TL;DR: A woman self-evaluates based on how much total attention she gets in her life. If she loses it in one place, she will make up for it in another.

6mo's after taking the pill, only just out of the most debilitating part of the anger stage, I can step back a bit from the LTR collapse that brought me here and think about patterns in my previous relationships.

I had severe beta habits that seem laughable now, but there was something about the women I was with that also matched a pattern. Anyone who writes about relationships talks about how changes in your life circumstances affect your personal ones, but they talk about it in terms of "stress" or "different priorities."

The changes that happened in my various girlfriends' lives all seemed to center around a change in how much personal attention they were getting in other parts of their lives - independently of me.

They each had changes in their careers that moved them from getting a lot of attention (as assistant profs, baristas, tv producers etc) to something more skills focused, and which took them out of daily interactions with people.

The ones that hooked up with Chads (and there were some real pieces of work) all did it to fulfill a deficit of attention in their lives. I didn't actually change much, but the amount of attention they got day to day did. All of their actions can be explained as a response to a need for attention.

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed that girls, from the age of 5, to 30 to even 65, all fight for or demand attention from me. When I am talking to other guys, the girls ignore the other guy and try being cute, flattering, challenging, or just running in circles screaming (both 30yr old, and 5yr old kid), because they need it.

Men don't demand each others' attention, except maybe guys who are comedians and need that kind of quippy banter for personal validation.

Lesson learned:

  1. Next time you are talking to a woman, consider that she is doing whatever she is doing because she needs attention to live. You can see the rhythm of it when you withdraw it, and bring it back.

  2. If you have been burned and are still angry about it, think about it in terms of her acting out her need for attention. Like hypergamy it's just her nature.

  3. Everybody does things for their own internal logic, even when they seem fucking nuts. A need for attention can cause her do things that seem completely insane and devoid of any logic, except when you look at it like a junkie needing her fix of sweet attention, it makes perfect sense.