The most telling sign of people who want to avoid responsibility is that they make up excuses — they rationalize. The more responsibility they try to avoid, the more excuses they will come up with. The overwhelming majority of males are rationalizers, or excusers, in one way or another. They only differ in their degree of rationalizing behavior, with those who are most successful with women rationalizing the least, as there is a strong inverse correlation between how good you are with women and how good you are at making up excuses. The males least successful with women either excuse themselves from even trying to flirt with women because they are intimidated or they do flirt with women but always using an excuse because they feel unworthy of them.

Making up excuses is called rationalizing because it is about attempting to make your experience rational when it is not. It is a function in your brain that tries to make your experience easier for you to understand by automatically assigning explanations to everything so that they appear to make sense, even if this results in lies that you tell yourself and other people.

This mental process is most evident when we are afraid, when we face uncertainties outside of our comfort zone — when we deal with something beyond our confidence. Since fear is a powerful emotion that has served to help humans survive for thousands of generations, we are programmed to avoid it at any cost, including with self-deception. Most males would rather rationalize than admit they are afraid. This is especially true when they have to explain their actions to other people, and particularly when what they are afraid of is a harmless woman, since they know that fear is a weakness and that males are not supposed to be vulnerable. No male wants to admit to being a coward, yet most of them are.