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What men and women are attracted to in a mate or potential sexual partner are somewhat different depending upon what is desired. If you or she are just shopping around, you may behave somewhat differently from how you will in the active selection of a long-term mate. Basically, people are complicated animals, and have evolved mating strategies that are coherent throughout the species.
That is to say, despite superficial cultural differences, men and women in Borneo are looking for the same things as men and women in Manhattan. The purpose of sexual pairing is the continuation of the species. Mother Nature does not care about you personally, as long as She gets some gene swapping, She's happy. Things are the way they are because they work and have worked for millions of years. Mating is complex, but looking at the big picture, not unintelligible. What makes things complex and unintelligible is how they relate to you personally.
We are descended from higher primates who were forced by changing environmental circumstances to adapt or die. We overlaid instinct with reason, which enables us to deal appropriately with change. However, this means that we must learn through mistakes. No mistakes, no learning. No learning, no surviving. Thus, we are doomed to error.
People evolved in a hunting and gathering environment. Lots of loose, flexible constellations, changing from place to place and season to season. We stay with one mate for a while and then Mother Nature urges us to move on. She wants variety.
Not so long ago we became farmers. Farmers stay in one place and own land. Mating thus became as much a means of ensuring the consolidation of property as the propagation of the species. People were forced to stay with one another for life, or suffer drastic financial penalties. This is the environment in which much of our language and cultural context evolved.
The Industrial Revolution once again allowed a condition of mating, breeding and moving on. Women once again have financial and social independence, and we are no longer bound to one spot and one mate for life.
People do what they can, and they do what they must. The reason people break up and find new mates is because they can.
So. What we have here is a melange of chimp, Neanderthal, farmer and factory worker. Contradictions, confusion, emotions pulling in the opposite direction from cultural ideals. In short, heartbreak and sorrow.
Who does not realize that without women we can get no pleasure or satisfaction out of life, which but for them would lack charm and be more uncouth and savage than that of wild beasts? Who does not realize that it is only women who rid our hearts of all vile and base thoughts, anxieties, miseries and the wretched ill humors that often accompany them? And if we really consider the truth, we shall also recognize that in our understanding of great issues far from distracting us they awaken our minds, and in warfare they make men fearless and bold beyond measure.
Certainly, once the flame of love is burning in a man's heart, cowardice can never possess it. For a lover always wishes to make himself as lovable as possible, and he always fears lest some disgrace befall him which can make him less esteemed by the woman whose esteem he craves; neither does he flinch risking his life a thousand times a day in order to deserve her love.
Indeed, if anyone were to recruit an army of lovers, to fight before the eyes of the women they love, it would conquer the entire world, unless, of course, it were opposed by an army of the same sort. . . . Do you not see that all those charming recreations which please everyone so much can be attributed solely to the influence of women? Who is there who studies how to dance gracefully for any other reason but to give pleasure to the ladies? Who studies to compose verses, at least in the vernacular, if not to express the emotions aroused by women?
Consider how many noble poems we would be deprived of, both Latin and Greek, if our poets had thought little of women. Leaving all the others aside, would it not be a grievous loss if Francesco Petrarch, who wrote about his loves in this language of ours in such an inspired way, had turned his mind only to exercises in Latin, which he would have done if love for madonna Laura had not sometimes distracted him?
I will not name the distinguished men of talent alive today (and some of them present here) who create something noble every day, and yet find their subject matter solely in the beauty and virtue of women. Notice how Solomon, when he wanted to write mystically of very exalted and divine things, in order to veil them gracefully imagines and ardent and amorous dialogue between a lover and his lady, since he thought it was impossible to find in this world any more suitable and exact analogy for divine things than a man's love for a woman; and in this way he wished to give us some inkling of the divine reality that through learning and through grace he had come to know better than the others.
-- The Courtier, Book Three
"As long as you know that most men are like children you know everything."
--Coco [Gabrielle] Chanel (1883-1971)
What do women see in men? Beats the Hell out of me. If I were a woman, I'd be a lesbian. But, throwing my hands up in despair is not what I'm here for, so let's just take a stab at it.
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