putanumonit.com
Primarily relevant to here through the discussion of what people claim to find attractive vs. choose, but also considers various other measures of attractiveness. I dont agree with all these analyses but think its worth posting simply for considering the topic in a lot more detail then Ive previously seen.
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Notes -
Do you have more material on this theory of relationships? A quick Google didn't come up with much.
This matches my experiences/intuitions, and my favorite relationship advice: Sex and the City's "He's just not that into you"; and the more TRP/trashy Most Favored Nation theory of past experiences. I'd love to read a good serious treatment of it.
I put that into a couple of search engines with all the variations/related terms I could think of and it turned up nothing. In fact, search engines in general seem to downrank TRP content rather heavily.
I'm not sure that's a TRP or PUA approved term, just my own; but it's a trashy reflex that fits in with that kind of thing. "He's just not that into you" or the TikTok "If he wanted to he would" stands for the idea that if a man really likes you he's going to go for you. He's not going to tell you "work is hectic" or that "the timing is bad" or that he's "coming off a breakup and doesn't want to get into anything serious right now." He's going to love you and make love to you asap, anything else means he's keeping you on the hook but not going to stick around unless he's desperate.
The Most Favored Nation idea is the sexual, hetero-male equivalent: if she's attracted to you she will want to fuck you, she will want to fuck you fast and she will want to fuck you wild, and that basically scales in terms of the wildness of the sex versus the level of attraction. So if you know, or especially if she lets it be known, or double especially if she specifically tells you, that she's been wilder with other partners, that means she was more attracted to them than she is to you and you should move on.* It's basically a rejection of women following The Rules or the FDS approach to dating; if she really liked you she'll throw out the handbook and be with you immediately. Giant red flag if she tells you about all the gross things she used to do with other guys, but doesn't do with you because you're nice to her; either she was more into them, or she is telling you how she likes to be treated while giving herself plausible deniability. You should demand in partners the best, wildest sex they've ever had with another partner, anything else means she is Just Not That Into You.
The basic concept is the same: if someone really likes you, the logical rules are suspended, and you shouldn't accept anything less than someone who really likes you. Which relates back to @Harlequin5942 's point: romance is a matter of motivation, not capability or situational context. You want someone who is motivated to be with you, not someone who is Just Not That Into You.
*The common female objection to this is that women shouldn't be obligated to perform sex acts with future partners which they did with past partners, they might not have enjoyed them after they tried them, they might be ashamed of having done them, they might be in a different place in their lives, etc. Which is why I'd offer the addendum that you shouldn't pry into a partner's sexual past, if she is really ashamed of or didn't enjoy X she'd keep X a secret. If she's flaunting her history of X all over, bragging about it to friends, she probably at least kinda liked it. Either way, it might not be perfect but it seems to be a useful heuristic every time I've seen it, with a few minor exceptions that serve to demonstrate the purpose of the rule.
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I came across it in David Burns's book Intimate Connections. I think he's done some econometric testing on it (he does that whenever he can get some data) but I don't know if the tests have been published in the psychotherapy literature, since I'm not a psychotherapist.
I'll check my library for it. Thanks!
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