This is a little too late for Valentine's Day, but Glenn Beck just gave a lovely shorthand version of the way one type* of conservative guys seem to view love (the other type consists of fundies who think that God made women as their domestic servants and their sex slaves):
BECK: I mean, here are some other reasons. "You're ugly." Hello! I'm not a sex expert but I'm -- you know, I'm thinking, you know, you're ugly and, you know, that's a tough one to overcome especially if you're a woman. If you're a guy, that's not hard to overcome. I'm sorry. That's just the way the world is. Have you -- how many ugly guys have hot wives? Take me, for example. I don't know why she married -- I think it was low self-esteem. I do. No, really I think it was low self-esteem. I got in -- you know, you buy when the market is low. You know what I mean? While everybody else is selling, you buy. And I think I got in there right at the right time. Low self-esteem, low, wait a minute, could go a little lower, she might come down to my price. Hang on, OK, sold! Now her self-esteem is going up. And if my income wasn't going up, she would have ditched me long ago. She would have gone, "Wait a minute, I think I was depressed when I married you." I'm just -- look. I'm not Tania, but I am a thinker. I'm on to you, Tania!
The bolds are mine.
It's a joke but it isn't really a joke. The thinking goes something like this: Women want money and men want sex. So all women are in the market for a rich guy and all men are in the market for a beautiful woman. Then they trade. And that is called love, I guess. Of course, once you lose your looks or your money you also lose the love...
This is the idea that much of the pseudo-evolutionary-psychology reflects. Though usually the guys there insist that no, women aren't after your money, they really truly honestly find older wrinkled bald guys very hot, and they also argue that even if women earned as much as men it would still be true that nothing is as awesome as someone like that.
It's very sad, really, as anyone who has experienced real love knows. Yes, an older, wrinkled bald guy can be the hottest guy on earth, but not because he is older, wrinkled and bald.
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*Not that there aren't other kinds, even kind ones. But these are the two types of conservative men who write about women.