Your potential mate/lover is your enemy and an enemy that needs to be won over. Here we look at the following five areas:
- The Tao – which is your philosophy of life and values. Does your purpose, values and way of life match with your lover (the target /enemy) rather than your targets other pursuers.
- What is the Weather – the trends, and hence the timing? What are your enemies desires, how are they changing, are you doing to position yourself to take advantage of the enemy at right time. Offer those values that your enemy values more than others and better than your competitors. Persuade and convince your enemy that your offerings are what is needed etc. You should be focusing on the enemies desires and not on your competitors.
- What is the Location – Make use of the characteristic of the right place.
- What are the Leadership attributes – There are five, wisdom, trustworthiness, love, boldness and discipline. These are keys for building a true and lasting relationship.
- What are your – Method, Policies, Organisation, Operations.
Make sure you do things effectively and efficiently that met the enemies expectation. - Master Sun said warfare is doing the unexpected, surprising and shocking the competitors but pleasantly surprise and delight the enemy to jump towards you and surrender.
- Keep in mind this quote by Master Sun: ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’
Mating strategies overlap with reproductive strategies, which encompass a broader set of behaviours involving the timing of reproduction and the trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring.
Relative to other animals species, the human mating strategies are unique in their relationship with cultural variables such as the institution of marriage. Humans may seek out individuals with the intention of forming a long-term intimate relationship, marriage, casual relationship, or friendship.
The human desire for companionship is one of the strongest human drives. It is an innate feature of human nature and related to the sex drive. The human mating process encompasses the social and cultural processes whereby one person may meet another to assess suitability, the courtship process and the process of forming an interpersonal relationship.
Commonalities, however, can be found between humans and nonhuman animals in mating behaviour.
Courting
Before bonding people express sexual interest – they will court. Courting for fun and courting with intent are two different things. Courting can also be called ‘flirting’ – and this can be for fun and can take place between friends, co-workers, or total strangers that wish to get to know each other. This type of flirting does not seek sexual intercourse or romantic relationship but increases the bonds between two people – in the animal kingdom, this can be equivalent to dogs sniffing each other as opposed to immediate doggy style excesses.
Flirting with intent plays a role in mate selection. The person flirting sends out signals of sexual availability to another, and hopes to see the interest returned to encourage continued flirting. Flirting can involve non-verbal signs, such as an exchange of glances, hand-touching, hair-touching, or verbal signs, such as chatting up, flattering comments, and exchange of telephone numbers to enable further contact.
Dating
People date to assess each other’s suitability as partners in an intimate relationship or as a spouse. Dating rules vary across different human cultures, and some societies may even replace the dating process by a courtship instead.
Matchmaking
In many cultural traditions, a date may be arranged by a third party like an Indian/Pakistani auntie, acquaintance, or professional matchmaker. In some cultures, a marriage may be arranged by the couple’s parents. Recently, internet dating has become popular.
Remember there is a huge difference between arranged marriages and forced marriages.
Gender differences
Sexual desire:
Evolutionary psychologists argue that ancestral men who possessed a desire for multiple short-term sex partners, to the extent that they were capable of attracting them, would have left more descendants than men without such a desire. Ancestral women, by contrast, would have maximized reproductive success not by mating with as many men as possible, but by selectively mating with those men who were most able and willing to invest resources in their offspring.
Gradually in a bid to compete to get resources from potential men, women have evolved to show extended sexuality. One classic study found that when college students were approached on campus by opposite-sex ‘flirters’ and asked if they wanted to “go to bed” with him/her, 75% of the men said yes while 0% percent of the women said yes. Evidence also indicates that, across cultures, men report a greater openness to casual sex, a larger desired number of sexual partners, and a greater desire to have sex sooner in a relationship.
These sex differences have been shown to be reliable across various studies and methodologies. However, there is some controversy as to the scope and interpretation of these sex differences.
Evolutionary research often indicates that men have a strong desire for casual sex, unlike women. Men are often depicted as wanting numerous female sexual partners to maximise reproductive success.
Evolutionary mechanisms for short-term mating are evident today. Mate-guarding behaviours and sexual jealousy point to an evolutionary history in which sexual relations with multiple partners became a recurrent adaptive problem, while the willingness of modern-day men to have sex with attractive strangers, and the prevalence of extramarital affairs in similar frequencies cross-culturally, is evidence of an ancestral past in which polygamous mating strategies were adopted.
Every time a man has a new sexual partner, the woman also has a new sexual partner. Therefore, casual sex and numerous sexual partners may also confer some benefit to females. That is, they would produce more genetically diverse offspring as a result, which would increase their chances of successfully rearing children to adolescence or independence.
Sexual attraction:
Evolutionary psychologists have predicted that men generally place a greater value on youth and physical attractiveness in a mate than do women. Youth is associated with the reproductive value in women, and features that men find physically attractive in women are thought to signal health and fertility.
Men who mated with healthy, fertile and reproductively valuable women would have left more descendants than men who did not. Since men’s reproductive value does not decline as steeply with age as does women’s, women are not expected to exhibit as strong of a preference for youth in a mate.
Evolutionary psychologists have also speculated that women are relatively more attracted to ambition and social status in a mate because they associate these characteristics with men’s access to resources. Women who preferentially mated with men capable of investing resources in their offspring, thereby ensuring their offsprings’ survival, would have left more descendants than women who did not. Evolutionary psychologists have tested these predictions across cultures, confirming that men tend to report a greater preference for youth and physical attractiveness in a mate than do women and that women tend to report a greater preference for ambition and social status in a mate than do men.
Some sex differences in mate preferences may be attenuated by national levels of gender equity and gender empowerment. The specific role that culture plays in modulating sex differences in mate preferences is subject to debate. Cultural variations in mate preference can be due to the evolved differences between males and females of a culture. For example, as women gain more access to resources their mate preferences change. Finding a mate with resources becomes less of a priority and a mate with domestic skills is more important. As women’s access to resources varies between cultures, so does mate preference.
Political attitudes
Mating strategies also influence political attitudes. Different mating strategies are in direct strategic conflict.
For instance, the stability of long-term partnerships may be threatened by the availability of short-term sexual opportunities. Therefore, public policy measures that impose costs on casual sex may benefit people pursuing long-term mating strategies by reducing the availability of short-term mating opportunities outside of committed relationships.
One public policy measure that imposes costs on people pursuing short-term mating strategies, and may thereby appeal to sexually restricted individuals, is the banning of abortion.
Attitudes towards drug legalisation are driven by individual differences in mating strategies. Insofar as sexually restricted individuals associate recreational drug use with promiscuity, they may be motivated to oppose drug legalization.
Mohammed Abbasi
Mohammed Abbasi 