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“People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturallyâ€� when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturallyâ€� and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will.

People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life.

We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually.

Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participantsâ€� blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). ”
― Malcolm Collins

“My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“We will preserve the capacity for independent thought through a society so heterogeneous that it will make our own look trite. We will intentionally craft new ethnicities, religions, and ways of existing. The genome will be our canvas and flesh our clay. Man is a young species. We still occupy the same bodies with which our ancestors hunted and picked berries. We are so trapped by the limitations of our biology that we lack the capacity to conceive our ultimate potential. ”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing