A careful reader of my posts will note that I don’t say anything about who’s capable of direct communication. In fact, I blame the incapacity of so many men to know what they want and to be honest about it for the current confusion.

The gendered roles in dating are downstream of desire. People aren’t forced into them by lack of ability to do anything else, they are drawn to them because of how they get attracted and how they want to be seen. The female readers I’ve heard from so far do feel seen by my post, so I’m not awfully bothered by accusations of sexism.

Elsewhere in his post, Wesley talks about how the differences in, e.g., big 5 traits aren’t that large between and women, and concludes that sex differences are magnified by sexist culture. Again, this is confusing “roles” with “traits”. (Straight) men and women date differently because they date each other.

Dating is a game for two, and thus the two roles will naturally polarize. In this way it is very different from e.g. a workplace team in which a lot of people are told to do roughly the same thing. Analogy: NFL linemen and cornerbacks and polarized by body type because teams need both to play a specific role. It doesn’t mean that the average NFL cornerback is small and weak, only that he optimizes for quickness above all else. A relationship, like a sports team, works better when the roles complement each other, not when they are identical.

The way dating roles are polarized does differ from culture to culture, but:

1. Not arbitrarily so, because they are very constrained by biological differences like the fact that men are stronger and women are the ones who get pregnant.

2. No matter how the roles change, I can’t think of a culture in which they are the same for both men and women.

In a world where men and women can seek each other with relative freedom, I strongly predict that women’s role will be more yin-like and men’s more yang. If anyone has anthropological evidence to the contrary, I would love to learn about it.