The Value of Others

Naive negotiators offer the wrong currency. Men mistakenly offer women sexual opportunity (which women already have in abundance), and women mistakenly offer men commitment (which men already have in abundance). The key insight: women control access to sex, and men control access to commitment. Each guards the commodity the other most desires. Successful negotiators learn to provide what the other party actually wants.

This exchange shapes incentives everywhere. The marginal utility of additional wealth is higher for men because money buys reproductive optionality — which partly explains the earnings gap beyond discrimination. Meanwhile, women's sexual opportunity functions almost like currency: it can acquire attention, protection, devotion, and lifestyle. Understanding what each sex actually values transforms the entire negotiation from guesswork into strategy.

The first law of attraction is that people want what they want, not what wants them. Demonstrating intense interest doesn't increase your partner's attraction — it often suppresses it. Desire operates like a shared resource within a relationship: when one partner does all the desiring, the other's desire becomes unnecessary and atrophies. Western romantic culture compounds this problem by teaching people that persistence and grand gestures will eventually be rewarded.

Become attractive rather than pursuing attractiveness. Instead of wanting someone into wanting you, invest in becoming the person your desired partner would naturally approach. This means appealing deeply to a smaller, more aligned group rather than broadly to everyone. A captain who advertises a specific, compelling destination attracts passengers who genuinely want to go there.

The second law of attraction holds that two people can never be equally attracted to each other. This creates two positions: the adorer (who likes the other more, feels intense highs and lows, but wields less power) and the adored (who likes the other less, commands more control, but experiences muted emotion). Neither role is inherently superior — each carries distinct trade-offs.

Men are generally better suited as the adored because women's hypergamy — their preference for men they can look up to — is undermined when a man pedestalizes her. If he's looking up at her, she's forced to look down. Two people who prefer the same role create constant friction. Complementarity between these positions is what makes long-term relationships sustainable — trying to secure the benefits of both while avoiding the costs of either is a fool's errand.

Taraban defines power as the ability to get other people to act in your service — and insists it's immaterial. A German shepherd cowering before a Chihuahua illustrates the point: the intimidated dog isn't the smaller one, it's the one that becomes afraid. Wealth, status, and strength are merely power proxies — they only work by evoking psychological states like desire, fear, or awe.

Ten principles signal who holds power: the person who moves less, is less committed, has more options, is more willing to sacrifice, more willing to transgress, more emotionally resilient, less visible, more flexible, more knowledgeable about the other, and communicates more effectively. The single most important defense is emotional resilience — because every manipulation strategy works by evoking a feeling you can't tolerate. Tolerate it, and you become unmanipulable.

The Crisis of Disillusionment strikes roughly six months into a relationship, when attraction-fueled fantasies collide with reality. Since no one can live up to an idealized projection, desire reliably drops. Most dating activities — fancy restaurants, elaborate outings — make this worse by cultivating unsustainable expectations that collapse once commitment is secured.

Invite prospects into your preexisting lifestyle instead. If your normal evening involves cooking dinner and hitting the gym, date there. This aligns courtship with reality, dramatically reducing the fantasy-reality gap. Captains seeking long-term passengers should err on the side of being too boring rather than too bold. The same principle extends to honesty: reveal potential dealbreakers early. Marketing yourself accurately attracts a smaller but far better-matched audience — and the relationship you build won't require a constant performance to maintain.

Taraban argues that 90% of relationship success is selection. The work a relationship requires is inversely proportional to the goodness of fit between partners. Forcing compatibility is a Procrustean solution — like the mythical innkeeper who stretched or amputated guests to fit his bed. Since "spouse" is a lifetime appointment, the selection process should reflect that gravity.

"Hire slow" means allowing two to three years of courtship minimum — enough to survive disillusionment and see your partner clearly. "Fire fast" means ending things at the first sign of genuine incompatibility, since it only gets harder and more expensive to leave. Remember that "and" is expensive: wanting a rich and handsome and funny and chivalrous partner exponentially shrinks the qualified pool with each added criterion. Clarify what actually matters — and drop the rest.

Non-transactable goods — love, loyalty, friendship — cannot be bought, earned, or exchanged. They're given freely at the giver's pleasure, no reciprocity expected. Since relationships require exchange, these goods technically exist outside relationships: you can love someone you have no relationship with, and maintain a relationship devoid of love. Romantic love, Taraban argues, is actually transfigured religion — originating with the 12th-century Cathars, whose heretical beliefs were hidden inside chivalric poetry. Its hallmarks — unobtainability, tragedy, obstruction — were features, not bugs.

True love is radically different: the bittersweet triumph of sacrificing yourself for the other's good. Like the Sun, it shines regardless of who benefits. This makes love extraordinarily powerful — yet deeply unattractive in the sexual marketplace, where self-sacrifice reads as weakness rather than virtue.

Marriage rates have halved since 1970; one in three American men under 30 report no sex in the past year — a figure that tripled in a single decade. Taraban traces this to two technologies. Birth control (approved 1960) separated sex from reproduction, reversing the historic order where commitment preceded sex and crashing the "price" of sexual access from a lifetime of provision to a couple of drinks at a bar.

Web 2.0 completed the disruption. Pornography gives men free, safe simulated sexual opportunity — removing their incentive to enter the marketplace. Social media and platforms like OnlyFans give women attention, validation, and monetized resources without physical contact — removing theirs. Both sexes are increasingly replacing actual relationships with virtual substitutes, each occupying online roles that mirror their real-world marketplace positions.