Is the splitting referred to as women’s “dual mating strategy” driven more by evolutionary reflexes—or by cultural tropes? Is it genetics or memetics? Clearly both can play a role, at least in theory, but perhaps it’s time we included a consideration of culture’s role in what is usually assumed a biological imperative alone.
The romantic love script likely fostered the process of splitting that was previously latent and less realized, whereby the dual male archetypes targeted by female desire became increasingly split from a previously more integrated archetypal configuration. The timeline below outlines how romantic love may have contributed to normalizing this split:
1. Courtly love formalized the split
Courtly love narratives institutionalized a division between the stable, duty-bound husband and the passionate, “alpha” lover (e.g., King Arthur vs Lancelot; King Mark vs Tristan). These stories did more than depict conflict, they implied that no single man could embody both roles, and by doing so they normalized the cultural idea that different male types serve different relational functions.
2. The pattern was culturally transmitted and reinforced
This narrative split didn’t remain confined to medieval literature. It was carried forward and elaborated through Romanticism, Victorian fiction, and early modern storytelling, repeatedly reinforcing the same dual archetype across generations.
3. Modern romantic culture inherits the same structure
Contemporary romantic norms continue to reproduce this division, often implicitly – through film, literature, social expectations, and in subsequent redpill narratives about “intersexual dynamics.” The “provider vs. passion” dichotomy has become a familiar, taken-for-granted template for interpreting male attractiveness and relationship roles.
4. Behavior may reflect scripts rather than evolved modules
Because this archetypal split has been consistently taught, modeled, and reinforced over nine centuries, the present-day patterns of attraction and mate choice may reflect internalized cultural scripts rather than simple, evolved psychological adaptations.
This splitting of male archetypes—away from a more integrated assessment of a man’s overall character—may serve narcissistic preference patterns far more than any hypothesized evolutionary strategy of selecting for “good genes.” In practice, it often reduces to familiar rationalizations: the grass is always greener, I’m bored, or I deserve more excitement.
What is frequently framed as adaptive strategy may instead be post hoc justification – enabled by a cultural script that separates stability from desire and encourages their continual comparison.
As an aside, the following scale attempts to reintegrate these divided archetypes into a single, holistic evaluation of male attractiveness [link].
Such an approach more closely resembles how traditional mate selection likely operated—not so much as bifurcated dual-mating strategies, but an assessment of the whole person instead of partitioning traits into competing roles. What has been lost is not complexity, but coherence – replaced by a kind of structural split engendered by the romantic ethos.