulating, and romantic than they have been at any time in history. When was the last time you went to dinner at an expensive restaurant in a luxury limousine wearing Chanel perfume, Versace clothing, and a
Rolex watch, sporting the perfect hair and the body of a god, with a thirty-piece orchestra playing in the background? Well, that’s the image you’re competing against and are expected to try to attain or expect.

These are the levels of unreality that are constantly being thrust at you by modern-day media, and this is the kind of pressure today’s men and women are under and are being expected to live up to. Many women are deluded into believing they can have a rich Brad Pitt type, though the reality is that they have a man at home who is a mechanic and earns an average income. The line between reality and fantasy has become blurred. At the beginning of a new relationship, many men, fueled by women’s unrealistic expectations, give women the illusion that they can reach some of these levels. Women want the guy from
Days of Our Lives
because that man knows exactly what women want and always delivers. Before long, however, a woman realizes that her man is really just a normal man, and disillusion may set in. Unrealistic expectations are a significant contributor to relationship breakups.

Women are exposed daily to hundreds of images of the “new man” in phony romantic situations involving supposedly “macho men” who think, talk, and react like women. These men have chiseled bodies, expensive clothing, hairy chests, and neatly trimmed beards and are eager to listen to women talk about relationships and their lives. These images are reinforced by women’s magazines, which make a woman feel that she must be the only one who isn’t married to a hunky guy like the ones in
The Young and the Restless
. Consequently, studies reveal that women who spend their time reading romance novels based on fantasy never feel happy with their lives, although studies have also found that they usually have more orgasms than nonreaders.

Men born before the early 1960s were the last of a generation of men who were raised with the understanding that to be attractive, they must always have a job, a hobby, and an outside shed. They should hold open the door for a lady, never use bad language around any woman, drink lots of beer, and revere John Wayne and Cary Grant. That’s largely all that was ever required to be a “real” man. John Wayne was the ultimate role model for men because he was rough and tough but was respectful to women and fair.

Since the 1970s, and with the emergence of more feminized Western societies, women’s expectations of men and relationships have changed. Women now expect more from men than their foremothers ever dared imagine. Until the 1970s, a woman had to “find a man” in order to be considered socially respectable, to bear “legitimate” children, or even to borrow money. Now that these conditions no longer exist, women are free to be more demanding in what they want from men. Many men have attempted to meet the new challenge, but because a woman’s additional criteria usually mean she wants him to
think like a woman—for example, realizing when someone feels down, talking endlessly about feelings, and discussing problems without reaching a solution (these things are not a natural part of male brain hardwiring)—men have been left confused and bewildered and have retreated into what was previously called “macho” behavior. These behaviors include an obsession with details about car engines, motors, computers, or sports statistics, combined with few, if any, personal communication skills. Today’s feminized societies don’t like this male behavior and sometimes attempt to define it as an illness. Some males are labeled as mentally ill when in fact they are only displaying the acute forms of some masculine behaviors or have been poorly parented.

Today in education, teachers of young children are almost exclusively women. They encourage boys to “talk out” their differences and “play gently,” as opposed to forming hierarchies, wrestling, play fighting, and electing leaders, which are hardwired male brain features. There are few, if any, male role models as teachers. It all adds to the confusion new generations of young men feel when thinking about what it means to be male.

Unfortunately, the bar for what women expect from men is raised almost annually by the media and Hollywood, to the point where many men have simply given up trying. Women are expected to live up to images of the perfect starlets on the cover of women’s magazines, but it’s even tougher for men, because at least women’s magazines show you what you’re supposed to look like—men’s magazines don’t. The new perfect male for the twenty-first century should be a warrior in the workplace; a metrosexual marvel when it comes to clothes, cooking, and decoration; a stud in the bedroom; a six-pack god in the gym; a perfect dad; a friend who loves listening to women talk about their problems; and a sensitive guy who cries when he watches
Beaches
and
Romeo and Juliet
. Unfortunately for most women, this type of man usually has a boyfriend.

As the list of requirements for the perfect twenty-first century man grows, many men retreat into football games, car rallies, and pubs, where men can still act like men in front of each other. Women simply go shopping and eat chocolate.

We now live in a time when relationships are more difficult to start and are harder to keep going than for past generations. Men’s and women’s expectations of each other are at unprecedented levels, and parents are at a loss as to how to advise us. Yet being in love and being loved are still as vital to humans for good health and survival as they ever were. Men are expected to be softhearted and feminine in some situations and bold and masculine in others, and women are expected to be self-supporting and know how to program a GPS. These things were never part of our ancestors’ job specifications. When you understand who we are and where we came from, you can develop strategies to successfully attract and manage the opposite sex. First, though, you need to know exactly what the opposite sex
really
wants from sex and love, and that’s what we’ll deal with in the next two chapters.

M
any mothers unwittingly train their sons to be lousy partners and husbands. A boy learns that his mother will love him regardless of what he does or doesn’t do. She teaches him that he doesn’t have to pick up his clothes or ask about her day. He doesn’t have to take her to dinner or even talk politely to her. His mother shows him that love with a woman can be a one-way street and he’s not expected to do anything for her to still be happy. This is why, when the rush of hormones associated with a new relationship subsides—as it inevitably will—romance vanishes, passion disappears, and sex slows down. He didn’t have to continually prove to his mother that he loved her—she knew it—so why should this new woman need constant proof? The first time it is evident that his new love has accepted the mothering role is when she
starts washing his clothes, telling him what to eat, and nagging him about what he’s not doing in his life, and no man is turned on by the idea of sex with his mother. Understand that the only time a woman can successfully change a man is when he’s a baby.

Today’s women want far more from a relationship than their ancestors ever imagined. To demonstrate how much things have changed, here is an extract about sex from a school textbook called
Home Economics
, written in 1963 by a woman for young women:

Some men reading this might wish for a return to this era; in fact, some men think that the above text sounds fair and reasonable. The women of the twenty-first century, however, are looking for more things in relationships than their foremothers did because circumstances were different in those times. Although today’s women are still driven by their ancestral hardwired preferences in men, they have also moved away from who their ancestors were. Although their brains remain rooted in the past, modern society now allows and expects them to make choices and decisions that past generations never had to make.