Summary

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Do you have a job?

I bet you got that job by talking to the person who had to commit to hiring you to do it, after they'd reviewed your resume and cover letter, or outside of such a formal set up, at least they knew you and you told them why you'd be worthwhile.

Do you have a running partner?

Have you made friends after elementary school?

Do you have any kind of human relationship that isn't one of familiar or social obligation?

Because in each one of them, you went from stranger to known after who you are was evaluated.

It may have been as rigorous as a background/credit check, references and resume, transcript and interview rounds.

It may have been as superficial as "Hey, this is my cousin, we used to do landscaping together before, he can help out" being enough for a foreman/contractor.

No matter what, every single human interaction involves an estimation/trust/verification paradigm - - when you walk into a Best Buy, you know that the people in blue polos with headsets are there to tell you about products and prices and return policies.

It's easy to dupe humans, so good at recognizing patterns, so eager to recognize patterns, into overfitting to the data they have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYU1a0lTTTw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipation#In_music

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye

Every joke you've heard, from the simple imitation and exaggeration of another's manner, to the introduction of a non-fitting action (man in a suit, pie to the face), to the elaborate juxtaposition of the crude and the refined (the Aristocrats!), to sophisticated running jokes in comedy shows which create entire fictional universes to sustain their humor and satire - - - is built on a subversion of expectations.

We are designed to see patterns, to evaluate from priors, and to do so as much as possible,

because it works

It was how our ancient ancestors knew not to eat certain plants and insects, knew where to find fresh water, knew what indicated cold weather was coming, etc.

Pattern recognition is what allows a dynamical system to persist with an internal order in an environment that changes.

Some of these patterns are deeply ingrained in our neurology by the slow, deep writing of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24749819

Others have to be learned, but are written to disk quickly:

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2011/01/26/people-arent-born-afraid-of-spiders-and-snakes-fear-is-quickly-learned-during-infancy

Others we learn only with repetition and the simulation of that pattern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory#Physiology

But we can learn behaviors all the same.

Every adult who learned a second language rewrote parts of their brain to do so.

Deep in our decision making process is the knowledge that certain patterns fit others, that patterns repeat, and that prior conditions lead to future results absent some other influence.

Balance, yin and yang, Manichean notions of good and evil, dialectics, equilibrium, etc.

The unreasonable effectiveness of quantitative methods in modelling, predicting and describing the world around us should give a human being pause when they believe there is no order, no patterns governing how the world works.

Priors matter.

Patterns matter.

We learn about what may be by looking at what is, and what has been.

The present you live in is a result of the past. Whatever future will be is a result of the present, is a result of the past.

Your past is inescapable, it is what makes you, you.

Your choices, your reactions to the world around you, as it was - - this is what makes your history unique.

Even without direct DNA transfer our histories echo throughout newer generations.

A person is nothing but why they chose to do what they did.

Not everyone is born into the same circumstances and not everyone's life choices are theirs.

Some TRPers were born into poverty, some were born into wealth and ease. Some were born to very unhappy families (or not even families), others had lots of emotional support.

Maybe you don't live anywhere with lots of unhealthy, cheap food. Maybe you grew up on poptarts and McDonalds.

Likely, you might not have exactly the fitness of someone who was born to athletic parents with a 5k habit.

There are allowances in judgement a mature person will make for someone's past not having the best choices available.

It's unreasonable, for instance, to expect a person raised in a housing project, to a single mother, with their entire older male peer group in and out of prison for drug dealing, going to a shitty school filled with other people much like them, to have made all the right choices as a 16 year old that will put them on track to have their college apps done by that summer, and as a 17 year old freshman be off to University to study pre-medicine on a scholarship.

It's fantastical.

It basically doesn't happen without severe intervention.

It's tragic that it is so common, and so institutionalized.

And it also means the most lily-white, pro-diversity, kumbaya singing, moneyed liberal academic isn't about to move from their comfortable Chelsea loft to Camden, NJ and stay out late at night there just as they might if they were going to the Meatpacking district for drinks.

Because patterns and priors matter, and even they know it.

There have been several posts recently invoking the notion of sexual history, and partner count, etc.

Sexual history is no different.

Obviously, human sexual practice varies.

Abstinence, low STD rates, unheard of extramarital sex:

https://archive.is/xM4KD

Literal society sanctioned sex huts for children:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muria_people#Sexuality_and_marriage

But why do you think so many civilizations and religions created the paradigms of sexual abstinence?

Particularly putting this responsibility on women?

Why do you think the hymen as a feature of the female anatomy persists? (and in so many other species, non primates, even)?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17307304

Indeed, the intense sexual emotions that may precede and/or follow the pain, the breaking and bleeding of the hymen during the first complete sexual act may generate distinctive strong feelings on/from each side of the newly formed couple. .... As a general consequence, it appears that the two physical pains under consideration may have behavioral implications, in the sense that they contribute to increasing the stability of the connection between partners and thus, indirectly, to the welfare or even the survival (especially in former times) of the newborn child.

Why do you think the male penis is shaped the way it is?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3128753.stm

Tests led a team of US researchers, headed by Professor Gordon Gallup, to conclude that the penis acts as a "semen displacement device" and its shape has evolved in part to displace another man's semen. .... They also say they have evidence, from surveys of students, to indicate that sex tends to be more energetic if the women is suspected of cheating, or if the couple has been apart - suggesting a sub-conscious desire on the part of the man to rid his partner of any trace of another's semen.

The number of times the relationships, okcupid, twox, and askwomen subreddits (and they are hardly alone) have had the hard rationalizing (from both men and women) about past sexual histories not mattering after a deep and primal fear and insecurity is voiced over it, is not a coincidence.

The differential in ovarian egg reserve (look it up: basically done by 30), to sperm motility (look it up: men basically keep being potent until they're truly old, and older fathers may even confer longer lifespans on their children if their genes were ones strong enough to tolerate genetic fidelity in sperm manufacture at such an old age) is not a coincidence.

The classic love story trope of a woman pining for the lover she first chose as a young woman is not a coincidence.

The alpha fucks/beta bucks paradigm, born out so many times, and so often revolving around sexual giving being in great degree for free to alpha-men, and with such paucity to beta-men is not a coincidence.

The hypergamy of women is a natural, inbuilt instinct.

It is how their children get the best possible genes through a process that nature isn't kind to them in carrying out. Pregnancy and labor are very difficult, fraught with risk, and the only way for the species to continue.

This state of nature in reproductive strategy brought about those basic features of our physiology and our sexual instincts:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/27/9792.abstract

Results revealed that parenting implemented a global “parental caregiving” neural network, mainly consistent across parents, which integrated functioning of two systems: the emotional processing network including subcortical and paralimbic structures associated with vigilance, salience, reward, and motivation, and mentalizing network involving frontopolar-medial-prefrontal and temporo-parietal circuits implicated in social understanding and cognitive empathy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/17/12/4849.full

The presentation of a novel receptive female behind a screen resulted in a slight increase in NAC DA, which was augmented significantly during renewed copulation with the novel female. The present data suggest that the stimulus properties of a novel receptive female may serve to increase NAC DA transmission in a sexually satiated male rat, and this, in turn, may be related to the reinitiation of sexual behavior.

.....

Men's literal physiological structure, of their neurology and psychological states toward 'their children', and to their ability and desire to have sex and impregnate, are in opposition:

Men at once want and seek out as much sex as they can possibly have, and are rewired by interacting with their child to have that child as their mission.

Because TRP audience is primarily male, I will provide more material on women:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1143191

. As a consequence, it is shown that the equilibrium can only be of two types. In the "Victorian" type, all agents marry somebody of the same rank in the distribution of income. In the "Sex and the City" (SATC) type, women marry men who are better ranked than themselves. There is a mass of unmarried men at the bottom of the distribution of human capital, and a mass of single women at the top of that distribution. It is shown that the economy switches from a Victorian to an SATC equilibrium as inequality goes up.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-control-pills-affect-womens-taste/

A study published in August in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, however, suggests that women on the pill undergo a shift in preference toward men who share similar MHC genes. The female subjects were more likely to rate these genetically similar men’s scents (via a T-shirt the men had worn for two nights) as pleasant and desirable after they went on the pill as compared with before. Although no one knows why the pill affects attraction, some scientists believe that pregnancy—or in this case, the hormonal changes that mimic pregnancy—draws women toward nurturing relatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex_and_sexual_selection#MHC-mediated_mate_choice:_case_studies

In one study done by Wedekind et al., women were asked to smell male axillary odors collected on T-shirts worn by different males. Women that were ovulating rated the odors of MHC-dissimilar men as more pleasant than those of the MHC-similar men. Furthermore, odors of MHC-dissimilar men often reminded women of current or former partners, suggesting that odor—specifically odor for MHC-dissimilarity—plays a role in mate choice

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/230783507_Sex_and_Age_Differences_in_Mate-Selection_Preferences

These analyses show very strong sex differences . Ninety-one percent of men could imagine marrying someone who earns much less than they do, whereas only 37.9% of women could imagine this .

Women are also torn between two impulses

They desire the best possible genetic material for their offspring; strong, intelligent, confident, tall, offspring come from men with those features (phenotypically known to her by their physiques and behaviors)

They also desire the material security and social status that will secure an environment for herself and her offspring that best protect each - - and they can tell which males will provide this as well.

In a state of nature, female hypergamy would be checked:

1) Male sexual mating wouldn't have very many constructs like 'wait a day before you call her' or 'pay for her drinks' or 'dinner and a movie'. (NotaBene: rape is unambiguously wrong; it is the beta males employment of the sole factor of dominance he has on a world with women in it - his strength, to get sex he is denied/not picked for)), or consent.

2) Pregnancy wouldn't be evaded by contraception

3) modern separation by things like subways and highways and workschedules to allow cheating didn't exist spatially or temporally.

4) social ostracization meant near certain death

5) men had no reason to invest resources and time and risk into another man's offspring, or be separated from his offspring - - divorce court? child support for adopted kids? adoption? alimony? ha

However, hypergamy still existed.

And it was recognized that it was an impulse of men and women to have a duality in their sexual and familiar desires.

The girl you want to ffffuck is like that because evolution wants to make her a Mother.

The guy a girl wants to ffffuck is like that because evolution wants to make him a Father.

And so, societies built, disparately, convergent models of checking hypergamy (and imposing costs on men as well!) so that there was a nearly bijective mapping of all females to all males.

Spinters and solteronas and confirmed bachelors and ascetics - - the men who had to visit the bordello, the women who kept cats, etc.

Never was it perfect.

But today: contraceptive technology, societal destruction of the gender relation, cultural confusion over the economic roles born from biological realities, and the shaming of men and their motives have led to the mess we now have.

Destroyed marriage rates, unchecked hypergamy, mass male sexual frustration, divorces, common single motherhood, demographic decline of 'developed' nations, mass abortion as birth control, birth control at least as recommended to teenagers as getting a job/applying to college/apprenticeships.

So why does partner count matter?

Because despite all the changes, despite all the evolutionary history, the societal upheaval, the economic rules changing, the communications technology becoming pervasive and invasive, the courts system being antimale....

A human being is only why they did what they chose to do

That's it.

Why she chose to have sex with her HS boyfriend says something about her. Why she chose to have a hookup, or two, or ten, in college, says something about her.

Why she chose to cheat says something about her.

Why she couldn't settle down before 25 says something about her.

Why she withholds sex from you, but didn't before says something about her - - - and you.

Women are just people; and people are only why they chose to do the things they did.

Will she make a good wife? a good mother?

Be faithful? Capable of being loving? Nurturing? Supportive? Loyal?

What will she raise your sons to be like? your daughters to be like?

What will she expect in terms of material provision for what she can give you in return?

What can she give you that she hasn't given others? And at what cost to you?

There is no way to answer these questions without a past

Whatever the standard a man has for himself, if he has any, he can only answer them with a history.

(This goes for women, too, by the way. Were I writing on RPW, I'd say the same damn thing: A furry top hat wearing PUA/seduction artist/eternal Chad Thundercock in his late 30s with a job that only allows him to buy loud clothes and a commute from a shared apartment to a city's bars will probably not be a great husband - - nor a father. They'd be a moron to sleep with him, and a complete fool to give away their virginity to him.)

The lesson:

Sexual history matters

Unless you can know all of it, and verify whatever you feel doubt about, and be able to determine how priors lead to the present leads to the future - - - you're being kept in the dark because your supposed partner knows that sexual history matters more than you do.