People Treat You Exactly How You Let Them Treat You
What dating men from fifteen plus countries taught me about the price every woman advertises, and who profits when it's below market rate.
The half chewed piece of Korean BBQ in my mouth was, I am fairly certain, about point two seconds from falling out and landing on the table with no ceremony whatsoever.
My mouth hung open. Wide. Gaping. My eyes went so round they lost their almond shape entirely, which is a thing I did not know my eyes were capable of doing until that night in Bali. Around the table sat a handful of people I had met at a party three hours earlier, and they were spilling tea, with tremendous enthusiasm, on a man I dated briefly almost three years ago.
I cannot remember the last time I felt that shocked.
"A man will treat one woman like a queen and the next like a work donkey. The difference is not in the worthiness of the woman. The difference is in what she calmly, subtly commands as the cost of existing in her priceless presence." –Amanda Leon
I. DATING THE WORLD
I have lived on this crazy little island for almost three years, and here is what nobody tells you about Bali: it is one of the most diverse places on earth. Not diverse in the brochure sense. Diverse in the sense that the woman ahead of you in line at the local warung is Finnish, the man fixing your scooter is Javanese, and the person who just invited you to a full moon dinner party grew up in Tel Aviv and works for a company registered in Estonia.
Which means I have now dated men I would have never even met in Texas. Not in a thousand years of Houston dinner parties.
Austria. Brazil. Belgium. Ukraine. Sweden. Russia. Finland. South Africa. The Netherlands. Turkey. France. England. Australia. Germany. America. A few more I am forgetting, which tells you something about the pace of life here.
I learned a great deal about culture from this. I learned that a German will tell you exactly what he thinks and consider it a kindness. I learned that Slavic men have a romantic streak that would embarrass a Victorian poet. I learned more about geopolitics over dinner than I did in four years of studying Diplomacy & World Affairs in college.
But the truth I actually came here to give you, the one I would like handed to every woman reading this, is bigger than any of that:
Men will treat you how you allow them to treat you, regardless of their cultural or societal programming.
And my proof, the single cleanest piece of evidence I own, comes from the Dutch.
You know the phrase. Let's go Dutch. Let's split it. Fifty fifty, right down the middle, separate checks, your half and my half. (I can literally feel the romance withering on the branch as I type this.) An entire nationality so associated with the even division of a dinner bill that the English language borrowed their name for it.
I have dated multiple men from the Netherlands.
Not one of them has ever asked me to pay for fifty percent of anything.
Not a coffee. Not a dinner. Not a scooter rental, a movie ticket, a bottle of wine, a taxi. Not once. And I want to be precise about why, because it is not because Dutch men are secretly lavish and the stereotype is a lie. It is because of who I am, and what I quietly, ruthlessly command from the men who wish to spend time in my company.
Consider what that actually is, scientifically. Same women? No. Same woman: me. Fifteen nationalities, fifteen sets of cultural programming, fifteen childhoods of instruction about how men and women divide the world. One unchanged variable in this unintentional experiment. One constant.
And the constant is what determined the treatment.
II. THE SAME MAN, TWO WOMEN
So. The tea.
Three years ago I went on maybe six or seven dates with a Dutchman. He was very tall, genuinely handsome, and around thirty four years old at the time. It was lovely. It was not for me. We parted with the warmth of two people who correctly identified a mismatch early, which I consider one of the underrated gifts of adult dating.
Later I knew, in the passing way you know things on a small island and casually re-bump into each other, that he had an Indonesian girlfriend. She is twenty seven.
What I did not know, and what the table proceeded to tell me while my dinner went cold, was this.
He pays for a nice gym for himself. She goes to a cheap one. Not because she prefers it. Because she is Indonesian, and an Indonesian salary is a fraction of a Dutch one, and he has decided that the gap between her gym and his gym is not his to close.
He opened a company with her. Her salary from it was not enough to live on. So she went to her boss and asked for a raise. Her boss, I should clarify, is her boyfriend. He said no. She quit, then went and found another job.
And I did not have to take the table's word for any of it. He told me himself, about a year into it, unprompted, with the shine of a man delivering good news.
I ran into him on the island. How's life, how are things. And he lit up telling me about her. She's local, he said. Indonesian. She negotiated the plants for their house herself. She has made his life “so convenient.”
Convenient.
Sit with that word, because he chose it, not me. He was not describing a woman he adores. He was describing an amenity. Her language, her local knowledge, her ability to get a builder to quote the Indonesian price instead of the bule (foreigner) price, all of it tallied under the heading of his own convenience. And he offered it to a woman he used to date, cheerfully, with no idea he was confessing.
Men will tell on themselves, every time, if you simply let them finish the sentence.
I say all this and I hear myself being slightly melodramatic, so let me strip the drama out and leave the arithmetic: this man does not take care of the woman he sleeps beside, in any sense of the word.
Now hold that next to this.
I still see him around. Bali is small and the coworking scene is smaller. And when I ran into him, two years after seven dates that went nowhere, and I say something like "Gosh, I feel so hungry. I want a snack" he buys me coffee. He buys me a slice of cake. He has nothing to gain. There is no romance on the table, no prospect, no arrangement, nothing on offer. He buys the cake anyway.
The same man. One woman gets the cheap gym and a denied raise. The other gets coffee and cake for saying she is hungry, two years after he stopped having a reason to care.
I sat there with my jaw somewhere near the sleek brushed metal of the table and thought: this is the whole thing. This is the question every woman I know has asked at two in the morning while staring on instagram at the beautiful new life her lazy-ex now provides for another woman, and here it is, sitting across from me eating bulgogi.
Why is he treating her so much better than he treated me?
My friend Benny answered it years ago, in the way Benny answers everything, which is instantly and without mercy:
"The audacity! Would he ask Margot Robbie to go on a coffee date? No. So you don't accept a coffee date."
III. THE PRICE YOU PUBLISH
Here is the answer to the two in the morning instagram death spiral question, and I need you to sit with it, because it will sting you in the tushy before it liberates you.
He is not two men.
He is one man reading two different price tags.
Every one of us, without ever consciously deciding to, publishes a price. Not in words. In behavior, in bearing, in what we accept without comment and what we decline without apology. It is the rate of exchange we have gently posted for the privilege of proximity to us. And other people, especially men, read that number with an accuracy that would frighten you and then pay exactly it. Not a rupiah more.
He did not change between her and me. The price changed.
I want to be careful here, because a price tag sounds mercenary and this is the opposite of mercenary. A price tag is not a manipulation. A price tag is information. It is the most honest thing in the shop. The tragedy is not that women have prices. The tragedy is how many women have never once looked at the number they are publishing, and would be horrified if they did.
Before you start sharpening your pitchforks against me… This is not folk wisdom. Social psychologists have a name for the mechanism. Thibaut and Kelley called it the comparison level: the internal standard each person holds for what they believe they deserve from a relationship, against which every actual outcome is measured.¹ Your comparison level is the floor beneath which you will not go. It determines what you tolerate, what you protest, and what you never even notice as a problem because it simply matches what you expected.
Raise the comparison level and the tolerable becomes intolerable overnight. Nothing about him has to change for everything to change.
There is a saying that gets attributed to Maya Angelou and popularized by daytime television: you teach people how to treat you. I want to flag, in the spirit of never handing you something I have not checked, that this is an aphorism and not a study.² But the research underneath it is real, and it is the exchange theory above, and it says the same thing with less poetry (Lord Byron, I still love you) and more evidence.
Now, the honest caveat, because I refuse to sell you a rule with no exceptions.
There exists a top tier of men, and I would put it at roughly the top fifteen percent, who treat all women to a standard regardless of what they want, regardless of whether they are sleeping with her, regardless of what she does or does not command. They hold the line because the line is who they are. (Usually it comes from great parenting.) If you find one, notice him.(I will also mention that there is a bottom fifteen percent of men who cannot read published pricing, some of whom are incarcerated, all of whom you should stay clear of completely.)
The rest, which is to say the bell curve of men, operate on read and respond. They are generous with women who command generosity. They are careless with women who accept carelessness. They are kind to women who are kind to them, giving toward women they want something from, and neutral to indifferent toward everyone else.
Which means, for the overwhelming majority of men (about seventy percent) you will ever meet, the price you publish is the entire game.
And here is the part that should feel like someone opening a window in a locked room: you cannot control him. You have never been able to control him. You will not fix him with a conversation, a text, an ultimatum, or two years of patiently homemaking for him and making his life convenient.
But you can control you. And when you change what you command, his behavior changes entirely. Not because you managed him. Because you re-priced, and he is reading the tag. This is the entire mechanism I teach women in How to Make Him Chase You, and it is the least mystical thing in the world once you see it working.
"You cannot control him. You can only change the number. He will pay whatever it says, because he always has."
IV. CULTURE IS AN EXCUSE, NOT A CAUSE
Let us now brutally murder the most expensive and ridiculous sentence a woman can believe.
"That's just how men are where he's from." or “That’s just how he was raised.”
Variations include: it's cultural, he wasn't raised to think that way, his mother did everything for his father, in his country the women don't expect it, you cannot hold him to a Western standard, he can't help it.
I have fifteen nationalities' worth of evidence and I am telling you it is nonsense.
A Dutchman raised inside the very idiom of going halves will buy the cake. Not because Holland changed. Because the woman in front of him did.
Two weeks ago it happened again, with a different passport and a different generation.
A German. Twenty eight years old, which is to say seven years younger than me, from a culture with no particular reputation for extravagance and every reputation for efficiency. He insisted on taking me out. Then he planned the entire day himself, start to finish, and delivered me to a private sauna with a plunge pool and a hot tub, on a first date.
I want to be precise about what I did to secure this, because it is the entire lesson.
Nothing.
I did not ask. I did not hint. I did not mention a preference, drop a standard into conversation, or communicate a single expectation in any direction. The tag is read, not recited. He looked at how I move through a room and priced accordingly, and then he went and booked the private sauna house, at twenty eight, on a first date, from a country that did not raise him to.
Cultural programming is real. I am not a fool and I have lived abroad too long to pretend otherwise. But culture is the floor, not the ceiling. It may set a man's defaults, his first instinct, the script he reaches for when nobody has given him a better one. It does not set the maximum. The woman in front of him sets the maximum.
The research supports this more than the culture excuse does. When David Buss ran his landmark study across thirty seven cultures, examining what men and women actually want in a long term mate, the striking finding was not variation. It was consistency. The deep patterns held across wildly different societies, economies, and religions.³ The local script differs. The underlying machinery does not.
And that machinery includes calibration. Buss and Shackelford studied two hundred and fourteen married people and measured nineteen distinct tactics people use to hold onto a partner. The finding that should stop you cold: a man's effort tracked his partner's youth and beauty. A woman's effort tracked no such thing.⁴ He is not running a fixed program. He is running a thermostat. And you are the thermostat.
I didn’t say it. The scientific research did. The men did. Copy and paste this to your mirror so you never forget: “Men adjust their investment, their effort, and their attentiveness according to the perceived value of the partner they are with.”
So when a woman tells me she cannot expect more because of where he is from, what she is really doing is handing her power to an abstraction (and abdicating her own pricing power as the supplier in the marketplace). She has assigned the outcome to a continent. And an abstraction cannot be negotiated with, which is precisely why the excuse is so comfortable: it means nothing has to change, least of all her.
The manosphere blames women. The gentler corners of progressive culture blame toxic masculinity and bad fathers. Both are hunting for a cause that lives somewhere other than the mirror.
V. POWER IS NOT FAULT
Before the hate comments arrive, let me get ahead of them, because I can already hear it: you are blaming a woman for a man's behavior. grrrrr.
No. I am doing something more useful, and it requires holding two ideas at once, which I have found is the minimum entry fee for thinking about anything real. Get your panties out of a twist, sit down, take notes.
Fault is about who created the situation. Power is about who can change it.
These are not the same axis. They are not even parallel.
It is not that girl's fault. She is twenty seven. Nobody taught her. She comes from a country where poverty is ordinary, she has less education and fewer opportunities than you (reading this) or I do, and she was not handed the operating manual. I was. I am thirty five. I went to a private prep all-girls school in Houston (which yes, made me quite weird and very outspoken), which afforded me superhuman discernment and pattern recognition skills. My parents and family (lots of uncles) sat me down and taught me what men are, how they work, and precisely where to set the bar. That is not virtue on my part. That is the luck of the draw, and I did nothing to earn it except be born where I was born to the people who raised me.
So no, the starting point is not her fault.
But the response becomes her responsibility the moment better information reaches her and she refuses it.
Fault for where you started. Responsibility for what you do once you know. Hold both. Anyone who tells you that acknowledging a woman's power is the same as blaming her is trying to keep her comfortable, not free.
And I know exactly what keeps her from acting on it, because I have watched it in a hundred women on this island. It is fear. Specifically, the fear that if she asks for more, she loses him. That if she rocks the boat, the Western man with the passport and the salary and the apartment in Canggu walks out, and she is back where she started.
Thibaut and Kelley named this mechanism in 1959 and it has not aged a single day in my opinion. Alongside the comparison level sits what they call the comparison level for alternatives: the lowest treatment a person will accept, set not by what she deserves but by what she believes is available to her instead.¹ Their finding is the entire Greek tragedy in one line. A relationship that makes a woman miserable remains perfectly stable for as long as she cannot see a better option. She is not staying because she loves the cheap gym. She is staying because the alternatives have gone dark.
Let me say this as plainly as I know how.
You are not losing anything. You are making space.
The man who leaves because you asked to be treated well was never going to treat you well. He was going to keep you at the price he found you at, for as long as you let him, and call it love. Losing him is not a loss. It is a vacancy. And a vacancy is the only thing in the world that a better man can actually walk into.
You cannot be chosen properly while the position is already filled by someone unqualified.
VI. YOU ARE NOT THE SHOPPER. YOU ARE THE SUPPLY.
Now we get to the economics, and I want to be careful, because this is where women get told they are being taught to play games. I am not teaching you a game. I am describing a market you are already standing in, whether or not you have looked at the chart.
Here is the reframe that reorganizes everything on the diagram:
A woman is not a consumer in the dating market. She is the supply. And supply either sets its own price, or the market sets it for her.
That is not cynicism. That is the same law that governs every scarce and precious thing on this planet, from saffron to a Vermeer. Restrict supply and demand rises. Flood supply and the market correctly reads abundance, and prices accordingly, and does not feel guilty about it.
The academic version of this is not fringe. Baumeister and Vohs laid it out in Sexual Economics, arguing that heterosexual courtship functions as a marketplace in which female sexuality operates as a resource, and the price is set by the same forces that set any price: scarcity, competition, and what the buyer believes he must offer to obtain it.⁵
Mark Regnerus extended the argument in Cheap Sex, documenting what happens on the other side of a supply flood: when access becomes abundant and cheap, male investment, commitment, and quality of treatment all fall.⁶ His definition is worth committing to memory. Sex is cheap when a woman expects little in return for it, and a man need not supply much time, attention, resources, recognition, or fidelity in order to have it.
Guttentag and Secord found the same law running through sex ratios across history: when one sex is scarce, its bargaining power and the standards it can command rise, and when it is plentiful, they collapse.⁷ They found something sharper still. Scarcity hands a woman what they call dyadic power: fewer of her, more choice for her, better terms. But men hold structural power, the institutional kind, and when women grow scarce, men reach for it to claw back exactly what scarcity just handed her.⁷ Read that twice, because it explains nearly every restriction ever placed on a woman's body. When women are plentiful, no clawback is necessary. The market does the work on its own, commitment thins, and the era gets called liberated.
But I need you to hear the part that matters more than the sex, because everyone fixates on the sex and misses the actual currency.
It was never only about sex. It is your attention. Your care. Your energy. Your enthusiasm, your emotional labor, your Saturday, your patience, your loyalty, your presence in the room. That is the supply that women flood without noticing, giving it away at two in the morning to men who have not earned a text back, and then wondering why it is treated as worthless.
Because that is what happens to anything infinitely available. It gets treated as worthless. Not out of cruelty. Out of arithmetic.
And here is the cruelest joke played on modern women. We are trained to compete on availability in a market that pays for scarcity. Be easygoing. Be a cool girl. Be low maintenance. Be chill, be flexible, be the one who never makes it complicated. Women are handed the losing strategy, told it is kindness, and then blamed for the outcome.
I have written before about hypergamy, and why a woman's selectivity is not vanity but the immune system of mate selection. This essay is that one's economic twin. The biology says choose carefully because you will become him. The economics says the price you set is the treatment you get. They are two dialects describing one instruction.
VII. THE BROKEN MARKETPLACE
Zoom out from one Korean BBQ restaurant in Bali and you can see the structural version of this, and it is not pretty.
Across much of the world where poverty is ordinary, from Indonesia to Colombia to the Philippines, extraordinary women, kind and beautiful and often far more giving and generous than the men who select them, settle for thoroughly mediocre Western men. And some of them experience the selection itself as an achievement. He chose me. The white man, the Westerner, the one with the passport and the strong currency, looked at all of us and chose me. It reads as a badge of worth. So she tolerates what a woman with options (and knowledge of the marketplaces/ pricing that we’ve discussed) would not tolerate for a week.
Anthropologist Nicole Constable spent years inside these courtships and documented what actually shapes them: less romance than the brutal asymmetry of economic and geographic power between the two people in the room.⁸
The best of that scholarship insists on a complication I will not skip past: these women are not dupes, the love in these marriages is frequently real, and a woman selecting the finest option her circumstances offer is doing precisely what any of us would do standing where she stands.(I’ll never forget the glee and pride of the Thai frontdesk woman [25yrs old] I met in 2019. She showed me all of the shein outfits her German boyfriend [50yrs old+] bought her. She was genuinely proud and she should be, she was improving her standard of living, even if it was only incrementally)
And on the other side of that trade you get the phenomenon everyone is too polite (except me) to name at dinner. The passport bros. The leftover men. The ones who could not secure a woman within their own society, in their own construct, at their own price. Who could not be impressive enough or earning enough or interesting enough to compete at home. So they buy a flight to a place where their ordinariness reads as exotic, where their salary reads as wealth, where their averageness reads as handsome.
And for the first time in their lives, they feel like enough.
Here is the part that keeps this from being a cheap shot, because I am not actually interested in mocking these men. I am interested in what they do next.
Somewhere deep, deep down, they still know they are not. The flight did not fix it. The exchange rate did not fix it. The feeling of being insufficient is portable, and it came with them in the carry on. And an unhealed sense of being less than does not sit quietly. It transmutes. It comes out sideways, as contempt for whoever is closest and least able to leave. He treats her as less than because he still feels less than, and she is the only person in the arrangement who cannot easily walk out.
That is the cheap gym. That is the denied raise. That is a man who buys cake for a woman he has no claim on and will not close a fifty dollar gap for the woman in his bed. Not because she is worth less. Because he is haunted, and she is available.
So whose fault is it?
We are always so hungry to assign the blame. But a marketplace requires two participants. It takes someone willing to accept and someone willing to exploit. Women have accepted, and in accepting, helped build this market. Men have exploited it, and skipped the interior work that would have made them the kind of man who could not stomach behaving that way.
Both are true. Neither is interesting.
Because we could spend the next ten thousand words tracing it back. Absent fathers who never taught their daughters to choose better or their sons to behave better. Economies that made women's options narrow. Colonial history, still running its program in the background of every mixed nationality couple on this island (and every former colony beyond). We could blame society at large and we would be partly right and also entirely stuck.
I would rather fix the market.
A note, because I hold myself to this: sexual economics and evolutionary psychology are contested fields, and the sharpest criticism of them is worth stating plainly. Laurie Rudman, writing in Psychology of Women Quarterly, argues that describing mating as a market risks making inequality sound natural, and therefore acceptable.⁵ I take the objection seriously and I answer it this way: describing a market that women are forced to operate inside is not the same as endorsing that the market should exist. I did not build this. Neither did you. But I refuse to let a woman walk into it blindfolded because the map offends someone's politics.
VIII. A HIGH STANDARD IS A GIFT, NOT A BURDEN
Now the part nobody expects, which is that fixing this is not a women's project with men as the reluctant losers.
Men benefit more than we do.
A man is built to give, to protect, and to provide. Not because a magazine told him so. Because contribution is how the vast majority of men actually generate self esteem, and a man denied the chance to contribute is a man slowly rotting in a comfortable chair. When he is not living in that, he is miserable, and he usually cannot tell you why.
This is not sentiment. Regnerus found it at population scale: in a market where sex is cheap and little is asked of men, men emerge sapped of drive, of purpose, and of marriageability itself.⁶ Lower your standard and you do not simply receive less. You manufacture less of a man.
So when you lower your standard to spare him, you are not being generous. You are confiscating his purpose.
And when you mother him, when you manage his feelings and pick up his slack and handle the logistics and absorb the cost and tell yourself you are being loving, understand what you are actually communicating: I do not believe you are capable of more.Treating a man like your child is not kindness. It is an insult to his manly capacity to give, to protect, and to provide. He hears it. They always hear it.
I have made this case at length elsewhere, which is that a woman with standards is not difficult, she is clarifying, and that the correct posture is to be an absolute menace to men, because they like it. The evidence sits in my own party every year. At my birthday dinner the men arrive with giant bouquets and gift certificates for massages, wearing cologne, dressed up in slacks and ironed button downs, in a country where the dress code is flip flops and spiritual ambiguity. Nobody asked them. Nobody has ever asked them.
They do it because they like what it says about them.
That is the piece women miss. He is not bringing flowers as a tax. He is bringing flowers because in that moment he gets to be valiant, knightly, charming, and royal in the presence of a woman who is worth being those things for. You are not extracting from him. You are giving him a role he actually wants to play, and most men are starving for it, and almost nobody offers it to them.
Which brings me to Doug, who once said something to me that I have carried for years:
"Amanda, sometimes I feel frustrated when you hold me to a high standard, but then I also feel excited, like there's something new I can reach and aspire to. I like it."
Read that again. The frustration and the excitement arrived in the same sentence, from the same man, about the same standard. That is what it sounds like when a man is being given something rather than taken from.
IX. THE FIELD GUIDE: HOW TO RE-PRICE
Diagnosis without a remedy is just anxiety, so here is the practical part.
Decide the number before you are in the room. You cannot price in real time with his eyes on you and your heart doing what hearts do. Decide, in the cold light of an ordinary Tuesday, what treatment you accept and what you decline. Then walk in already knowing.
Restrict the right supply. This is not withholding sex as a tactic, which is a game and beneath you. This is refusing to pour your attention, your enthusiasm, your care, and your Saturday into a man who has not earned proximity. Your presence is the scarce resource. Stop distributing it like a free concert flyer.
Delete the culture excuse on sight.That is just how he is. Every time that sentence leaves your mouth, you have handed your outcome to an abstraction and let yourself off the hook for the rest of your life. Whatever remains after you delete it is the actual situation, and the actual situation can be changed.
Read the tag you have been publishing. When a man treats you as less, resist the two in the morning question of what is wrong with you and ask the useful one instead: what price did I quote him? Then change the number. He will read the new one. They always read the new one.
Accept the growing pains. Here is the beautiful thing about raising a standard: both outcomes are wins. The right man feels the bar go up, gets frustrated (potentially), gets excited, and rises to meet it, the way Doug did and many others after him. The wrong man calls you unreasonable and leaves, which saves you years and costs you an evening. You cannot lose this bet. You can only find out faster.
Receive it without flinching when it arrives. When the flowers come, when the bill is quietly handled, when he asks from where he has the honor of collecting you, say thank you and mean it. The woman who deflects generosity is returning the gift with an unsigned note that reads I do not believe I deserve this, and he reads that note too.
X. BACK TO THE TABLE
I want to return to that mouthful of Korean BBQ, because the shock has resolved into something else now.
What stunned me was not that a man could be two men. Men have always been two men. Ten men. However many men the situation pays for.
What stunned me was watching, in real time, the invisible thing become visible. Two women, one man, two entirely different lives, and the only variable between them was a number that neither woman had ever consciously set. She never chose the cheap gym. I never negotiated the cake. We simply arrived in his life carrying different price tags, and he did what people do, which is read the tag and pay it.
She is twenty seven. I hope somebody hands her this, or something like it, or one good friend with Benny's mouth on her.
Because here is what I know, having dated the world from a small island in the Java Sea, and having watched the same man be generous and stingy in the same month with the same wallet:
He never treated her badly. He read her price, and he paid it, exactly, to the rupiah.
The tag was always in her hands.
So was yours.
With Love Always,
— Amanda
P.S. If you want the actual mechanics of re-pricing, the part where you change what you command and watch his behavior reorganize around it, that is the entire spine of How to Make Him Chase You. It is less mystical than it sounds and more effective than you would like to admit.
P.P.S. There is a second half to this that I could not fit here, so it is becoming its own essay.
You do not only set your price. You set the currency it gets paid in. Some women want diamonds. Some want land, in their name, on the title and the deed. Some want a foot massage every single night without having to ask twice. I once watched a man online complain, with enormous affection, about how expensive his wife is, and the expense was not clothes or jewelry. It was hay. It was vet bills. It was a new miniature pony for a woman with a farm full of ruffian animals who needed feeding.
He was not being robbed. He was being useful, in the exact denomination she happened to trade in.
So tell me what yours is. Not what you think you are supposed to want. What you actually want, including the embarrassing one. I will read every single answer, and the best ones are going in the essay.
Sources & Citations
1. Thibaut, J.W. & Kelley, H.H. (1959). The Social Psychology of Groups. New York: John Wiley & Sons. The "comparison level" (CL) is the standard, formed by past experience and expectation, of how much reward a person believes they deserve from a relationship. Thibaut and Kelley also define the "comparison level for alternatives" (CLalt): the lowest outcome a person will accept given the alternatives they perceive as available. A relationship above CL can still be unstable if better alternatives exist, and a frustrating one can remain stable when the person sees no better option.
2. The maxim "you teach people how to treat you" is widely attributed to Maya Angelou and was popularized by Phillip McGraw, but it is an aphorism rather than a research finding. The empirical support for the underlying claim comes from social exchange theory (n.1) and mate value calibration research (n.4).
3. Buss, D.M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(1), 1-49.
4. Buss, D.M. & Shackelford, T.K. (1997). From vigilance to violence: mate retention tactics in married couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 346-361. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.346. Study of 214 married people across 19 mate retention tactics. Key finding relevant here: men's, but not women's, mate retention effort positively covaried with the partner's youth and physical attractiveness, indicating that male investment and effort calibrate to perceived partner mate value.
5. Baumeister, R.F. & Vohs, K.D. (2004). Sexual economics: Sex as female resource for social exchange in heterosexual interactions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 339-363. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_2. For the principal scholarly critique of this framework, see Rudman, L.A. (2017). Myths from sexual economics theory: Implications for gender equality. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 41(3), 299-313.
6. Regnerus, M. (2017). Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190673611.
7. Guttentag, M. & Secord, P.F. (1983). Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. ISBN 9780803919198.
8. Constable, N. (2003). Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520238702. doi:10.1525/9780520937222. On how agency and desire in transnational courtship are shaped by uneven economic development. Note that Constable explicitly resists the stereotype of these women as passive or purely calculating, and of the men as uniformly predatory.
