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Dating Doctor On What Women Really Want & The NEW Dating Rules To Attract Women | Dr. Orion Taraban

Channel: Sean Kim
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqXM3fmeYcs

A long-form interview with psychologist Dr. Orion Taraban (author of The Value of Others) on what women want, sexual marketplace value, attraction, monogamy, and modern dating.

Key points

  • What women want: Taraban's shorthand is that women largely want what other women want (mimetic desire), using the crowd as a heuristic for a vetted, high-value mate; he balances this against evolutionary cues like facial symmetry signaling health.
  • He links this herd dynamic to rising female anxiety/depression: social media makes women feel they are drifting from the "safe center."
  • The ring effect: married men get more female interest -- one woman did the vetting, and the man reads as safe to approach; he cites research that men more often misread friendliness as sexual interest.
  • Invokes the "Matthew principle" (the rich get richer) for sexual attention.
  • Want = desire + lack: people want what they cannot have; striving in hope can feel better than possession.
  • Three kinds of sexual marketplace value (SMV): normative (closeness to cultural beauty archetypes), perceived (an individual's personal type), and transactive (what partners you can actually secure, revealed only when the "transaction" happens); references assortative mating.
  • Age and SMV: women start high (youth, fertility), men start low and rise; the crossover is said to occur around 30. Cites studies putting female peak around 23 and male peak around 40-50 (the 50 figure from a dating-app revealed-preference study).
  • Advises men to be highly attractive to a small slice (1%) rather than mildly attractive to many; compares to Kevin Kelly's "1,000 true fans."
  • Balance of attraction: every couple has an "adorer" and an "adored"; the adorer gets the emotional content, the adored gets practical control. Argues women leave sooner without emotional content, and that men insisting on adoring puts a woman on a pedestal she tends to reject (hypergamy).
  • Familiarity over happiness: cites Alain de Botton/School of Life and Freud -- people seek partners who feel familiar and unconsciously reenact childhood templates to "resolve" old wounds, usually without the skill to resolve them.
  • Discusses how healing (often via therapy) changes who you are attracted to; notes the adage that starting therapy can accelerate divorce.
  • Contraception: raises the contested "dual mating strategy" and ovulation-shift studies (scent preferences, cheating likelihood), suggesting hormonal birth control may alter attraction to masculine men.
  • Monogamy: views it as largely a cultural invention; humans fall between chimp and bonobo strategies; recommends Sex at Dawn and Esther Perel, and the term "monogamish."
  • Marriage: sees it as nearly impossible long-term; past stability owed more to lack of options, social pressure, shame, and women's financial dependence than to compatibility; giving a partner what they want reduces your value to them.
  • Argues against staying together "for the kids," and that marriage often overloads one person with needs once met by a whole village.
  • Closing advice: men and women are different; drop the demand for symmetry and reciprocity; want fewer things from a partner and get other needs met elsewhere.

Note: a long opinion-and-evolutionary-psychology interview; it references several studies and books (Sex at Dawn, Perel, ovulation/scent research) mostly by gist without specific citations.