Insights from the Mind of a Seducer

You want to spend quality time together, but she'd rather do things for you she thinks you'll like? Different love languages can cause more issues than you'd think... until you realize they exist.

One of the most controversial articles on Girls Chase is my piece "Should You Pay for a Date?" My conclusion of that article was "No, you shouldn't pay. Not based on my experience. Not if you sleep with or date a gal." Many men and some women agreed with me. Many other women flipped out that I'd suggest not paying for women. Some men also said they found it odd or counterproductive. You can go read the comments on that article to see how hotly contested the issue was (and those comments kept coming for years).

For years after I wrote that piece I assumed the outraged women were outraged at the threat the article posed to the free rides they enjoyed. Who wouldn't be upset at the prospect of losing a quite literal meal ticket? That last thing a gal needs is a lot of guys reading that article, then cheapening up their dates and splitting the bills!

And while some female commentators clearly had that as their rationale, not all did. Some professed to genuinely see a paid-for date as an expression of how the man values them. I was aware there are women like this, but always considered them outliers. I assumed most women who fought for paid-dates were simply girls who'd been pampered and didn't like the threat they might lose that pampering.

Yet, there's a psychometric theory called 'love languages' that might also explain the controversy.

According to Gary Chapman's theory of love languages, wanting gifts isn't just that someone is or isn't spoiled.

Rather, different people actually primarily gauge how other people value them in very different ways. And just as some people like quality time most, and some people prefer touch, there are people for whom the primary way they feel valued is through gifts.

Do you make a woman worse as a future girlfriend, wife, or mother when you go to bed with her? Many people think you do.

On my article about player guilt, Ben asked:

Could  you address the final issue that you bring- that sleeping with women  damages their ability to have long term relationships?

You made a fairly convincing case that emotionally, assuming you are  going to flirt and go out and attract women, not sleeping with them  isn't doing them any favors.

Maybe we really shouldn't be going out and flirting with most girls  (excluding the ones who need an emotional escape or similar i guess)  from an emotional standpoint?

More importantly though, how do you justify flirting with girls then  sleeping with them, knowing it damages their ability to have long term  relationships? This bothers me more than the emotional aspect.

-ben

The issue he's talking about was where I paraphrased some 'web wisdom' thrown about about women. Some of it says sex is liberating to women. Some says sex is violent, oppressive, and patriarchal. Some say sex is empowering. Some say it ruins women for the long-term. Those aren't my opinions; they are however common tropes you will run into on the Internet.

Ben's question, though, is one worth exploring... particularly as it ties into the concept of player guilt (which that article Ben commented on was about). If you sleep with a woman, are you damaging her future potential as a girlfriend, wife, and mother?

A growing movement online seems to have arrived at the conclusion "yes, sex damages women's futures."

The men who arrive at this conclusion though follow a chain of logic that proceeds thus:

1. Women with higher numbers of sex partners are, on average, worse partners and mothers

2. Therefore, when men have sex with women, they degrade women's abilities to be competent partners and mothers

While we do have plenty of evidence that women are less faithful the more partners they have, and we've all heard anecdotes of irresponsible man-crazy single mothers ditching their kids to chase the homme du jour, there's a big causal jump between those two points. This casual leap of faith is where guys trip themselves up.

That is to say, women with high partner counts are (on average) worse as mothers and partners. This is true.

Yet their partner counts are a symptom of what makes them worse in these roles -- partner count is not the cause.

And when you take a woman to bed, you are also not 'the cause'.