In the current Open Thread, aj left an excellent comment on how men and women deal with their past and decisions that may have been suboptimal. His observation strikes me as perfectly valid and well-deserving of greater visibility. His comment is replicated below.

The previous open thread had an interesting subthread about women rewriting memory. I once heard a guy decide to bulk up and get rich just to make his ex regret dumping him. (That’s a poor motivation, so I doubt he followed through.) Anyway, in retrospect, this was a case of projection. Men look back at where they screwed up, especially with women, and feel regret. Women revise history in their own minds instead. Their behavior in a given situation is guided less by (actual) prior experience and more by simple calculation of personal advantage in that moment (by male standards this is called a lack of integrity.)

In other words, if this guy had bulked up and gotten rich and then run into his ex, she wouldn’t have thought “I should never have dumped him.” She’d be more likely to think, “Okay, now that he’s hot and rich, how can I get back aboard the train?”

That’s probably also why they repeat the same mistakes endlessly, until they no longer can, due to fading sexual market value.