How important is a man's job when it comes to dating?

As I pointed out to you this is a public conversation on a public forum. A question was asked. I attempted to answer it. But it does not matter who you asked really. If we can not see the source of the figure then no one can really answer it. But I have at some length now gone into the explanations of the 50% figure. The study itself does this. And very little appears to be because "a mans job when it comes to dating" is important. The study and the figure do not support that notion at all it seems. It's literally talking about something else entirely.

The evolutionary narrative does make pretty stories sometimes - especially evolutionary psychology - but the diversity of humans means it's usually a lot more complex than a cursory evolutionary reading would suggest. I described a lot of that complexity already but by your own admission you did not read those posts. Which makes the conversation a little one way :)

I do wonder about the "expectations" part of it myself. The link I just gave spoke of how men "at first" love it when their partner gets ahead and gets the promotions and so on. But then the "reality" of it hits and it starts to undermine their well being. I honestly can not put myself into that head space. And given I am in a relationship where a partner is earning more than me - quite significantly - and it is likely to keep increasing in significance - I just don't feel it. I don't doubt their feelings on the matter - I just can not imagine ever feeling the same way myself.

Indeed. I for example have no sexual interest in Asian Women. They simply do nothing for me it seems and I would no sooner want to get sexual with one than as a heterosexual man I would want to 1:1 with another man.

Contrast that to my friend who is absolutely smitten with just about every Asian woman he has ever met.

So this measurement of disirability - who's standards are we meant to be using exactly? There seems to be too many quite diverse ones to choose from.

Give me a woman with nice hips/arse and I don't care what race she is.

People choose based on options available to them.

Exactly. And most people won't push themselves to create more options, but instead, accept what's immediately around them. Preferably without needing to change themselves much in the process.

"Women aren't interested in me, and it's ALL THEIR FAULT." 😫

(And evolutionary psychology is astrology for men)

I don't think it's money alone, even though a minority of people do chase it.

I think people are attracted to status, and in the modern world, wealth and status are obviously linked. Status might have meant different things pre-civilisation. Who knows what?

And high status is obviously rare so not everyone can have the high status partners, and people still require partners so most people settle for ordinary partners or people of approximately equivalent status.

Either that, or die alone.

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, although I'd say it's a combination of both evolution and social conditioning. Alternatively, the evolution of society, and the shifts in what is considered attractive to the genders. To be fair, the traditional expectation of men/women hasn't changed all that much in thousands of years, although, then again, the levels of social conditioning that humans are exposed to nowadays, is far greater than ever before.

The media that people are exposed to alters their perception of what is important in their partners, whether its the action movies with the sexy woman, or the epic drama love story. The same with literature/fiction although that's become less important as time has gone by being replaced with other forms of expression (music being part of it). Marketing on TV, on the internet, etc is all going to have an effect on both the conscious and subconscious preferences of people...

It's never going to be entirely about biology. It's true that we are driven instinctively to listen to our biological needs or desire, but we (most people anyway) have also been taught throughout our lives, to control our biological impulses.. and that's going to factor decisively in the partners we choose.

Erm what question? If I missed a question by all means repeat it. Unlike some people - I do not intentionally dodge or avoid questions and if I have done so it is usually a genuine over sight.

But unfortunately no, no "proof" has been offered. The narrative about evolution has been offered. Multiple times. But support for that narrative not so much. Noticing that a narrative based on evolution "makes sense" is great and all. But it making sense or sounding plausible does not evidence it. The burden of evidence still lies await. Especially as we live in a time where we have undermined much of what evolution might have demanded. For example many people who may not even survive long enough to reproduce now do. From glasses to wheelchairs - transplants to treatments like insulin - to much more - we have underminded the demands of evolution time and time again and such people pair off and procreate quite often.

Remember the vast majority - in fact the near totality - of our evolution happened in times much different from the ones we find ourselves in too. Which makes applying concepts that might have been historically true about evolution to the times in which we now live. For example much of our evolution occured in time of being in very small tribal groups - not million strong cities or a global digitial civilisation. So caution is warranted and necessary in over applying evolution concepts to today's world - especially without a shred of supporting evidence.

Not to mention we have undermined the "resource" needs you are referring to in evolution in many ways too with community schooling, social welfare, childrens allowance, subsidising things like education clothing and so forth. The fact is that the "cost" of pregnancy, child birth and child rearing is - while not low - certainly not as high by any means as it once was so we are once again undermining evolution and freeing ourselves of the demands it may once have had upon us and allowing us to select our partners on "higher" ideas and criteria. And in fact it seems that it is the people with less resources - not more - who end up having more children. It is oft noticed that it is the middle and upper classes that tend to have less children and have them later in life despite their "resources" being higher. Again something that occurs percisely because we are not slaves to the demands evolution once put upon our species.

So no I am not seeing the evidence for the narrative that "job" or "earning" is all that "important" at all. One has to take the eye off whether the evolution narrative makes sense or not - and test to see if the narrative actually holds in the real world. And it does not seem to as - which I have pointed out time and again now to you - people of all economic realities across all countries are pairing off time and again. Your own link to the Divorce Rates even goes against the OPs question here too in that clearly they got married and got through the dating game regardless. Issues only arose - it seems - for some small number of women when their being successful in life caused marital strife. But the OP did not ask about marriage. Specifically about dating and your own link not only does not show anything of the sort was "important" during dating - but even suggests the opposite in many ways.

When an evolution narrative fails to hold true in reality the temptation towards confirmation bias is high. Which can be seen when gravitating towards small outlier groups (like rich men and the specific group of gold diggers who pursue them) in order to try and validate the failed hypothesis. Ignoring of course that there is no useful or valid way to extrapolate a generalisation from that specific minority group.

So the answer to the OP in that light is it doesn't seem to be that "important" at all in general. Though clearly it is important to some. But any evidence that it is anything more than a "nice to have" minor preference has not been shown in this thread to date. Just like the last paragraph in your post here - there may be trends in "preferences" - such as there may be a trend towards a certain leg length or financial situation - but there is a difference between trends and "important". Though I did raise in an earlier post about how vague we are all being about what we even mean by "important" in this context. It seems even the word itself - let alone the answer to the OPs question - is quite subjective.

I have heard that yes. It has not happened in my case I have to admit. If anything the opposite is true and it has only gotten better in our 15 years together.

Something tells me there is more to it than simply living in close quarters. Rather it is what happens while you live in close quarters. Or what we allow to happen. Complacency maybe. For example the effort one might put into looking good or romancing might wane because it is no longer "necessary".

I find a lot of the things we do to challenge and improve each other have very positive effects on sexual attraction. For example we do martial arts and capoeira and tai chi together. This pushes each other to improve our skills and our health levels and more. But also - doing something like Tai Chi opposite your partner is extremely sexy and arousing at times. Contrast to say - coming home from work and falling on opposite ends of the couch with TV dinners and Netflix for example.

We also have our own bedrooms. It varies a lot who ends up in which bedroom on any given night. Sometimes together. Sometimes apart. And I think there is a lot (for us at least - the mileage of others is likely to vary) to be said for that in maintaining many aspects of romance and attraction for us.

But a huge one for us is communication. I think living in close quarters can make communication poor, formulaic, and presumptuous. It is possible to even avoid it or miss it because one feels we already know what the other person is thinking in a given context so why bother? For us though we are almost obsessive about communication. In fact it has been the single most important attribute of our relationship from day 1. Not career or money or looks or sex or hobbies or anything else - all of which are very important - but communication over all has been from day 1 being what we clicked over and what has kept us going.