Treat them mean

To keep them keen. It's an old chestnut, but as with so many old chestnuts, there is truth inside. The Chateau quotes a woman to demonstrate why you should never feel terrible about treating a romantic entanglement like shit - because that's precisely what women find attractive.

A woman is as viscerally repulsed by a sensitive niceguy as a man is by a fat woman. If you want to know what a woman feels when a niceguy dotes on her in needy supplication, just remember how you feel when you see a land whale bend over in short shorts to pick up a donut crumb. The stimuli are different, but the disgust reflex is the same. And the reflex serves the same underlying reproductive purpose in both sexes: to avoid contamination of the egg with inferior sperm, and to avoid fertilizing and investing resources in inferior eggs.

Most women aren’t capable of this sort of self-reflection, and with good reason; if women had to grapple with their malignant sexual natures on a regular basis, they might very well go crazy. Or crazier than they already are. From an evolutionary perspective, mental stopgaps (aka the hamster) that block access to understanding of primal limbic impulses is a useful adaptation for ensuring women capitalize when the superior seed of self-driven, aloof, challenging, emotionally distant and often unkind men is available to them.

If you are a gentle, compassionate niceguy… a man of God…, a woman will become, inexplicably to you, cranky and moody if she’s in a relationship with you. You will be confused and wonder why she won’t listen to reason about all the good you do for her, and then you will blame her for your pain, unless you are an emasculated quasi-man, in which case you’ll direct the blame upon yourself.

Now, this has to be kept within reason, of course. If you're naturally an indifferent bastard, this does not mean that unleashing your inner sociopath is the means to a healthy relationship. But the reality is that most men are honestly nice, decent guys. Most men are also decidedly unsexy to women. These two facts are directly connected.

The thing is, if you're married, sex is not the entirety of the relationship. Keep that in mind before denying your wife the respect she deserves. But if your sex life is on the blink, rather than trying to be extra nice, try being uncharacteristically mean for a change. Extend your next business trip and go golfing for two days. Stay out until bar close with a friend. Get tickets to a game with a friend and don't bother telling her until you're walking out the door. Then compare notes with how it went compared to the time you tried buying roses, taking her out to dinner, and going on that romantic weekend getaway.

Women will tell you that it's not jerks that they crave, it's confidence. And you should put as much faith in that as a man's assertion that he doesn't like a nice set of double-Ds because more than a handful is a waste. Women don't even admit to themselves what they want, so why on Earth would you think they're going to be honest with you?