That actually wasn't my point, but i see what you mean. On the other hand, if a woman breaks down by the side of the road, somebody (not armed and dangerous, one hopes) is likely to stop and help her out a lot quicker than they would for a man. (I know this is not supposed to be admitted, and the vulgar name for this power women have is taboo even if its use is constant, standard, and inevitable.)
My pop-evolutionary psychology point was simply that men lose their value in the sexual marketplace at a later age than women do, on average. It's a bad deal for us, but it's biologically logical, and nobody's fault. And this is on average, of course. Some beat the odds, some don't.
And my cynical speculation was that two things were going on in my friends' lives. One was more purely philosophical/psychological, and had to do with the bombings. The other was that as, over time, her sexual marketplace value dropped more than his did, his relatively lesser professional/material success began to 'feel' different. She began to love him more the longer she knew him, or some such thing, is what it would feel like to her, probably. She simply felt like 'committing.'
I think the emotions that arise are those that tend to get us to do what our clever if amoral genes are whispering to us to do. The rationalizing operation is a different process, is my suspicion. First the emotion, then the results-oriented rationalizing construct.
Geeeez, I hope my anonymous friends aren't reading this. |
