WorthlessGiftsGetTheGoodGirls
From Epowiki
Worthless' gifts get the good girls 13:21 27 July 2005 Anna Gosline
Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken for granted.
Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially worthless gifts � such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out � is a winning courtship strategy for both sexes.
Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can ensure they are not just seducing 'gold-diggers' � girls who take valuable presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.
Sozou came about the idea after reading about a man in his local newspaper. The man had been paying the rent of a woman he considered was his girlfriend � he was giving her a valuable gift. But she had been heartlessly manipulating him, dating another man on the sly while accepting money from her unwitting sugar daddy.
"It spurred me onto thinking that if he had just been buying her expensive dinners, and not paying her rent, she wouldn�t have strung him along so much," says Sozou.
Full Text at NewScience http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7737
Comment: This commentator seems to assign no 'worth' to gifts that do not accumulate wealth. Dinners out and theatre tickets can be expensive, but the benefit these bring feed only the belly and memory. But the memory of these pleasurable events become foundation stones of relationships that are largely constructed in the phantasm of the imagination. Such a construction forms even before sex, the shared home, and family, and may easily outlast all of those and even the marriage itself.
It seems to me, that in the context of human relationships, feeding the memory with pleasurable events for nostalgia to feed on is anything but worthless.
Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek
