I don’t mind talking about the subject of Romantic love months after Valentine’s Day because frankly, the subject need not be limited to that day. We have critiqued the Romantic model for great reason and the relevance of the subject is year-round. I have no qualms about completing these thoughts at this time of year.

While this is not a step-by-step takedown of the article itself, some context is clearly required. If one can see the tag line for the article by Jaimee Marshall, it reads: “That our greatest novels, most enduring works of art, most popular songs, and most affecting films overwhelmingly center around themes of romantic love is telling.”

Amounting to nothing much more than “It’s in our media and recent history, therefore it is right”, it sums up the gist of the article. Okay, if you want more, here are some gimmies.

“We all knew that those who vocally ‘hated’ Valentine’s Day really just meant they hated spending it alone and resented everyone who got to partake in the festivities with a chivalrous, thoughtful lover.”

A hasty summarization alleging that there are no legitimate critiques on the idea of the holiday (Yes, I know it’s not actually a holiday but judging by the pious and worshipful attitudes of its celebrators, is it not practically a “holiday”?) And, the allegation that men are lonely and bitter because they ain’t got no woman. Seems like projection, since these women appear to be constantly bitter at men deciding not to let women be the center of their lives.

And that’s what the title of the article, ‘The Case for Centering Your Life Around Romantic Love’, means in the end, doesn’t it? It reads, ‘The Case for Centering Your Life Around Women’.

The article tries to sound nuanced, as follows:

“Since children are dependent on their parents for survival, some form of sustained pair bonding is clearly essential, though (Richard S.) Schwartz says there’s no reason to think it must be romantic. You could imagine, and indeed there is precedent, for a sort of kin-based, communal structure to raising children that gets the job done without monogamous romantic love. However, romantic love’s persistence across cultures suggests it’s a core feature of human psychology, not an incidental cultural invention.”

I promise this will be the last of the Evie article, but referring to “renowned” biological anthropologist Helen Fisher:

“…one of the world’s leading experts on the neuroscience of romantic love, has described it as humanity’s most powerful drive. ‘People pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love,’ she has said, framing romantic love as a deeply embedded neural system that cannot simply be opted out of. According to Fisher, humans are hardwired for pair bonding through their very brain circuitry.”

Appropriate, is it not, that the emotional impulse to die for and kill for and dedicate one’s life to women comes from an “expert on neuroscience”, presenting male disposability as a norm. And yes, for those new to basic humanity for the male of the human species: the glorification and exaltation of male disposal for the sake of females is precisely what is being talked about here. The Romanticist thinks it’s dreamy. Anyone with basic esteem for men would think it is ghastly.

Since when is love in its most meaningful sense a cause or motive for death and abnegation?

But that’s the gist of that article. Blubbering pontifications confusing romanticism with proper pairbonding between the sexes, elevating Romantic love above all human relations (“All other human relationships pale in comparison”) and the constant appeal to hardwiring and biological inevitability.

In my mind, this all amounts to human (male) self-destruction as an argument for human species survival – this is the essence of collectivism, the denial of humanity to one segment of the species to serve a societal idealism.

Alright, enough of the nonsense. Here are the Five Reasons Not to Center Your Life Around Romantic Love.

1. The History of Romantic Love

The original article implies that our novels, artworks, “popular songs” and “most affecting films” are the proof we need that we need to center our lives around romance. To me, this accidentally suggests that all these are vastly new to human history, and nothing evolutionary in the sense that it was a cornerstone to our becoming homo sapiens, standing on our own two feet and achieving the glory of civilization.

While I am not saying that choices made from human infatuation never happened earlier in human history, nobody called it a virtue per se. The codifying of these infatuations into a whole framework of romantic love, or courtly love, appears to be in the order of centuries old.

Romantic love is as such not a biological constant. Instead it was a new, aristocratic cultural edict in which asymmetrical emotionalism was declared as a virtue. Emotion over mind became the standard. The result was the preaching of man’s sacrifice of rational interests, priorities, personal dignity, discernment, and resources.

What’s more, if we are talking history, marriage was primarily done with economic and political endpoints in mind, and yes as well as kinship. Passion was not the key factor. While to the uninitiated these arrangements seem like a game for the very rich, even the much poorer classes married for economic and survival purposes. The poor in particular did not appear to have the luxury of impulsive romantic acts.

The man grovels for the pedestalized female, who is both superior and more fragile than the man at the same time. Such is the legacy of romantic love, continuing to this day in modern formats. But the modern formats are taken today, erroneously, as evidence of the biological evidence of homo romanticus patiens…the suffering romantic man, as the apex of evolution.  

(Some runner ups were homo troubadorus, and homo pedestalicus, but I digress)

Being the farthest from the historical authority on the subject myself, I will leave some readily accessible links to Peter Wright’s gynocentrism.com, in particular the ones under ‘Courtly & Romantic Love’:

Courtly and romantic love

These will be able to tell you more than I can of the historical details that make clear that Romantic love is far less wholesome than most people delude themselves into thinking. Much of the Romantic ideal is downright misandric, if one can uncover his or her self-imposed blindfolds and take a good look.

2. Romantic Love is for Show and Public Acceptance.

Ever notice how in the process of promoting Romanticism, it always entails an element of loudness and publicity? Romantic love is to be “shouted”, one must want everybody to know it, and it is what the world needs right now to solve all our problems.

In the otherwise genuinely entertaining show Family Matters, Carl Winslow (the husband and father in the show) is too often portrayed as what I can only describe as henpecked, though to be fair this quality did not necessarily dominate the character’s run on the show. In the b-story of the episode “It Didn’t Happen One Night”, Harriette (the wife/mother) is upset with her husband, essentially, because he won’t express how he feels about her in public, and instead prefers to keep things private. This cumulates into what is essentially a concession on Carl’s part as he takes his police megaphone and shouts to the entire neighborhood out his door about how he loves his wife, after which Harriette is happy.

Certainly there are other moments like this in media and no doubt in romantic stories. There are other vestiges of this in our world – the awkward kiss cams in stadiums, carvings in trees with cupid’s arrows, blimps conveying messages that Boy loves Girl (yes, Family Matters did this too), the get-down-on-one-knee and propose in public that I’ve seen too often to my exasperation, and many more.

The marketing used here is “true love against the world”. As if the world will never approve of the love of this fine couple, but they don’t care, they are going to scream it out into the world and it doesn’t matter who knows it!

The problem with that is, that this is false – it’s not about being in defiance of societal expectations. Instead, it is about making sure society approves it.

The Romantic model, certainly as we are seeing it today, is all about advertising one’s love instead of keeping things intimate and private, leaving things within the pairbond and not shoving it into people’s faces. What we have is all about having an audience, and the approval of said audience.

It’s all about making it everybody’s business.

The approval, then, is focused on making sure the female half is “treated right”, when concerning the heterosexual side of things. As a sidenote, romantic framing within the LGBTQ+ contexts are always celebrated and subject to public approval, such to the point that any objection to that is immediately shot down as “bigotry” even if the objection was more akin to “get a room”.

But back on point. This societal scrutiny and approval is what the romantic model thrives on. It has nothing properly to do with indifference or defiance of what others may think.

Let’s talk more on how this is all for the performative benefit for the female. We know that the romantic model enables female narcissism vastly. A key quality about narcissism is the requisite of an audience to adore and uphold the narcissist. This “shout your love” aspect of the social Romantic model is tailor-made for the narcissist.

This is a danger for both healthy pairbonding and to one’s actual character, male or female. The society that abides under the Romantic model is essentially promoting living by consensus.

Under this, men are only “approved humans” if they center their lives around women. The rebuttals for failing to do so are ready-made and women of all stripes are equipped with them: Incel, Misogynist, something referencing penis size, Loser, and whatever else they can scrounge up.

The women in question cannot conceive of a life in which they aren’t showered with social approval, in essence demanding a lifelong princess treatment. Jettisoning self-accountability, she becomes just a set of whims and firing emotions.

And this is supposed to be essential to the human race biologically? This is what we must celebrate?

I’ll close off this second point by mentioning that in a proper pairbond, privacy is non-negotiable to the intimacy. There is nothing wrong with passion (rationally navigated and arrived at), but by its very design it is not something one advertises the particulars of. “None of your business” should be the norm regarding the details of the relationship as far as the passion goes.

The over-advertising and screaming-to-the-world of romance is deluded. If there is a good pair bond, why not keep it personal? Public romance is to involve the world – and so the pair is beholden to that world.

If we as a race evolved to uphold anything, it is our notion of privacy – but that is a subject for another time.

3. Pathologies Particular to the Romantic Model

The big error that Romanticists repeat that make them sound somewhat credible is the conflation of Romantic love with pairbonding itself.

Pairbonding, by the term alone, should imply mutual respect, values-based meaningful love, and above all, a close understanding and a type of friendship. If we look closely at romance, any pretense that it is a valid form of pairbonding has a way of unraveling.

I have already talked about the narcissism it induces particularly in women. The attention-seeking works in two ways: making sure the woman looks well-taken care of and tended to (“treat her right”, etc), and making sure the man us under her thumb and heel as needed, at her beck and call.

The latter sometimes is blatant; he is observably submissive when one takes a quick glance at the relationship. There are other circumstances in which this is not obvious, however: the pretense of leadership. Women, often the tradgyn types, love to talk about how a man leads.

Translating what such a woman says, this reads: “He pulls the carriage I am resting on while I crack the whip.”

Such “leadership” is performative, and she is nothing but condescending towards the very man she is allegedly pairbonded with. But this is neither friendship, understanding, nor any meaningful notion of love.

It resembles a relational pathology.

By design, the male fills the sacrificial role in anything deriving from the Romantic model. In a proper pairbond, a woman should be aghast at the notion that her male partner, her close friend, is to be sacrificed at all; she should be equally aghast that she is the beneficiary and endpoint.

This horror is a rational response, assuming we can expect women to feel this at all at this point. What do we have instead in this world? Adoration, gratitude, and joy – because a man is degraded. She is the visible cause of this, and her response is the opposite of horror. This is the pathology of society, the legacy of Romantic love. And it appears to be essentially exclusive to this model.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the accidents of youth that are the result of marketing Romantic love by and large. Emotional damage, radical adjustment to expectations physically and mentally, humiliation, all the way up to teen pregnancy – those are the fruits of Romantic love and the embracing of infatuation as standard instead of a challenge to overcome.

And what about the darker things that have been done? Murders due to jealousy, the murder of children in the light of affairs, suicidal acts of the moment, hybristophilic situations with women romanticizing dangerous criminals, and the most common popular result of romance: the thriving divorce industry and women looting their ex-husbands property without a care in the world.

We can safely say that it is rational to avoid Romantic love. When women, even those who allegedly “defend” men like the busybodies in Evie, instead insist that we need more Romantic love, and assert that only nasty, “lonely and bitter” men are against this, then this only indicates how deep the pathology runs in society. If the antifeminists themselves still fight for gynocentric ideology, it’s more uphill a battle than one wishes it is.

4. Companionate Love is Superior to Romantic Love

I for one wish we had a snappier label for this variant of love that we advocate. Companionate love, for the moment, seems to suffice.

It incorporates Storge in the sense that it is in fact a love of the family in a real sense. A pairbond, assuming it is built to last, is literally chosen family. The reason I don’t care to *only* call it Storge and leave it that is due to the privacy/intimate factor – it specializes it just enough to earn what is possibly a distinct categorization, or a subcategory.

Now let’s talk about Eros, or Erotic love. While Eros is often conflated with Romantic love, this is a mistake, and the reason goes beyond a simple mis-categorization.

Eros, properly, is unabashed. Romantic love, on the other hand, serves to both curtail and subordinate Eros. Romantic love serves to starve and control sex in a way that cartelizes it, to manipulate a man by withholding sex and general affection. So I think it is wrong to directly equate it with Eros.

In case I haven’t made it clearer before, those that hold the reins of Romantic love don’t approve of men’s Eros in any meaningful way. It goes without much explanation that male sexuality is demonized, with the express directive that it is only proper when it serves women. If anything, Romantic love whitewashes Eros, demonizes it and then “forgives” it in men if certain shit-tests are passed.

As the erotic factor is important to a pairbond (albeit in varying degrees; men are different in the volume of their sexuality here), is Erotic love the proper descriptor of what we are looking for?

Well, while it is part of it, a pairbond isn’t necessary per se for erotic love to have some presence, so again it isn’t a complete picture. Like Storge, it isn’t an estimate of it, but it is adjacent. What we are looking for incorporates both to be sure, but it needs a proper category that isn’t Romantic love.

Whatever we call this (and again, Companionate love seems to do for the time being), it is the more rational, moral choice over Romantic love.

So, does this mean we must center our lives around Companionate love instead? The answer…is no.

5. You Shouldn’t Be Centering Your Life Around “Love” Anyway.

Even if Romantic love is all it’s cracked up to be (and I hope I’ve indicated successfully that it isn’t), one must not center one’s life around it. So it should follow that whatever remains that *is* all it’s cracked up to be – that is, what we call Companionate love or any proper form of intimate love – should likewise not be the center of one’s life.

Romantic love is practically by definition centering one’s life around a woman on the man’s part, and on the woman’s part the indulging and moralizing of men’s centering of her in his life. We disavow this paradigm by rejecting Romanticism itself.

So, as a proper form of Companionate love doesn’t involve this centering, it follows we shouldn’t force it to be the center as it is not natural to do so.

A human life essentially is about values and the pursuit of happiness. Things like love are a detail (albeit non-trivial), not an end goal. If anything, the pairbond should be among the number of things that reflect how you live your life with the values you aim for. They are not the aim itself.

Your ikigai, that sense of life purpose and worth, is something particular to yourself that cannot be simplified by who you have a relationship with. Everything and everybody you choose to surround yourself with should be an indicating detail and reflection of the choices you made as per your ikigai. They are not the ikigai itself.

In plainer language, your pairbond should reflect your values, yes. But it is not in itself the center.

While this is the most important reason in this article, there isn’t much to be more longwinded about, and I think this is very straightforward. Love is not the most important thing on this planet nor for our existence, and there are other things more important than the even best iterations of partner love.

Respect, especially for oneself, comes to mind. From that flows mutual respect, the understanding of values and boundaries, and one another. Love being the greatest value in the world tends to comfort people, but it’s time to challenge that.

Some Closing Thoughts on Love

Even if we extracted the toxic elements – the sacrificial expectation for men, the pedestalizing, and the exhibitionistic performances – the very notion that one must center their life around love is a funny thing.

I have come to properly understand love as an action that is self-initiated. In some of its purest forms, it manifests itself as attention that bring out the life in something, be it work on one’s car, a dedicated train set, a well-designed composition or architecture, a meal cooked in just the right way, and many other examples.

Love, then, appears to be a cultivation and a process. It’s not an end goal to center one’s life around, but just something we wield mindfully. It cannot be faked – “duty” or “obligation” to love then becomes inexact, as again this is self-initiated.

The same should stand when love is applied to human relations. Love brings out the life in people where needed. Relationships, and loves, are built over time.

But reliance on another’s love is only an indicator that one has failed to love oneself in a meaningful way as I have described thus far: taking charge of one’s own life and freeing it from being beholden to another’s approval.

The centering of love, and the “pursuit” of it, then makes for two pratfalls: one – the insistence to perform love to the point of sacrificial behavior, and two – the complete, narcissistic reliance on love by another such that they will fall apart when they have to stand alone.

Standing alone is the key to humanity and despite the familiar prattling of how man is a social animal, humanity’s true evolutionary distinction is the ability to stand alone…but that is an article for another time.

Seems like only yesterday we had a Senate election in Texas. Now we’ve got another one. For whatever reason, Texas holds its primary elections early, so I started seeing your yard signs in April, more than six months before election day. Frankly, in this house we abhor all yard signs, but that is a topic for another day. In Texas, one might as well complain about the heat in the summer.

I do admire the simplicity of your message, however. “Talarico for Texas,” black print on a white background. Some of my friends opine that “Talarico for Massachusetts” would be more appropriate, which may be true, but it lacks alliteration.

In the three months or so since your signs started popping up, I’ve learned more about you. I think you’d be the first to admit you didn’t have much of a statewide profile before you secured the nomination. Now I know you have been a member of the Texas House of Representatives since 2018 and you currently represent the 50th Texas Congressional District which covers a good portion of Austin. Now that the “getting to know you” phase is over, I have some advice for you.

I have noticed that your lack of a wife has been remarked about by your political opponents. The Texas Constitution states that one must be 30 years old to run for governor. If you were 30, your lack of a spouse might not arouse a lot of suspicion. After all, JFK didn’t get married till he was 36. Of course, before that he wasn’t exactly a monk. You, however, are 37 years old and, by all accounts, hardly a player. I realize that the lack of a significant other should have no bearing on your ability to represent the State of Texas in the U.S. Senate. Many voters, however, will feel otherwise.

I saw that you or your handlers decided to introduce a girlfriend into the mix. Supposedly, she is your former chief of staff, which makes it look like she’s taking one for the team. Consequently, her enlistment has not allayed all the rumors swirling about your sex life or lack of same.

Frankly, I don’t know what turns you on. Even so, I have a bit of advice for you. It’s simple: Come out of the closet – even if you are a regular heterosexual guy. Let me explain.

There was a time when homosexuals running for public office had to keep it under wraps. Nowadays, however, it’s not that unusual for a member of a legislative body or a cabinet, or the occupant of a governor’s mansion to be an out-and-out homosexual. A mature bachelor, however, is still a rarity in politics. The late Lindsey Graham was one and rumors persisted throughout his tenure in the Senate.

Now there are any number of reasons why a man might choose to remain single. Unfortunately, as the percentage of single men has grown in society, its acceptability has not grown in proportion, either in society or politics. A lot of women voters might look at your youthful, clean-cut image (your nickname “Opie” is appropriate) and see you as the son they wish they had…dutiful, attentive, sensitive. One man might see you as lacking in testosterone (I understand “Low T Talarico” has gained currency among your political foes); another might see you dating his daughter and abhor your politics but breathe a sign of relief…no tattoos, no piercings, no drugs. She could do worse.

If you are low T, consider yourself blessed. A strong sex drive causes a man to dissipate his energies and squander time, energy, and money. Sad to say, most men don’t realize that until they are older and their testosterone levels have plummeted. So you have avoided stepping on a lot of land mines.

Your background as a seminarian is a double-edged sword. With some people, it’s a plus, with others a negative. Some see you as a man of God, others as a sissified mama’s boy. Of course, it is possible to be both simultaneously. Also, you could be a preacher and a rake at the same time. Given the overwhelming majority of females in churches, a preacher man has plenty of opportunities for dalliances – and there is the occasional femme fatale hankering to defile a man of the cloth.

Most women, however, would look at a man of God (Catholic priests excluded) at age 37 and assume that the lack of a wife indicates a failure to engage with the marriage sacrament. There are any number of reasons why a man, whether of God or mammon, wouldn’t want to make a commitment to a woman, but women don’t see it that way. The way they look at it, you haven’t knuckled under. You have not donned the yoke. You’re not one of those MGTOWs, are you?

As I said, the best rejoinder is to simply come out of the closet. Of all the reasons for explaining one’s bachelorhood, the most politically acceptable is homosexuality. All you have to do is say, “I’m gay” and everyone will just nod and say, “Oh, OK, whatever.” There’s nothing wrong with that. No one will ever bother you again about your lack of a spouse. In fact, adjectives like “stunning,” “amazing,” and “brave” might be attached to your campaign.

Of course, the danger of this is that one day you might want to tie the knot with a woman. How to explain that? Maybe say you were hetero-curious and much to your surprise, you found a female life partner. Or you can announce you are bisexual. Again, the response will be, “Oh, OK, whatever.” There’s nothing wrong with that either. Again, no one will complain.

In today’s topsy-turvy world, almost anything is preferable to being a single heterosexual male. If you were a heterosexual female, you could pull it off – you know, you don’t need no man. But if you are a single man who don’t need no woman…well, women voters in Texas won’t cotton to such a man, and in 2024, 6,037,000 of them voted compared to just 5,404,000 men. Also, keep in mind that there are some male voters who don’t trust a bachelor. They look at it as failure to “man up.”

I wish I could tell you that you could just go ahead and campaign as a confirmed bachelor. Unfortunately, as we say in Texas, that dog won’t hunt. Tell Texas voters you haven’t found the right girl. Or you’re too picky. Or you don’t want to settle for anything less than a devout spouse. After all, being a seminarian, you must have found it hard to find a decent Christian woman, what with all those stoners, sluts, floozies, and hussies in Austin.

When faced with the question, “Are you seeing anyone?” you might attempt to make light of your situation by explaining you’re still sowing your wild oats. Given your personality, that is guaranteed to garner chuckles and defuse the situation so you can move on to the issues of the day.

Granted, if you are elected, attending social functions stag in Washington would be awkward. You might seek out someone on Lindsey Graham’s staff for advice on how he dealt with that. On the other hand, I’m sure there is a discreet D.C. escort service that will be more than happy to supply you with a hottie to hang on our arm. Just be sure you don’t commingle your campaign funds with your personal services funds. And if you ever happen to get caught in some sort of sex scandal, many male voters of Texas who had written you off might figure there’s hope for you yet.

One photo op you might consider is a visit to Boy’s Town in Nuevo Laredo. I’m going to assume you’ve never been there, but there was a time when any man running for office in Texas would have paid a visit or two or three there over the years. In fact, a road trip to Boy’s Town was a rite of passage for most Texas boys. Now I am not saying you should hire a hooker. Rather, you should go there and preach, attempting to save the souls of those poor misguided souls working in La Zona. Religious voters will think highly of your mission inside the belly of the beast. Most men, however, will see you went to Nuevo Laredo and assume you went there for the same reasons they did. There’s more to that boy than meets the eye, they’ll say.

Unfortunately, a pilgrimage to Boy’s Town has negative connotations in some quarters. Way back in 1990 we had a rancher named Clayton Williams who ran for governor. He boasted of having been not only to Boy’s Town but also the Chicken Ranch, the famous brothel storied in song (“LaGrange” by ZZ Top) and drama (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), and conveniently located midway between the University of Texas and the Texas A&M campuses. Williams, unfortunately, did not get elected and Texas got stuck with Ann Richards. Drat that 19th Amendment!

It’s a sad state of affairs but almost any status aside from being a never-married heterosexual male is acceptable today. If you are a straight man, I understand you might be reluctant to lie about being gay in order to get elected.

Hey, it’s not like you’d be the first politician who told a lie to win an election.

The featured image is of Palo Duro canyon, Texas. By Sefor4 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

If true, female status preference should be tightly linked to reproductive motivation, and modern dating-up should therefore produce more babies, not fewer. At its core, hypergamy is fundamentally a theory about successful reproduction — not status-seeking in isolation.

Yet the data tell the opposite story. Fertility rates have collapsed, especially among educated and higher-earning women who are most active in the contemporary mating market. Many women pursue visibly higher-status men while showing little interest in turning those pairings into families. This mismatch suggests the popular “hypergamy” explanation has been stretched well beyond its evolutionary logic.

The evolutionary rationale for hypergamy weakens when the reproductive goal that supposedly drove it is absent or greatly diminished. In that light, what we are seeing today is not adaptive mate choice for offspring viability, but a culturally exaggerated drive for personal status elevation operating in a void of its own.

Subclinical narcissism offers a more coherent account. Personality research shows that narcissistic women are drawn to partners who enhance their social image, prestige, and self-esteem. High-status or highly attractive men function less as co-parents than as trophies — symbols of personal success that provide admiration and reflected glory for the women.

Rather than seeking affiliation or reproduction, these women prioritize self-enhancement and status elevation; the relationships often dissolve once the man’s utility for ego-enhancement fades, skipping the long-term investment in offspring that classic hypergamy theory requires.

The research quotations provided below illustrate this point. Collectively, they show that status-oriented mate choice need not be read as evidence of evolutionary hypergamy at all. When reproductive motivation is diminishingly low or absent, this behavior reflects an entirely different drive: not a modified form of hypergamy, but narcissistic self-enhancement.

These women are pursuing high-status men primarily as trophies to elevate their own image, prestige, and ego — not as providers for future children. This is not hypergamy simply decoupled from babymaking. It is an entirely different phenomenon — narcissistic self-enhancement in romantic disguise. Said differently: No babies? Not hypergamy.

“Narcissists are more likely to choose relationships that elevate their status over relationships that cultivate affiliation. For example, narcissists are keener on gaining new partners than on establishing close relationships with existing ones. They often demonstrate an increased preference for high-status friends and trophy partners, perhaps because they can bask in the reflected glory of these people.” ¹
— Grapsas et al., 2020

“Narcissism has been linked with the materialistic pursuit of wealth and symbols that convey high status. This quest for status extends to relationship partners. Narcissists seek romantic partners who offer self-enhancement value either as sources of fawning admiration, or as human trophies (e.g., by possessing impressive wealth or exceptional physical beauty).”²
— Wallace, 2011

“Romantic partners were more likely to be seen as a source of self-esteem to the extent that they provided the narcissist with a sense of popularity and importance (i.e., social status). Narcissists’ preference for romantic partners reflects a strategy for interpersonal self-esteem regulation… This pattern of relating romantically may have some benefits (notably self-esteem) but may lack durability, particularly when the ability of the partner to provide self-esteem wears thin. For example, as clinicians have noted, a narcissist’s relationship with an attractive “trophy” spouse may end when that trophy ages or loses a prestigious job.” ³
— Campbell, 1999

“Narcissists particularly look for in a partner are physical attractiveness and agentic traits (e.g., status and success). A narcissist’s ideal partner is like a narcissist’s ideal self (recall Freud’s comments): attractive, successful, and admiring of the narcissist. Indeed, in our research, narcissists report that part of the reason that they are drawn to attractive and successful partners is that these people are similar to them.” ⁴
— Campbell, Brunell & Finkel, 2006

“Narcissists use close relationships largely for the purpose of gaining social status and self-esteem (Campbell, 1999). A good example of this can be found in narcissists’ reports of romantic attraction. Narcissists are particularly attracted to individuals who are (a) high in social status (e.g., successful, popular, and attractive) and can provide the narcissist with self enhancement via association, and (b) admiring and can enhance the narcissist’s self-views directly via flattery and attention. In contrast, narcissists typically report less attraction for partners interested in close, caring relationships.” ⁵
— Tanchotsrinon, Maneesri & Campbell 2007

“Gold diggers were female, reckless (i.e., psychopathic), narcissistic, lived in larger cities, and students. Female, right-wing students scored highest in gold digging, consistent with increased access to resourceful partners… Its materialistic-exploitative behaviors mark gold digging as a fast life strategy, emphasizing short-term mating and resource-extraction. Yet, gold diggers seek re­sources (e.g., money, status) but not reproduction––requiring a nuanced life history strategy calibration via self-centered (i.e., narcissistic) behavior over reciprocal decisions.”⁶
— Freyth & Jonason, 2026

In the evolutionary playbook, hypergamy was never an end in itself. We should stop treating it as a cogent explanation when it so clearly functions as a “Just-So” story for a distinctly maladaptive phenomenon.

References:

[1] Grapsas, S., Brummelman, E., Back, M. D., & Denissen, J. J. (2020). The “why” and “how” of narcissism: A process model of narcissistic status pursuit. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 150-172.
[2] Wallace, H. M. (2011). Narcissistic self-enhancement. In: Campbell, W. K., & Miller, J. D. (Eds.) The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Findings, and Treatments, 309-318.
[3] Campbell, W. K. (1999). Narcissism and romantic attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1254–1270.
[4] Campbell, W. K., Brunell, A. B., & Finkel, E. J. (2006). Narcissism, Interpersonal Self-Regulation, and Romantic Relationships: An Agency Model Approach. In: Vohs, K. D., & Finkel, E. J. (Eds.), Self and Relationships: Connecting Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Processes, 57–83.
[5] Tanchotsrinon, P., Maneesri, K., & Campbell, W. K. (2007). Narcissism and romantic attraction: Evidence from a collectivistic culture. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(3), 723-730.
[6] Freyth, L., & Jonason, P. K. (2026). Mercenary predators: Individual characteristics of gold diggers. Personality and Individual Differences, 258, 113817.

Observations of extreme hypergamy among women may be equally explained by the rise of cultural narcissism in affluent societies (Twenge & Campbell, 2009), a motive that differs from baseline hypergamy, but which nevertheless involves comparable behaviors of self-enhancement and status-seeking.

The rise of narcissistic behaviors among women is receiving increased attention from academia, particularly with the addition of new variants to the lexicon such as communal narcissism, and vulnerable narcissism, which appear to be preferred female modes of expressing narcissism. A more in-depth survey of narcissism variants among women, and their implications can be read here.

Hypergamy, as an evolutionary motivation, doesn’t require a woman to overestimate her own attractiveness and desirability as she seeks to secure high resource/status males. Narcissism, on the contrary, does entail an overestimation by women of their own attractiveness & desirability as they seek to secure high resource/status males.

To discover whether hypergamy or narcissism is at play, one might simply ask a woman to rate her own attractiveness. If she strongly overrates herself, then her mating-up is likely driven by narcissism and is maladaptive. If she rates herself honestly, then her desire to mate up is more likely driven by an adaptive hypergamy. Mating-up today appears largely driven by maladaptive narcissism; therefore any rationalizing or excusing it as “natural” and “adaptive” serves to compound and increase that same culturally-driven narcissism.

A note on terminology:

Sigmund Freud introduced narcissism as a developmental trait that ranged from healthy to unhealthy.^4,5 Some evolutionary psychologists posit that a degree of narcissism might be adaptive in the wider evolutionary sense, though this hypothesis (which has zero genetic evidence to confirm it) can only be applied to a limited subset of behaviours before tipping into maladaptive expressions of narcissism as measured by the usual psychometric instruments.^6,7,8 Moreover, no one has satisfactorily demonstrated that a mild, non-pathological narcissism is adaptive and belongs to a construct continuum with more pathological narcissism; therefore it is conjecture to claim that narcissism is natural but that it simply “gets out of hand” at the more extreme end of a hypothesised spectrum.

With these points in mind it’s necessary to differentiate between female self-enhancement as an evolutionary survival strategy, versus female self-enhancement as a maladaptive, narcissistic pathology. The narcissistic self-enhancement we see increasingly demonstrated among women today is not a contributor to evolutionary success; on the contrary it works to undermine family ties, corrode intimate relationships, and is also associated with lowering the birth rate – the exact opposites of conditions required for evolutionary success. Lastly, by differentiating hypergamous self-enhancement from narcissistic self-enhancement we avoid the error of encouraging or excusing narcissism under the banner of it being “natural.”

_{Maladaptive vs. adaptive versions of self-enhancement}

REFERENCES:

[1] Grapsas, S., Brummelman, E., Back, M. D., & Denissen, J. J. (2020). The “why” and “how” of narcissism: A process model of narcissistic status pursuit. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 150-172.
[2] Campbell, W. K. (1999). Narcissism and romantic attraction. Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 77(6), 1254.
[3] Wallace, H. M. (2011). Narcissistic self-enhancement. The handbook of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder: Theoretical approaches, empirical findings, and treatments, 309-318.
[4] Freud, S. (2014). On narcissism: An introduction. Read Books Ltd.
[5] Segal, H., & Bell, D. (2018). The theory of narcissism in the work of Freud and Klein. In Freud’s On Narcissism (pp. 149-174). Routledge.
[6] Holtzman, N. S., & Donnellan, M. B. (2015). The roots of Narcissus: Old and new models of the evolution of narcissism. Evolutionary perspectives on social psychology, 479-489.
[7] Holtzman, N. S. (2018). Did narcissism evolve?. Handbook of Trait Narcissism: Key Advances, Research Methods, and Controversies, 173-181.
[8] Czarna, AZ, Wróbel, M., Folger, LF, Holtzman, NS, Raley, JR, & Foster, JD (2022). Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Evolutionary roots and emotional profiles. In TK Shackelford & L. Al-Shawaf (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Evolution and the Emotions. Oxford University Press.