We spoke about suboptimal female dating strategies before, such as systematically fishing in the wrong pool, which leads to at best achieving a local optimum. There is an interesting inverse to this problem, which seems to explain why a lot of women are obsessed with “fixing” their guy. While women normally realize that they cannot turn a fat, short slob with a decent paycheck into a Chad, they seem a lot less convinced that they cannot turn a Chad’s life around.

Ideally, a woman would look for a guy who ticks a fair number of her boxes and be content with it. Some women even pursue this strategy. However, particularly in the West it seems a lot more common that they do not want to compromise on anything, which perhaps explains our sky-high prescription rate for anti-depressants. For such women, looks are presumably non-negotiable and if they happen to get a Chad, they do not view this is as an exciting short-term experience but instead often seem to want to turn this guy into their dream man. I have experienced this a few times myself. The two most extreme cases were eerily similar. Both had spent the first night at my place, desperately wanted to meet up again, and when we did so, they had presented me with some kind of master plan to turn my life around. The first one had brought printouts of job ads that she thought seemed suitable and which she wanted to discuss with me. The other had a much grander plan and was convinced that my best path towards success in life was to go back to school, get an MBA, and work for a large company. At that time I was not interested in either. Admittedly, both approaches were not without merit. I was just not at a point in my life where I cared about being gainfully employed.

Other women I either knew and who were interested in me as well as women I briefly dated had a similar angle. It seems they were giddy with excitement that there was this 6’3″-tall guy who had not yet outgrown his phase of teenage rebellion. If they could just turn me into Joe Normie who was eager to work for Big Corp and bring home a steady paycheck, their life would, at least for the foreseeable future, be perfect. This is a pretty odd approach. Granted, some men also think they can turn any woman into their dream woman. They wonder how they can get their fattie of a girlfriend to lose weight. Some are Captain-Save-A-Hoes whose mission it is to turn the former town bicycle into a respectable housewife. I hope I do not need to point out how unlikely either goal is. Of course, there is also a subset of men who spend six figures on cosmetic surgery for their wives. If they had been able to attract better-looking women, this would not be necessary. Besides, cosmetic surgery cannot do miracles. The 6/10 girlfriend of a local millionaire will never be a supermodel.

Wanting to fix the guy comes across as a childlike wish-fulfillment fantasy. The perfect guy is not out there, so women pick they best-looking guy they can get and hope to turn him into a suitable breadwinner, either by helping him to deliberately shape his career or by incessant nagging. I am not sure that this works at all. I can see nagging being a successful strategy, though, but it probably does not lead to outsized results. I am aware of one instance of a woman nagging her husband to take on secondments in order to potentially improve his career. He did that, but his health ultimately suffered and he did not seem particularly happy. A different guy, i.e. one who is obsessed with his career, would do this out of his own volition and not need extraneous female encouragement, be it of a positive or negative nature. In the end, people can only fix themselves and men and women would be better off if they accepted this reality instead of embracing delusions about human nature.