Hmmm, for both men and women? Basically, the sexual market is governed by our perception of what we can get vs. what we've got. After the first few partners, you lose the naivete required to love someone with all you've got.

It's easy to denounce those who settled early as not being as "grown-up" as us somehow, but that's a convenient fiction along the lines of "No one killed themselves at the Foxconn factory that made my iPhone". There are fully intellectually and emotionally developed human beings who settled early and retained that crucial naivete -- true "pair bonding". Dating damages you. Learning about your options -- what you can get, what you can't get, and what you can get but only briefly hold onto -- is good for your sex life but it's bad for you. Once you drop your emotional attachment to certain notions and look at the people in your life's behavior objectively, it all pretty easily follows from an "It's all chemicals" atheist viewpoint.

I think truths like these are often recognized implicitly by posters in this sub but not often consciously acknowledged. Why should they be? They're painful. A lot of people don't need or want that kind of negativity in their life, but I don't think that changes that these ideas are the truth in the sense that one can agree with Marx's analysis of capitalism without necessarily wanting communism. In the end, though, normal people should get into yoga.

My advice would be to read Michel de Houllebecq's novel Whatever (written in 1992, by the way). It's like 100 pages or something.

It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as ” the law of the market”. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude…………

Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag.