I didn't upvote or downvote-- the post doesn't seem wildly different in quality than other vaguely ok posts I've seen.

It took me a while to get past sympathy for Alice to think about other aspects of the post. What is your understanding of your mistake when breaking up? I've got my own theory, and I'm curious about whether they'll match.

I'm surprised that you got so much good out of research.

I think there was a comment tweaking you for needing to figure out that women are looking for positive subjective experiences. (One annoying thing about the double post is that there are two discussions.) There's a lot of nonsense in the culture, and it takes work to get past it. In particular, I think there's a background belief that men should be able to attract women through innate wonderfulness, and as stated, this just isn't true. The belief also causes a lot of misery.

I'm wondering whether people who have trouble getting started on relationships are more likely to come from families where the adults were in an unhappy relationship. I think that people are more vulnerable to nonsense from the culture if they don't have good countervailing examples.