After nearly 25 years, I can’t remember how many people have tried to give me the “perfect advice” for finding a partner.
“Just be yourself!”
“Don’t tell them how much you read; it’s scary.”
“Put yourself out there!”
“Maybe a little more makeup?”
So when I was handed a copy of the 2006 book Why Men Marry Bitches, by Sherry Argov, I figured, what do I have to lose? After all, I am indeed – depending on whom you ask – a bitch myself, so I thought maybe I’d learn something.
Contrary to its title, this book is not “A woman’s guide to winning her man’s heart.” It is a rule book for the most ridiculous games men and women play with each other instead of just having a single conversation.
Less than 50 pages in, you get this gem: Don’t even mention the word “commitment.” The less you say about it, the closer you are to getting it.
What? Were men in the early aughts really so terrified of admitting they liked someone? Why do relationships need to be treated like a chess match, where you need to maintain the upper hand?
The book has an entire chart about how long to wait between phone calls so you don’t accidentally reveal that maybe you’re interested in more than a situationship.
The idea that you should tell a partner to “Please give me the same courtesy that you would give to a client you work with” was one that really blew me away because, for the record, if my future person is out there: dear God, don’t.
The strategy of dating
To be fair to Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches was publishing gold in 2006 because it spoke directly to the anxieties of its moment.
This was peak strategic dating era, when the books Sex and the City had women analyzing every phone call like CIA operatives; when He’s Just Not That Into You convinced us that men were simple creatures whose feelings could be decoded with the right manual; when The Rules still cast a long shadow over how women approached relationships.
The underlying philosophy was pure game theory: Relationships were fundamentally adversarial, and you needed a competitive edge to win. Being “too available” signaled desperation. Showing genuine interest meant losing leverage. Vulnerability wasn’t intimacy – it was tactical weakness.
Women consumed these books religiously because we’d been taught that love was something you strategized your way into, that the right combination of aloofness and intrigue would unlock commitment.
Women needed instruction manuals because they’d been sold the idea that honesty, directness, and emotional transparency were relationship repellents.
Reading Argov’s advice now feels like watching someone describe an elaborate heist, when you could just knock on the door.
The shift to healthy relationships
The entire premise – that you need to strategically withhold parts of yourself to seem valuable – contradicts everything we’ve (hopefully) learned about healthy relationships. We talk about attachment styles now, not manipulation tactics. We value emotional availability, not calculated distance. The idea of performing cool indifference for months or years sounds genuinely exhausting when you could just communicate like adults.
Beyond the sheer effort required, the book’s framework feels archaic in its assumptions. It presumes a rigidly heteronormative dynamic where men chase, and women gatekeep, where traditional gender roles are so fixed that they can be gamed like a predictable algorithm.
It completely misses that good relationships aren’t about winning – they’re about finding someone who enthusiastically chooses you without needing to be tricked into it. The “power” Argov promises isn’t actually power; it’s performing a character until someone proposes to your act instead of to you.
That’s not a victory. That’s a setup for years of wondering when he’ll figure out you’ve been pretending all along.
Maybe the saddest thing about Why Men Marry Bitches isn’t the advice itself; it’s that millions of women bought it – and truly, it’s part of why I read the book to begin with – because we genuinely feared that being ourselves was too much; that our authentic enthusiasm, our emotional honesty, our desire for partnership, would scare men away.
Twenty years later, we’re finally learning what actual power looks like: showing up as yourself and trusting that the right person won’t need a performance.