What Do Women Want? Mimetic Desire, Market Value and Complementary Needs

The conversation opens with the question even Freud could not answer: what do women really want in dating? The speaker says he devoted a separate episode to it three days earlier, and gives his unsatisfying answer: women want what other women want. Provocative as it sounds, the rest of the talk balances it with evolutionary psychology and current research data.

The name of that answer is mimetic desire : desire is contagious, and people decide what to want by watching what others want. According to the NIH-archived Girard review, French thinker Rene Girard laid out the idea in a 1996 essay through eating behavior; Taraban carries the same mechanism into the dating market. Attraction, in other words, is born not between two people but between the gazes watching them.

Imitated desire and fashion-like attraction

Male types that rise and fall by season are no surprise under this lens. A style, a tone of voice, a way of life reaches critical mass as women watch each other, and suddenly it becomes what everyone wants. The speaker compares it openly to fashion: attraction has a color of the season, and whoever matches the season becomes as visible as the season.

The narrative does not stay one-sided; evolutionary psychology steps in as the counterweight. Height, strength and above all facial symmetry count as indirect signals of fertility and developmental health. A symmetric face is thought to mark a body less damaged by outside insults during development. Whichever way the fashion wind blows, older hardware keeps running underneath.

The real reason women watch each other is safety. When a preference reaches critical mass, standing at the densest point of the behavior curve means standing in the middle of the herd, and the middle is the safest place. A woman whose style, expectations or relationship format drifts too far from that center feels more exposed. The speaker ties part of rising female anxiety to this exact spot: everyone who leaves the center fears losing direction.

Social media scales this watching beyond all measure. A woman looking at her screen absorbs the impression that other women achieve everything at once: career, beauty, relationship, motherhood. According to the book's Amazon page, Taraban reads this picture through an economic lens; perceived value sits at the heart of coupling. The perfection on screen distorts perception, because nobody sees the bargaining behind the camera.

The mirror grew: anxiety and comparison

The comparison mechanism shows up clearly in research. According to the NIH-archived social-comparison study, exposure to upward comparisons explains the link between Instagram use and lower global self-esteem. A second study with over four hundred participants traced the effect all the way to depressive symptoms. What drops while scrolling is not just time but the value a person assigns to herself.

According to the CDC's NCHS report, depression prevalence past age twelve measured 13.1 percent between 2021 and 2023, falling as age rises. Counseling uptake among women runs clearly above men. The speaker connects this picture to the fear of falling out of the herd: the impression that everyone does the same thing makes whoever cannot feel sick. The numbers at least confirm this: young women carry the heaviest share of the pressure.

The other face of the search for safety is the search for resources. Women in dating look not only for excitement but for protection and a secured future; the speaker frames it with the concept of sexual market value . That value is not fixed; it traces different curves by age and sex. Cold as the market language sounds, the narrator's thesis is warm: whoever reads her own value correctly suffers fewer disappointments.

According to the UTexas age-preference review, men across dozens of cultures choose younger wives on average, and women choose older husbands. The number of likes received on online platforms follows the same curve by age; because age tracks fertility, it is an exceptionally decisive variable in mate choice. The trace of age runs from marriage ads to divorce causes. Age curves are not an opinion but a pattern repeated across cultures.

The male curve is more volatile, because in women's eyes a man's value is not reduced to his body. Wealth, humor, charm and status, added to physical appeal, can carry a man's total value into late decades. The speaker offers this not as consolation but as strategy: where the body ages, character and resources speak. For men the game is played not in the mirror but in humor and in a trusted circle.

The pedestal trap and admiration

The most expensive mistake is putting the woman on a pedestal. When a man places himself below and the woman on the throne, he effectively asks her to settle for someone beneath her, and most women refuse. The speaker stresses that this dynamic runs largely below awareness. It explains why men who look perfect on paper get rejected: admiration is no substitute for attraction.

Admiration itself is not the pure pleasure it is assumed to be. Limerence , the obsessive kind of fondness, carries anguish, fixation and negative feelings alongside the pleasant ones. People even love the aching side of falling in love; that is the speaker's provocative line. Feeling bonded without suffering counts, for many, as the seal of reality on the bond.

The liveliest metaphor for relationship cost is the sports car: everyone talks about the thrill of the drive, nobody mentions the maintenance bill. The speaker says no relationship improved his life in his twenties, while today the cost makes sense because he receives love and support. The host answers from the same spot: excitement is momentary, maintenance is permanent. The math has to work after the feeling fades.

Here the SagePub mate-preference study enters: in a 760-person survey of college-educated singles, participants wanted a partner resembling themselves in personality yet told the general question they preferred a complementary partner. Women additionally wanted a more conscientious, steadier and more extraverted mate. It mirrors the speaker's complementary needs thesis exactly: relationships work between people who trade what the other lacks, not the same goods.

The ledger model: attraction, bargaining, upkeep

Taraban's economic model of relationships is laid out systematically in his book. According to the book's Amazon page, The Value of Others appeared under the PsycHacks imprint in July 2024 and earned a high score from over a thousand reviews. The core claim: if everyone chases their perceived best option, the perception of value sits at the heart of human coupling. The book turns that sentence into a dating philosophy.

The SecondPerson review distills the model's three phases: attraction based on perceived market value, bargaining in which the man tries to get the most for the least resources, and upkeep after the first excitement fades. In the upkeep phase the power balance shifts, overfamiliarity sinks in, and the couple either builds a new equilibrium or breaks apart. The schema disturbs because it translates romance into accounting.

The same review's strongest objection is that love does not fit the ledger: love is a good that cannot be bargained over, a one-sided gift like the sun scattering light without payment. A relationship lasts while both sides judge the current trade their best option; love stands outside that math, like a climate softening it. The speaker's model does not deny this; it only says love alone does not hold a relationship up.

The proposed remedy is to ask for less: ask your partner only for what you cannot get anywhere else, and meet the rest among friends, family and community. For thousands of years people met those needs inside the tribe; men with men, women with women. The pair bond was never expected to be everything to everyone. When expectations shrink, disappointment shrinks with them.

Practical notes: for men and for women

The community leg of the work runs through the Captain's Quarters, where Taraban hosts twice-monthly group consultations and Q&A sessions with invited guests, alongside one-on-one consultations for men and women worldwide. The speaker presents this as the tribe made explicit: recurring contact with the same circle, where needs get distributed instead of loaded onto one partner. Links to the book and to every project sit in each episode's description.

According to the PsycHacks channel description on Podbean, Taraban releases short episodes distilled from clinical practice several times a week and defines his mission as reducing unnecessary suffering. The catalog has passed six hundred episodes. The format works like a laboratory carrying the book's heavy theses into daily life: each episode takes one idea and holds it up to the listener's mirror.

The practical prescription for men fits in three items: tear down the pedestal, make your value visible, ask for little. Instead of seating the woman on the throne, grow your own standing, humor and resources; target concrete value creation, not the herd's approval. And shorten the list you bring to a relationship: take friendship, therapy and fun from your circle, not from your partner.

The mirror is held from the other side for women: notice the pressure to stand at the herd's center, and separate fashion from value. Wanting what everyone wants feels safe but costs dearly; a woman who accepts complementary needs, who tolerates what is different, finds more satisfaction with less rivalry. Safety lies not in the middle of the crowd but in the right trade.

Closing: the dance goes on

At the close the host points to the book and the speaker lists his online addresses: the video channel, one-on-one consultations and a community with twice-monthly group sessions. The last line is a dance invitation: good questions, good talk, on with the dance. The narrator's share is this: dating is not an exam but a dance where two people lay their value on the table. Whoever knows the steps endures both the music and the silence.