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This isn't about your girlfriend or your feelings toward her. It's about your parents' relationship and specifically either your father's mother or your mother. To cut love off takes a persistent heavy weight of dysfunction. Tell us about your father's mother and her relationship to men. How did your dad experience this?

I think it's a bad idea to jump out of a moving car. If you feel something then you still have a great opportunity for growth because if you didn't then you wouldn't be able to admire the person since they would be a burden. That's all calculated unconsciously.

Over the past couple of years, people started talking more and more about the hypergamous nature of women. This topic came up with regularity in Stefan's podcasts as well. The theory is that the female brain is wired to look for the best possible mate they can get and to trade up as much as one can. After this Stefan usually adds "and men as well". My question is...if it is the case that men are hypergamous as well, how come "female hypergamy" does not lose its relevance? (since regardless of the gender you are hypergamous)

Less demand for what? I haven't read it. So I don't know why you are bringing that up.

I believe you're missing the salient point of "relative to what". Namely, male resources are to women as female fertility is to men. That they do not seek the exact same element in their counterparts is NOT illustrative that they do not seek "the same thing". They're both "trading up", however you split it. It's simply WHAT they're trading up for which differs by the subject. So, it's still hypergamy in either scenario. Hypergamy doesn't stipulate that what one seeks must be strength or protection. It's just "trading up". The peahen chooses the peacock with the most illustrious feathers because he demonstrates that he is SO capable with his detrimental and costly feathers that he can survive in spite on this handicapping attribute; the peacock is offering survival guarantee, the peahen is offering fertility. If there wasn't a biological constant in what the sexes desired from each other, but the hypergamous drive still remained, then we'd see the same thing split across all individuals. An individual who seeks a more eloquent speaker would seek that out in his/her mate, and their counterpart might be one who embodies these qualities, yet THEY seek out one with long and sturdy hair and they themselves don't care about speech skills... just throwing out random elements to illustrate the point, not that these are actual sexual selectors. Regardless of what one side pursues, both sides are "trading up". That being said, I still consider the topic question to be moot. Just because both sexes are hypergamous doesn't mean we can't call women hypergamous. They are. That's like saying just because we all get hungry we shouldn't say that some people are going hungry. That kinda misses the point of descriptive explanations, don't you think?

Women are not drawn to resources. Men only appear to select for beauty more because they have a more constantly high libido. Women are able to obtain resources from men only because of that imbalance. What people obtain is a function of supply and demand, not being programmed to pursue those things. The ability of women to select men for resources is entirely the result of testosterone difference. If estrogen made you more horny than testosterone the rule would be hags driving Maserati's with studly waiters in the passenger seat. The roles would reverse just from that.

Biologically speaking, a woman's highest value is her looks (am I wrong?), men care about looks and women about resources (that's what I always hear). My observation is that men are incredibly hard-wired to be drawn to female physical beauty (maybe even more powerfully than women are to resources), when selecting a mate, men try as hard as possible to land the most physically attractive woman that they can get. Also, there is this infamous behavior of men when they would sometimes leave their partner with whom they have been for a long time for a younger, hotter female. We have heard a bunch of cases when guys in their 30s and 40s left their wives for attractive women in their 20s. What is this if not hypergamy?

Men aren't hypergamous because both sexes cannot possibly be hypergamous at the same time. Men breed across and DOWN (hypogamy) in the dominance hierarchy. Women breed across and UP (hypergamy) in the dominance hierarchy. This is not a theory. It's human biology.

You need a common denominator and like you said, women seek resource, men seek looks. These 2 are not the same. Thus a man seeking an attractive female is not equivalent to a woman seeking a richer man. Male attractiveness for a woman doesn't carry the same amount of weight as female attractiveness for a man. Female resources for a man doesn't carry the same amount of weight as male resources do for a woman. A man in his 40s will never ever trade his wife for a 20 year old that's more attractive than him AND richer than him. If the 20 year old is more attractive than his wife and/or not richer than him then he will probably make the switch. This is not to say he's mating UP the dominance hierarchy. The 20 year old being somewhere in between his wife and him in the dominance hierarchy. Hypergamy refers to trading up to oneself, not trading up compared to another female. There are several reasons why men cannot be hypergamous. (a) Women are hypergamous. They will never trade down therefore a man who IS willing to marry a hot rich 20 year old won't be able to because the 20 year old won't want to date him. (b) Men were bred to b the dominant one in the human species and most other species. Therefore a man who cannot dominate his woman, so to speak, will feel emasculated. It's true when they say that men fear strong women. The roles are reversed and the man will revert to being the child-like one. Little boys may love their mother but they also fear her. Keep in mind when I say "dominate" I'm referring to any human endeavor that a man is better at than his woman. A female MMA fighter might marry a wimpy tech nerd IF the nerd is smarter than her and has more resources. She may have the strength but he has the power. Btw, I just made an interesting connection that strengthens my point. There's the adage than men insult each other without meaning it and women compliment each other without meaning it, right. This is also true with the relationships between men and women. Men make backhanded compliments all the time to women. Same with backhanded insults. This lowers the woman status (artificially) and implicitly raises the man's status (artificially). The man is happy because the higher he is in a dominance hierarchy the greater the odds of the woman staying with him AND the woman is also happy because the higher the man is in a dominance hierarchy the greater her desire to stay with him. It's a win/win. Same thing with a woman that compliments her mate.