You have probably been operating on a story about men and women that is not quite true.
Not because you are gullible. Because you were handed the story by people who believed it themselves — and because it gets repeated so often, in so many places, that it starts to feel like fact. The story goes something like this: men want physical connection, women want emotional connection. Men resist commitment, women pursue it. Men move on quickly after a breakup, women grieve longer. Men are the pursuers, women are the choosers.
That story shapes how you read signals on a date. It shapes how you interpret silence after a good conversation. It shapes how you explain why someone pulled away, or why you did. And if the story is wrong — if it has been quietly, measurably wrong this entire time — then a lot of the conclusions you have drawn from it are wrong too.
Here is what a recent episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast surfaced that stopped us cold. Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Nottingham and author of A Billion Years of Sex Differences, laid out what decades of cross-cultural research actually shows about what men and women want from each other. Three findings in particular landed differently for an audience like ours — people who grew up with a very specific set of scripts about gender, love, and desire, and who are now navigating real relationships without a map.
We are going to walk through all three. But fair warning: the third one explains the first two. So stay with it.
Women Are Not the Romantic Ones. Men Are.
Go ahead and sit with how wrong that sounds.
The cultural story — the one your Relief Society lessons and romantic comedies and well-meaning aunts all agreed on — is that women are the relational ones. Women are the ones who want love. Men are the ones who have to be coaxed into it, corralled toward commitment, convinced that settling down is worth the sacrifice of their freedom.
The data disagrees. Substantially.
Research compiled across decades and cultures shows that men fall in love faster than women. Men are more likely to say "I love you" first in a relationship. And when a relationship ends, men suffer more — not less. They report higher levels of emotional pain, take longer to recover, and are more likely to describe a past breakup as the defining loss of their life.
This is not a small finding buried in an obscure journal. It has been replicated enough times that Stewart-Williams calls it one of the more robust patterns in relationship psychology. And yet almost no one talks about it. The cultural narrative of the emotionally unavailable man is so loud that the data can barely get a word in.
For the midlife LDS community specifically, this matters in a way that is almost uncomfortable to name. The men sitting in those Facebook groups — the ones writing posts that get labeled "bone-tired" and "defeated" by the comment threads — are not performing. They are grieving. Often more deeply than the women around them realize. Often more deeply than they themselves have been given permission to admit.
And the women reading this? Many of you have quietly written off the men in your dating pool as emotionally unavailable. As people who cannot or will not go deep. That assumption may be costing you something real.
But here is the question that finding opens that this article has not answered yet: if men want love just as much as women do — maybe more — then why does attraction feel so inconsistent? Why does the same woman who eventually wants depth and stability seem to keep choosing something else first?
That is not a character flaw. It is something more interesting than that.
Her Attraction to the "Wrong" Guy Isn't a Flaw. It's a Feature.
This one is going to sting a little for some readers. Stay with it.
Stewart-Williams presents research showing that what women prioritize in a potential partner genuinely shifts depending on what kind of relationship they perceive the man to be offering. In a long-term context — a real relationship, the kind our audience is actually looking for — women weight things like stability, emotional availability, kindness, and resources more heavily. These are traits that matter enormously for building a life with someone.
But in a short-term context — a casual encounter, a low-commitment situation, or something that signals it is not going anywhere lasting — women weight physical attractiveness more heavily. Not moderately more heavily. Substantially more. In those contexts, their preferences converge closely with men's.
The evolutionary explanation is direct: in a casual context, the only thing a male partner contributes is genes. So the qualities that signal good genes — physical symmetry, confidence, vitality — become paramount. It is not irrational. It is a different program running for a different purpose.
What this means practically is that the woman who keeps finding herself drawn to someone who is exciting but not buildable is not broken. She is not self-sabotaging, though it can look that way from the outside. She is responding to signals about commitment level — and if those signals are ambiguous or low, a different set of preferences activates.
This also means something for the men reading this. If you are leading with emotional availability, kindness, and long-term signals — and the woman across the table seems underwhelmed — it is worth asking what signals she is reading about the nature of the interaction itself. She may not be rejecting you. She may be in a different program entirely, one that has not yet registered this as a long-term context.
Which brings us to the part that explains why so many people in this community feel like they are dating in a hall of mirrors. Because there is a second layer underneath all of this, and it is almost certainly making everything harder than it needs to be.
If You Feel Invisible, the Problem Probably Isn't What You Think It Is.
The research calls it the "sexual overperception bias." Here is what it means in plain language.
Men systematically overestimate women's romantic interest in them. Women systematically underestimate men's romantic interest in them. These are not random errors. They are evolved asymmetries — each sex making a different kind of predictable mistake, for reasons that made sense across a long history even if they cause chaos in modern dating.
For men, the cost of missing a genuine opportunity historically outweighed the cost of an awkward misread. So evolution built in a bias toward assuming interest. Better a false positive than a missed chance. For women, the cost of misjudging a man's intentions could be much higher — which built in a bias toward caution, toward reading down rather than up.
The result in 2026: men in a midlife singles group are frequently projecting interest onto interactions that were friendly warmth, not an invitation. Women in the same room are frequently failing to register genuine interest from men who are signaling — just not loudly enough to register through a filter calibrated for skepticism.
Both patterns show up clearly in the Facebook threads we follow. Men who have been rejected repeatedly, convinced no one is interested. Women who feel unseen, unnoticed, passed over — when the man across the table was interested and simply terrible at showing it in a way that cut through her noise-canceling filter.
This is not a reason to feel worse about midlife dating. It is actually the opposite. Because here is what ties all three findings together into something you can use.
The Part That Changes Everything
You are not a prisoner of any of this.
That is the point Stewart-Williams returns to throughout the entire conversation. He is insistent about it: understanding why a behavior evolved does not mean it is fixed, inevitable, or an excuse. It means you have information. And information is the beginning of agency.
If you are a man who now knows that you are probably reading too much into ambiguous signals — you can slow down and look for clearer ones before you invest. If you are a woman who now knows that your filter for detecting male interest may be calibrated too conservatively — you can stay a little more open to the quiet, steady signals you have been discounting.
If you are anyone who grew up being handed a script about what men want and what women want that turned out to be more wrong than right — you are not starting over. You are starting with better information.
The evolutionary story about men and romance, about women's shifting attraction, about the signals we send and miss and misread — it is not a verdict on you. It is a description of the terrain. And once you know the terrain, you can navigate it.
That, it turns out, is the only real advantage any of us have over the people who came before us. We get to know more. We get to choose more deliberately. We get to stop running the old programs on autopilot and start making decisions that actually match what we want.
Which, if you are here, is probably something real. Something lasting. Something worth the learning curve.
This article is based on the Modern Wisdom episode "The Truth About Sex Differences That Gets Scientists In Trouble" with Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams, published July 2026. The research cited draws from Stewart-Williams' book A Billion Years of Sex Differences and the studies discussed in the episode, including cross-cultural mate preference research conducted across 53 to 80 nations. Watch the full episode at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roXX9iuPQIA