On Women

Life would be quite simple if there was "the one" when it comes to meeting women and then having things working out and then sticking to it. Unfortunately, if that was the case, all of humanity would be pretty much doomed. As one of my friends best put it, if there was "the one" and you had to find them out of several billion people, you'll probably never be able to meet all the people in the world in a life time to find him/her and die. The world population would probably shrink like crazy until things became more manageable. And so, for humanity to survive, there is no "one person" that you are compatible with, but a bunch of them. A whole genre of romance movies and novels should be killed by this simple concept, but if this romantic concept comforts other people (mainly women?), I'll leave them to it. Men however, have a different ball game to deal with.

This post is going to be something that I am going to use to help formalize some underlying notions that I have been having recently about male-female relationships and what should be my motivations be for making behavioral decisions. Consider this to be somewhat of a rough draft....

The Role of a Man

As much as modern society would like gender equality between the sexes, things are still not 100% equal, especially when it comes to who has to make the first move (and usually it is the man, though I would not consider it a bad thing). I consider myself a modern man, generally politically correct and respectful to the equality movement between men and women. Unfortunately, perhaps, I have taken things too far in when it comes to male-female relationships that I end up treating most females like ordinary friends and that is what I usually get. If you could stereotype me, I would probably come off as "the nice guy" and usually the nice guy isn't the kind of guy that choose his women, they end up choosing him... which seems to be another characteristic of my past experiences (though not all of them have been that way). Things, however have started changing.

As of January, I have found myself free from a 9 month relationship, though not going into full details, it was with someone that I liked but I knew that I couldn't marry for some reason. Emotions defy logic so I am not going to even try explaining. But after a dry spell of meeting people I have started attending various social events again and as a result, meeting many interesting people (what a blessing) and I have somehow managed to come to the situation where there will be several candidates that might make for good girl friends in the future and I have started running thought experiments in my head.

Finding the right person

I have had the pleasant experience of meeting many couples over the course of my life, some of them are couples that work really well together and it is quite obvious to me that the both of them are quite happy. I do believe that it is my responsibility to be active in finding the right person that I would like to spend a considerable amount of time with. I do believe that it should be the dutiful responsibility of everyone else to do the same. Unfortunately, somehow, it is easy to be unaware of the graveness of finding the right person as if things don't work out, things can get very messy down the road.

When it comes to initiating any sort of formal/informal relationship with a person of interest, it is up to the man to make the first move. Of course there can be plenty of prior cursory interaction that might give some indication of the character of the candidate, but it really boils down to spending time with them to understand the values, the characteristics and how well does each person fit together in a relationship. Because not everyone is a good fit for each other, it usually is necessary to go through several/many people to find the right person.

The numbers game

As a sweeping and inaccurate generalization, men are often chided upon for being "players" or wanting to go after whatever hot chick that might come their way. I wouldn't blame them, because if they didn't, women would be bitching about men not making the first move (which also seems to be a prevalent problem). Damned if you do, damned if you don't. So if you're going to be damned anyways, I'd say make the first move and it seems to me that is has been somewhat genetically programmed into the male species (though sometimes suppressed by more educated people). I would say that this is very wise advice, since it is statistically very improbable to find a close to ideal match for you without taking a big enough sample size of people.

An obligation to yourself-- against a stacked system

I read somewhere about an old guy giving advice to his soon to be adult grandson. The whole story is pretty much about how kids and women are generally protected in modern society, however when it comes to being a man, there isn't a whole lot of mechanisms looking out for you and I would have to agree with that.

There has been plenty statistics out there that 50% of marriages end in divorce and of these divorces 2/3's of them have been initiated by women. In addition if children are involved, the women will generally get custody and the couple will generally split financial assets and the man will end up paying for child support. If the divorced female fancies another guy, she may make the decision not to marry so that she can continue to receive financial support from the male and enjoy the companionship of her new boy-toy. In other words, have her cake and eat it too.

I have read about many of these kinds of scenarios and come to the opinion that marriage is a very dangerous proposition for the man. The man has a lot to lose and the woman has a lot to gain from such an arrangement. As an interesting aside, a lot of Japanese women are pretty much the "head of the financial household," where many men generally give all their income to their wives for them to "manage" and the hard working men get "allowances" from their wives to spend on as they wish. I had an interesting conversation with a female friend of mine last week about that when it came to possibly marrying a Japanese girl and I responded, if that was the case I'd rather become a playboy instead of getting married to anyone. My response might have come off as a bit of a shocker, but it made perfect sense... I still have no idea where this notion of the man giving all his money to the wife historically came from, but I'll leave it as a side project to figure out.

For those of you that have followed this blog, I have a keen interest in personal finance as financial planning is crucial for the long term life planning. I for one, do not want to spend any more time than I have to working at job because I have to and would rather spend time on things that I want to do. In order to achieve these goals, I require many years of hard work and good financial management. I obviously don't want to be set back by a bad divorce, (and people say that is what a prenuptial is for, I am still on the fence about it however).

With these risks in mind, I obviously have to set very high standards for women that I would consider marrying. We would be very well suited for each other, I would have to be damn well confident that I could trust her. Women in general would want their man to honestly tell them that they are for "the one" for them... and considering the risks, I would damn well have to consider them "the one" if that were the case. It would not come easy, because it would be absolutely necessary that my trust be earned.

So when it comes to finding the right woman, I have no apologies for being the measured man that I should be.