Natural Freedom

By offering a commitment you are admitting you are not in a place of abundance.
You are also telegraphing your fear of loss and hence value of the other.

This I see as them asking you 'is this enough? is this enough to get you to offer your commitment?', a way of assessing where you think your value lies on the scale.

Not to say they want it, or would take it, are you willing to offer it and how much value do you expect in return?

They are not seeking the commitment, they are seeing at what point you will offer it.

The way society, the rules, the boundaries have been put together and the way males thought/think and have been conditioned, I think males put way too much on commitment (on both sides), the females know this and have worked out how to utilise that.

I am thinking they are using the males willingness to offer commitment as a measure of his own internal value.

5. Strategic pluralism
According to the model we have presented, men’s allocation of effort to short-term mating during evolutionary history should have been contingent on their ability to satisfy the short-term mate preferences of women. Women’s short-term mate preferences, in turn, should have been influenced by GGSS (Good Gene Sexual Selection). Thus, men’s tendency to engage in short-term mating should be a direct function of their genetic fitness (indexed by FA), whereas men’s propensity to invest in single, exclusive long-term relationships should be inversely related to their genetic fitness.

From our perspective, the basic notion that men, on average, evolved to engage in greater mating effort than women correctly assumes that some ancestral males could have increased their fitness by trying to attract multiple mates. However, the more stringent notion that the best evolutionary strategy for most men should have been to pursue multiple mates assumes that most men were successful at short-term mating. This is a dubious assumption.

Men’s short-term mating success should have depended partly on which attributes women preferred and desired in short-term mates. Relatively few men are likely to have satisfied these preferences.

Thus, for some men, one cost of engaging in short-term mating would have been the loss of opportunities to engage in parental investment (which human males also evolved to do: see Alexander & Noonan 1979; Lancaster & Lancaster 1985).

If short-term mating effort generated poor payoffs for men who did not have the attributes most women desired in short-term mates, these costs should have outweighed the benefits of pursuing short-term mating.

Hence, the most profitable mating strategy for the typical man may have been to devote most of his reproductive effort to enhancing the phenotypic quality of his offspring by investing heavily in a single mate’s offspring, despite the fact that a few men with certain desirable attributes were even more successful when they adopted short-term tactics.

Consider a parallel example where the currency of profit is money rather than fitness. Suppose that brain surgeons make more money than everyone else does. Clearly, it is not the “most profitable” money-making strategy for everyone to decide to become a brain surgeon. Only so many people can become brain surgeons; hence, most people would be bound to fail. Instead, the most profitable strategy for most people would be to select careers that provide them with the most money, given their abilities and, in competitive markets, their chances of success.

And how does the optimal strategy change with time?

No matter how much of a player you are now, if you aren't able to shelter your kids from the brainwashing it will all be for nothing.

Losing or giving or having an apple taken does not affect the trees ability to generate more.

In contrast, a committed man is always there for you or at least much more available. Which in turn decreases his value.

is my finger too small, or is the moon too bright to look at?

About what Peregrinus said, my belief is that if you lead by example, your kids will catch up on it.. Subconscious level is insanely influential but most people don't know it.
Just look at how subconscious things from our parents fucked us up in a way lol, demons we had to face (and also good things passed onto us subconsciously)

You've got me stumped lol

is my finger too small, or is the moon too bright to look at?

The person that has the least amount of interest in continuing a relationship has the most power over it.
And that person has to be more valuable than the other.
But that person should also care less about commitment.

This is what I was trying to express. Metaphorically, I don't think the tree would try to generate apples for the outcomes it provides (birds, attention, etc). Chop wood, carry water, because it's what we want to do, not for the external things we gain from it. This is what I'm really trying to work towards.

If you're not physically there at least in presence so they have a role model, they're gonna have a heavy handicap to work with.

You have already lost

You have already lost

How so?

I've lived first hand the results of a single parent feminist household. It's not what I would call fun.

Nature, not nurture, explains most family resemblance, so parents can safely cut themselves a lot of additional slack.

Accept that your children's lives are shaped mostly by their genes and their own choices, not by the sacrifices you make in hopes of turning them into successful adults.

a phrase I was overhearing from her "I don't see you as a fixed point"

If he is a fixed point (stable) then she knows what she is getting and what she will get. If he is not, she will not.

In a study of gender differences in Big Five traits across 55 nations, Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, and Alik (2008) found men reported lower levels than women did of neuroticism (overall d = −0.40), agreeableness (d = −0.15), conscientiousness (d = −0.12), and extraversion (d = −0.10) across most nations. More egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity, however, were associated with larger gender differences. For example, the largest overall gender differences in personality were found in relatively high gender egalitarian cultures of France (d = −0.44) and the Netherlands (d = −0.36), whereas the smallest gender differences were found in the relatively low gender egalitarian cultures of Botswana (d =0.00) and India (d = −0.01). The same pattern of findings—larger Big Five gender differences being found in more gender egalitarian cultures—had been previously documented by Costa et al. (2001) and has since been replicated across dozens of cultures by Lippa (2010a) and Schmitt et al. (2016).

Individuals who score low in neuroticism tend to be more emotionally stable and less reactive to stress. They tend to be calm, even-tempered, and less likely to feel tense or rattled. Although they are low in negative emotion, they are not necessarily high on positive emotion. Being high in scores of positive emotion is generally an element of the independent trait of extraversion. Neurotic extraverts, for example, would experience high levels of both positive and negative emotional states, a kind of "emotional roller coaster".

Seems like another *what* moment. Have you tried answering that question yourself?

She will value things in the way she values them

She will also telegraph this value of value to the male in question, if he is paying attention

What is the saying.. oh yes, pick from those who pick you