A woman is apt to confuse a man’s reluctance to marry with his reluctance to marry her.
Mating
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
—Goethe
Principles of Evolutionary Biology
1. It can be explained by natural selection.
2. If it cannot be explained by natural selection, it can be explained by sexual selection.
What makes a marriage is less common interests than complementary vices.
One flesh, in many marriages, is no mere metaphor: the vitality of husband and wife mix, and one waxes as the other wanes.
What do women want? Men who need not be told what women want.
Girls are wiser about sex than boys, and far wiser than men.
Men marry for looks, and women for money — it’s too easy to kid yourself about the rest.
That boys play King of the Hill, and girls do not, explains more about the world than all of gender theory.
Love-conquers-all is the dullest story in the world. In most of the interesting stories love conquers nothing whatever.
There exists in all men a thirst for the hunt, for predator stalking prey inexorably until it is caught and torn to shreds, that only reading Jane Austen can slake.