Is attachment theory overused? Sexual market value and avoidant behavior

Attachment theory has become one of the internet’s favorite explanations for romantic rejection.

She pulls away? Avoidant.

He will not commit? Avoidant.

Someone becomes less interested once the relationship gets serious? Childhood wounds.

Sometimes that may be true.

But sometimes attachment theory is cope.

Sometimes the simpler explanation is that the other person simply does not value the relationship enough to invest more heavily in it.

Attachment theory asks the wrong question

Attachment theory asks:

Why is this person pulling away?

A mating-market framework asks something different:

Why would this person choose to stay?

People do not date in a vacuum.

They respond to attraction, alternatives, status, security, resources, sexual chemistry, future potential and what they believe they can get elsewhere.

A woman can appear deeply “avoidant” with one man and become intensely invested in another.

A man can say he is “not ready for a relationship” for three years and suddenly become ready when he meets a woman he values enough.

The attachment style may not have changed.

The incentive did.

Sexual market value changes the incentive

The Red Pill calls this sexual market value, or SMV.

It is the value someone commands in the mating market.

Men and women tend to build that value differently.

Within the Red Pill framework, female sexual market value is weighted heavily toward youth, beauty and femininity, while male sexual market value can rise through physique, competence, confidence, money, status, social skill and the ability to protect and provide.

That creates different timelines and different incentives.

A young attractive woman may have extraordinary optionality before she has built much of anything else.

A man may have relatively little optionality when he is young, broke, socially awkward and physically unimpressive, then become dramatically more desirable as he develops himself.

This matters because optionality changes behavior.

More options can look like avoidance

Someone with few desirable alternatives has more incentive to preserve a relationship.

Someone with many attractive alternatives can afford to be more selective.

That does not mean people consciously calculate every relationship like a spreadsheet.

But alternatives matter.

Relationship research already shows that perceived alternatives can reduce commitment, even when someone is otherwise satisfied with their relationship. I explored the same problem from another angle in my article on romantic overfitting: the more comparison points and imagined alternatives people accumulate, the harder it may become for one real person to feel exceptional.

So what gets labeled “avoidant attachment” may sometimes be something much simpler:

I like you, but not enough to close my other options.

The feminine imperative

Rollo Tomassi uses the phrase the feminine imperative for the idea that female mating behavior ultimately serves female interests.

Strip away the terminology and the underlying point is simple:

Romantic love is not the same thing as unconditional investment.

Women tend to choose men they believe improve their lives.

Men choose women according to their own mating preferences.

Both sexes respond to incentives.

Both sexes can lose interest when they believe they can do better.

And both sexes can become far more committed when they believe they have found someone difficult to replace.

The useful response is not diagnosis

If a woman pulls away, you can spend six months trying to determine whether she has avoidant attachment.

Maybe she does.

Or you can ask a more useful question:

How do I become a man women are less willing to lose?

Improve your physique.

Build competence.

Earn more.

Develop social skill.

Become more confident around women.

Build status and an interesting life.

Become capable of protecting the people around you without becoming a danger to them.

Increase your own optionality.

In other words:

Raise your sexual market value.

Start with health

If you want to raise your SMV, health is the foundation that makes the rest easier. 

Because health determines how much capacity you have to attack everything else.

When your sleep, metabolism, body composition, energy, strength and hormones are dialed in, you have more physical and psychological bandwidth to take on difficult things.

More capacity to train hard.

More capacity to work.

More capacity to tolerate stress.

More capacity to compete.

More capacity to build the career, body, social life and competence that raise your value over time.

Testosterone is part of that picture, although not in the cartoonish “more testosterone makes you an alpha” sense. Human experiments suggest testosterone may influence social assertiveness, submission, sensitivity to status and willingness to approach social threat. I break that research down in Does Testosterone Change Your Personality?

And if your testosterone is being suppressed by poor sleep, excess body fat, inadequate energy intake, poor metabolic health or other correctable factors, the first move is usually not some exotic testosterone hack. It is fixing the system producing the hormone in the first place.

That is the idea behind my guide to increasing testosterone naturally.

Maybe she really is avoidant.

Maybe she simply did not value you enough.

Either way, raising your own value gives you more leverage than diagnosing hers.