Men Think They Need To Be Good Providers Even More Than Women Do

And everyone agrees that caring is the most important quality in a mate

How true is the cultural narrative that women only want “high value” men? About as true as the one that says men only want beautiful women. There’s some broad basis to it from an evolutionary psychology perspective, but all you have to do is look at any crowd of humans to see all kinds of different people of varying shapes, sizes and attractiveness levels paired up. It turns out that the actual story is a lot more nuanced than the cultural narrative and also has an interesting twist. The people most likely to believe it’s important for men to be good providers are actually men.

A September 2017 study from the Pew Research Center on the topic of the importance of men as financial providers found that most Americans do expect men to be the main providers in a household.

“Roughly seven-in-ten adults (71%) say it is very important for a man to be able to support a family financially to be a good husband or partner. By comparison, 32% say it’s very important for a woman to do the same to be a good wife or partner, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Men are especially likely to place a greater emphasis on their role as financial providers (emphasis mine). While a nearly equal share of men and women say a man needs to be able to provide for his family to be a good husband or partner (72% and 71%, respectively), men are less likely than women to say the same about women. Just a quarter of men say this is very important for a woman to be a good wife or partner, compared with 39% of women.

However, the importance of being the financial provider ranks behind being caring and compassionate when it comes to being a good spouse or partner, in the public’s estimation. Overwhelming majorities say it is very important for men (86%) and women (90%) to have these qualities to be good spouses or partners.”

So yes, most women do expect that for a man to be a good partner he will also be a good provider, but most men expect this of men as well. And more cardinally, both men and women believe that loving character traits are more important than earning potential.

If you as a man feel that you are burdened by a societal expectation that you need to be a good provider for your family, that’s the patriarchy in action. That’s the societal box telling you how to be a real man and how to rise in the dominance hierarchy, which is what patriarchy actually is — a stratification system that affects all aspects of our culture and not just gender-related ones.

But with agriculture, for the first time, you have substantial personal property, property that you’d like to go to your heirs. In order to ensure paternity (hence the name patriarchy) women had to be controlled and their sexuality policed.

What resulted was not just stratification between men and women, but a larger stratification of society in general for the very first time. You’ve got a social system that is based in coercion and control — a pyramid-shaped dominance hierarchy.

Social castes emerged for the very first time.

How Patriarchy, Dominance, and Agriculture Ruined Our Quality of Life

Sure, there’s no doubt some evolutionary psychology in there also, but if we were to cease reinforcing it so stringently, and behave more cooperatively, there’d be more leeway for everybody to enter into roles and relationships that actually work for them. In the meantime, you can hardly blame women for holding the same views that men have too around man as provider. That’s what we’ve all been taught by patriarchal norms, which came into being about 10,000 years ago. Before that human beings lived a lot more communally and cooperatively.

Small bands of hunter/gatherers with strong kinship bonds would have cared for all children born into that group, regardless of paternity, which would have been unknowable without the sequestering and control of women. Because all food acquisition would have been done in groups and shared communally, there is no biological incentive to mating with the best provider. It was only with patriarchy that the role of a provider becomes important.Women no longer had any autonomy and had only one mate upon whom they were entirely dependent. It is only within this context that a good provider begins to truly matter.

If you are prohibited from providing for yourself and your children, and must rely on only one man to do that, then it is in your best interests to find a man who can do that well. Whereas, if you had been an adept gatherer, you might not have even needed a hunter at all. Cavewomen and Us.

To actually be a “high value” man means a lot more than the ability to be a good provider. It means exhibiting the caring and compassion that was what was indicated to be most valued in the Pew study and doing your fair share of the chores. In other words, treating the relationship like a partnership, and not like a hierarchy.

“If we want to get serious about living out our evolutionary hardwiring, we’d do better to examine the human desire for collaboration and community, the emphasis on pleasure and partnership rather than hierarchy, and to look for ways to bring those more fully into our current culture.” Cavewomen and Us