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This is akin to a trend I've noticed with promiscuous people in general. I'll call it the "promiscuity trap" and it applies equally to men and women, though women are usually more open about it. The vast majority of relationships begin with both parties in more or less the same position—they're looking for companionship and intend to get to know the other party better and treat the relationship as a going concern. This isn't to say that the occasional flings don't happen, but they're the exception and there's usually a specific reason. Sometimes the reason is benign, like you meet someone from another city while on vacation and there's chemistry but no long-term potential there. Other times, though, it's more sinister, like you just got dumped and are looking to feel good about yourself. But when most people engage in the second kind of hookup it's due to an acute emotional situation and doesn't become a habit.
People in the promiscuity trap tend to dwell in this second world all the time. They have a constant underlying self-loathing that has them seeking instant validation from a sexual partner. But since availability trumps compatibility, these relationships never last very long. And the inevitable failure only feeds into the self-loathing more. This whole process is compounded by the fact that promiscuous people tend to be around more promiscuous members of the opposite sex than average, but aren't really any less capable of developing genuine feelings for someone else. So if a promiscuous woman sleeps with a promiscuous guy and ends up liking him there's a good chance he'll only use her for sex and dump her as soon as the next opportunity presents itself, and if a non-promiscuous guy likes her there's a good chance she doesn't like him and just wanted sex. So of course the original author talks about how she fucked men over or they fucked her over.
By the time the stars align and they meet someone whom they like and who actually likes them back the cycle of self-loathing being validated and self-medicating it with sex ends, and they're left wondering how anyone could actually like them enough to genuinely want to spend time with them? I know about this because I have a friend who fits this pattern exactly, and when I read this excerpt my mind immediately jumped to her. Then I thought of how all the promiscuous people I know seem to fit the general pattern, and the whole theory coalesced. And yes, she's admitted to me that self-loathing has a lot to do with it.
Is that true tho?
I've seen claims that promiscuity leads to diminished ability to pair-bond.
Surely, if gluttony leads to reduced insulin-sensitivity, reduced ability to feel satiated / reduced tolerance for hunger, temporarily or permanently...
Couldn't similar biological mechanisms apply for oxytocin or reward circuits?
Do they really have the same ability to start and sustain a loving relationship that they used to have before n attempts?
Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. We're talking about standard-grade promiscuity here, not nymphomania. The people I know who are like this are still, occasional hookups aside, still ostensibly trying to find a long-term partner. The problem is that they get caught up in the whirlwind period at the beginning of the relationship and quickly sour on the other person. Unless, of course, the other person sours on them while they're still in the whirlwind period, hence the self-loathing. This also explains why promiscuous people tend to describe normal "nice guys" as "boring". If you never get past the early stages of a relationship you're either in the period where the only time you see the person is on dates when doing fun things and in the bedroom, or you're so infatuated that doing absolutely anything together is exciting. Or both. If you're a self-loathing person who hates their boring life, the new person seems like a window into a better one. Except eventually the relationship progresses to the point where instead of drinking Bloody Marys on bright, beautiful Saturday afternoons you're at his house on a rainy Tuesday night while he watches the local news and YouTube videos about how to fix the leak in his dishwasher.
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Your post very accurately described the movie "Trainwreck." Say what you like about Amy Schumer, that movie really captured a common contemporary female neurosis.
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I mean I feel the modern moment makes it tricky.
I've done a lot of dating in the last year or two trying to find 'the one', whatever that means, and yet it's been my experience that if I'm not trying to storm the proverbial castle in terms of sexual and physical escalation within 2-3 dates that I'm going to get automatically discarded as a potential partner due to the women getting confused and ultimately talking themselves out of the interaction.
As a result, I've spun off more than a few cases where it's 2-3 dates in, we sleep together and then the relationship fails to happen for whatever reason. There's a lot of dealbreakers you can't really figure out on that small a sample, and yet I feel I have to put out or I'm not going to even get a chance to take things slowly. In an ideal universe I'd be perfectly happy if my current dating stanza involved me just actually getting to that stage with one woman (provided she was the The One) but yet to be competitive in the marketplace I need to swing myself around.
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