Kim du Toit recently dredged up an old article concerning the ways in which men weigh up the pros and cons of dating, sleeping with, and settling down with any given romantic female interest in their lives, and it provides an excellent insight into the way we men think about relationships:

I think that men keep a running ledger going in their subconscious—all the good/great things about their relationship on the one side, and all the bad/terrible things on the other. At some point or another, if the perceived negatives outweigh the positives, the man will quit the relationship—I mean, just bail out of the whole thing—and usually with a swiftness and finality which confounds women.

Because we’re guys, we don’t talk about this much—even, or especially with other men, and hardly ever with women. But it’s a plain fact.

Now, because we’re guys, certain things have a disproportionate effect on both the good and bad things: on the good side, sex, food and shared interests being probably the best examples; on the bad, infidelity, constant nagging and invasion of privacy constitute the negative. The degree of each, good or bad, will vary among individual men, of course. Some men will put up with almost anything if the sex is of the “bed on fire” variety, for instance, while others will walk out of a relationship for something as trifling as compulsory weekly visits to Mom (hers).

Frankly, it doesn’t matter what these things are. What’s important is that they are each weighed, and applied to the ledger. And when the negatives consistently outweigh the positives, the man will say (to himself), “You know what? This isn’t worth the hassle. The hell with it.”

And once that decision is made, the relationship is over. Now, it may take a long time for all that to happen. Men are not accounting machines, and this is not a daily, or even a regular process. But it takes place in every man, sooner or later, when the negatives get too much to live with.

What’s interesting about all this is that as men grow older, the process becomes a lot quicker—mostly, it should be said, because younger men can put up with almost anything if they’re getting laid. As men get older and sex becomes less important, however, the “bullshit” factor and the tolerance thereof become more important.

Rarely, if ever, have truer words been written about how men think.

This is the daily reality for men in relationships with women. We may well love the woman that we are with, and we may excuse any number of faults and flaws that she has because we love her – but we do keep a running tally in our heads of just how difficult and painful she is to deal with.

The very best women are the ones who are feminine, sweet, girly, caring, kind, beautiful, and accomplished – though “accomplishment” for women is measured on an altogether different scale than it is for men.

“Accomplishment” in a woman’s case has nothing whatsoever to do with her “career”. Instead, it encompasses her domestic skills, such as her ability to cook and clean and maintain a good house; her artistic, literary, and linguistic skills, since women are far more predisposed to right-brain thinking and are vastly more emotionally sensitive than men are; and – let’s face facts – her skills in love-making and sex.

Note, by the way, that it is a basic truth that women who act like whores in bed, often (though not always) act like whores out of bed too. A woman in her late twenties or early thirties who is too experienced with sex and relationships is a colossal headache compared to a young shy sweet clueless mostly sane 18-year-old virgin. (Sadly, there are very few of those around these days; if you are looking for one of those, you’ll want the unicorn stables right over there in the Land of Make-Believe.)

The sweet spot for us as men is the woman who is, to use the old phrase, “a lady in the streets and a freak between the sheets”. That is a rare woman indeed, these days, at least in the Western world. You can still find such ladies in fairly decent numbers outside of the West, in places like Eastern Europe, parts of Latin America, and parts of Asia. But they are still not “normal”.

The amount of bullshit and lunacy that a man will put up with from such accomplished women is extraordinary. That is the kind of woman that a man will gladly march off to war for. But, every man has his breaking point, and reaches it sooner or later when forced to deal with too much nonsense.

The fact is that men do indeed keep a running tally of positives and negatives in a relationship, especially once we pass the age of thirty. In this respect, we are vastly different from women. As our good friend the Gentleman Adventurer once said in relation to his now-ex-wife, men are rational while women rationalise their decisions.

Men and women are both capable of ending a relationship with shocking abruptness. But men do so after thinking carefully through all of the pros and cons of staying in the relationship, and once the bullshit meter hits a critical level, THAT’S IT. We’re done.

For men, our ability to think with the big head instead of the small one increases with age. The period between our late teens to late twenties is often miserable in the extreme for a lot of guys. It’s a horrible time for us because we want and need sex, but cannot get it nearly as readily as we might like.

The reason for that is simple, and has to do with the radically different ways in which men and women age.

I’ve explained this so many times on this blog that it would be highly redundant to do so yet again. And my explanation is far from the best; others have done much better and more succinct jobs, in my opinion.

The Cliff Notes version is that men and women trade in different currencies. Men trade our resource value, defined in terms of status, wealth, and power, for access to the sexual value of women. Women trade their sexual value, defined in terms of youth, beauty, and fertility, for access to the resource value of men. Since men start out with very limited resources and accumulate value gradually over time, and women start out with very generous sexual value and lose it rapidly over time, women have a very easy time in life during their twenties and then see their value plummet sharply after 30, while men have a very hard time in life during our twenties and then see our value rise sharply after 30.

Things get much better for men after we turn 30, if we are careful and take good care of ourselves. Things get much, much worse for women after the same age, no matter how well they look after themselves.

As a result of this radical difference in mindset, psychology, biology, and risk-reward preferences, men end relationships for relatively rational reasons. Women, on the other hand, end relationships almost entirely because they feel UNHAAAAAAAPPY.

It is vitally important for both men and women to understand one critical fact:

You cannot make someone else happy.

All you can do is create the conditions within which someone else CAN be happy, if he or she has the maturity, wisdom, and strength to do so.

That is all any of us has the power to do. And, contrary to much of the “received wisdom” of our modren age, men do not have the obligation to keep their women happy.

Much of the nonsense circulating around the mainstream media these days involves arguing that men are somehow responsible for keeping their women happy, and if women end relationships with their men, it is because the men in question failed in some way to carry out this important duty.

As Dalrock pointed out, this is pure horseshit. A man is not responsible for keeping his woman happy. As Scripture, logic, and experience all dictate, the task of avoiding female discontentment – in other words, being happy – is not the responsibility of men. It is the responsibility of women:

If it were true that husbands are responsible not only for upholding their own vows, but also for making sure their wives always wanted to uphold their vows, then marriage vows would be a profoundly foolish thing. They are not foolish, but there is no denying that they would be foolish if you accept conventional wisdom, including the teaching of modern Christian leaders like Heidi’s chaplain friend, FotF, FamilyLife, and Pastors Dave and Doug Wilson. If a man doesn’t believe in biblical marriage, then not only does marriage have no moral meaning, but the very idea of marriage is downright absurd.

And, ladies, the exact same thing applies in reverse. You are not responsible for keeping your man happy. Only he can do that.

What you can do is not be an absolute ball-buster with more cooped-up crazy than Mariah Carey on a shopping spree in Macy’s. Avoid this one major mistake, and stick to the basic rules of keeping your man happy. It’s really not very difficult to give a man the conditions that he needs to be happy, contented, and compliant. Women have to do just three things to accomplish this:

1. Keep his stomach full;

2. Keep his balls empty;

3. LEAVE HIM THE HELL ALONE once in a while.

(I recently gave that exact advice, word for word, to a girl a few days before her wedding – in Russian. I assure you, in this specific instance something is actually gained in translation, in large part because in Russian the word for “balls” in this specific usage, literally means “eggs”. But that’s a story for another day. I’ve got quite a few of them from that particular period, in fact. Not all of them good, it must be said.)

Now, let me anticipate a criticism here: I am not for one moment arguing that a relationship consists of giving something and expecting to get something back. That is not love. Scripture makes this perfectly clear – 1 Corinthians 13, for instance, is perfectly clear on this subject.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

That is the love of which I write and speak – the love that a man bears for his woman even as she hurls abuse and wrath upon his head, even as she screams and shrieks and sobs at him. It is the kind of love that allows him to stand firm in the midst of her emotional tempests, letting the thundering waves and howling winds of her wrath break upon the rock of his strength.

Yet even the strongest rock is worn away with time. Enough such storms, and any sane man is simply going to snap and conclude that the woman in question simply isn’t worth it.

That does not mean that such a balancing of the books will be pleasant or easy. All too often, such breaks leave extraordinarily deep emotional scars and pain that can last a lifetime.

Men who have been through genuinely hard relationships, where the women involved called them “cowards” and “evil” and “abusive” and mocked their manhood at every turn, have to deal with a tremendous amount of poison, which must be extracted and disposed of before they are really fully capable of loving another woman. This takes time and not every man is successful at doing it.

Sooner or later, though, a man must lay down the law and balance that ledger. Eventually, if the abuse is bad enough and the woman prideful, difficult, arrogant, and hard-hearted enough, he must simply say, “it’s time”, and walk away.

Sadly, it is the woman who loses out in that particular bookkeeping exercise. But then, if it were not for the woman in question being bugshit nuts, the balancing would not have been required in the first place.