Dating and General Happiness

        The love-shy male of any age can usually think of little else apart
from the mental-emotional prison which blocks him from making mean-
ingful contact with that which he most sorely wants and needs--girls!
This fact was driven home to me several years ago in a study I conducted
on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. This study
dealt with the relationship between personality traits and all aspects of
student behavior. A representative sample of over 300 students was
taken, and thousands of correlation figures were obtained A correlation
coefficient is simply a barometer as to how strongly or closely two factors
are associated with each other. Of the thousands of correlation coeffi-
dents my study produced, the strongest one of all was the one relating
the following two variables:

   a. Degree of personal satisfaction and contentment with the amount
   of informal boy/girl interaction engaged in of late

   b. General happiness with life.

      Simply put, nothing in the entire study correlated more strongly
with happiness and general sense of well-being than did extent of sat
isfacfion with amount of informal boy/girl interaction The correlation
between these two factors was + .65 for the young men and + .32 for
the young women. A related correlation coefficient dealt with the rela-
tionship between general happiness and number of dates averaged per month
with the opposite sex. And this correlation figure was similarly tar above
average by social science standards: it was + .49 for male students and
+ .16 for the female students. Thus we have another clear indication of
the fact that girls are far more important to men than men are to girls.
      It is commonplace for moralists to disparage happiness as some-
thing which is "overemphasized" in America, and as something which
is alleged to be not a very important end goal. To be sure, happiness
cannot successfully be sought directly. Happiness is, in essence, a nat-
ural byproduct of (1) making effective progress within the sorts of socially
valued activities that are most germane to a person's prime goals in life,
and (2) active involvement in networks of meaningful (love and work)
roles and relationships.
     More succinctly, happiness is very important in a whole host of
ways about which ascetic moralists are invariably blind Research evi-
dence has shown that (1) happiness is a prerequisite for self love, and
that (2) self love is a prerequisite for a loving, caring attitude towards
others. Unhappy people are in very poor position to be of genuine
service to their fellow man. And there is a kind of vicious circle here
because it is only through service to humanity that a person can achieve
maximum happiness and contentment. However, a person's own cup
must be adequately filled before he can begin to share the contents of
his cup with other people The cup of a love-shy male quite typically
has very little in it. And as this book will clearly demonstrate, love-shy
males of all ages are often profoundly unhappy
     Why is the happiness and contentment of males so much more
strongly influenced by successful heterosexual interaction than that of
females? Most researchers today believe that the answer rests on the
fact that women tend to be capable of finding emotionally intimate coin
panionship vis-a-vis their own sex whereas men are able to satisfy their
needs for emotional intimacy only in the company of women. Further
more, non-dating females can normally manage to develop and maintain
their socioemotionaI social skills and social self-confidence in their all-
female peer groups. In contrast, non-dating males are usually isolated
from social networks involving same-sexed peers.