On the surface, it seems very intuitive doesn't it? The men who instinctively need validation the most will be more motivated to do things to impress women and will be more reproductively successful, right? This makes sense until you realize that historically, men didn't need female validation to reproduce, and therefore the competition between men was for access and not much else. Enthusiastic female approval was, at best, a bonus and focusing on it too much would be detrimental. Any man in that situation that cared whether the women were 'genuinely attracted' would be LESS reproductively successful not more. Romance is inefficient and the other (unromantic) men would spend their time/energy maximizing resource gathering and territorial expansion which would have a much bigger ROI. Even when we move forward in time a bit, arranged marriages were the norm up until recent centuries and the men succeeded in that endeavor by impressing the girl's father, not by impressing her. 

TL;DR version of 1st paragraph: Exhibiting behaviors to romance/attract women is just one reproductive strategy out of many and probably not the most successful. There are many more descendants of Genghis Khan than Casanova. (To any moron reading this, no I do not justify r*ping and pillaging, I'm just stating what happened.)

To reiterate and expand upon these points:

  1. The more closely a behavior is tied to your survival, the more deeply rooted an instinct it will be. E.g. the Palmar grasp reflex.
  2. For 99 % of human history, adult women were far more dependent on adult men for survival than the other way around.
  3. Therefore, if (and that's a big if) an instinctive need for validation from the opposite gender DOES exist, it would be far more present amongst WOMEN than men.
  4. Since we see that women tend to lose their validation-seeking tendencies almost immediately after gaining 'independence', it's reasonable to infer from this that those behaviors were never instinctive to begin with.
  5. Going by points 2, 3, and 4 above, we can reasonably assume that validation-seeking isn't instinctive in men either.

So what exactly is going on here? If most men aren't "genetically hardwired" to seek female validation then why are so many of them obsessed with it today? I would say it's mainly a by-product of modern culture which itself is a by-product of technological advances. For most of human history, media wasn't anywhere near as far-reaching, stimulating, etc.. Also, government wasn't as big therefore, social sciences weren't very well-funded. This changed dramatically around the early 20th century or so. These fields tend to be magnets for those who have a need for attention and a need to be seen as "changing the world" which leads to a disdain for the normal or the traditional. Thus one of the most frequent targets of these new cultural tastemakers would be traditional gender roles. So as time passed, male perspectives/preferences came under more and more scrutiny while simultaneously, the female perspective became more and more heavily promoted. As a social species, we're quite sensitive to behaviors in others and whatever is presented as prominent, we'll copy, and whatever we see other people attacking, we'll attack. If any of you doubt that behaviors can be changed at the population level by consistent messaging, go look up this obscure little thing called religion.

In short:

  1. The modern male desperation for female validation is highly unlikely to be a genetically hardwired instinct because whatever positive selection pressures might exist in it's favor, they are probably outweighed by selection pressures for other behaviors.
  2. The tendency can be better explained by a need to conform to whatever behavioral standards are most promoted. Standards which are today being set by a small minority of men who have a much wider influence than they normally would due to modern technology.