8. The Pleasure-Effort Equation

What moves us

Even when I was younger, I had a question. What causes people to do what they do? To be interested in what they are interested in? To be drawn toward what they are drawn toward? What is behind that?

I took the route of psychology and spirituality. After studying them, I arrived at an understanding of what I call human nature. At its core, it is simple: human nature is the pull toward pleasure with the least amount of effort. Every person has it. It drives almost everything we do.

The parameters

What differs from person to person is what counts as pleasure, and what seems worth the effort.

Some people are born more artistic. Some lean toward music, some toward sports, some toward scientific thinking. Each of us is also born into an immediate environment: parents, neighborhood, upbringing, society. Together, those inclinations and that environment set the parameters. They decide what feels good to me, what I go after, and what I leave alone.

That is what people bring to dating: a set of parameters they never chose, taken from childhood, television, and the people around them.

On a date, the same question applies. What makes me feel loved and appreciated? What makes the other person fall in love, respect me, and want a relationship? Both people are running on their own parameters.

Why this matters

Most grown adults, including me for the first 30 years of my life, never notice what is running their lives. It tells them what they like and dislike, what to go after and what to leave alone, and how to act.

Underneath it is a simple, almost animalistic rule meant to keep us alive. Fear is hard to face because the mind treats fear like death. So people stay where they already are. We have built a society that keeps us at a certain level of comfort. And if someone doesn't believe they can get what they want, the fear wins before they even try.

In dating, this shows up as the easy option. A real conversation or a real date feels like too much effort and too much risk. Staying online feels safer: messages, pictures, the sense of a relationship without ever sitting across from someone. It looks like the path of least effort.

Recalculating

It isn't the path of least effort. Years spent on the wrong style of dating with the wrong people is an enormous amount of effort for very little pleasure. The dates that go nowhere, the chats that vanish, and the starting over all cost more than learning to date well.

Understanding how I am built, and how the other person is built, changes the calculation. Nature doesn't change. The parameters do. When I understand what actually leads to a good partnership, the effort that once looked too hard becomes the easier path, because it is the one that works.

For a woman, that often means learning to follow her nature: to rest in who she is and let herself be known, instead of working to earn love. For a man, it means learning to overcome his nature and lead: to build himself up and take the risk of going after what he wants.

Different paths, same result: less wasted effort, and a real partner at the end of it.

Before your next date

For a man: Where in your dating life are you taking the easy option now that costs you more later? What would it be worth to you to stop repeating it?

For a woman: Where are you working hard to earn a man's interest? What might happen if you put that effort into being more fully yourself instead?