Dr. Orion Taraban Is Not Wrong About the Sexual Marketplace. He Is Wrong About Love.
Monday, August 24, 2026.
Dr. Orion Taraban has built an enormous audience by saying aloud what much of contemporary relationship culture prefers to discuss behind its hand.
Attraction is unequal. Beauty matters. Status matters. Sex matters.
We tend to compare our partners with available alternatives.
If we need the relationship less, we may possess more power within it. Kindness, regrettably, does not compel desire.
None of this is especially soothing, because the good doctor Taraban does not seem interested in soothing anybody.
The California psychologist and creator of PsycHacks has become one of the internet’s most provocative interpreters of modern relationships.
His 2024 book,The Value of Others, examines coupling through the language of behavioral economics: value, exchange, competition, scarcity, leverage and the availability of better options.
It is easy to understand why his ideas have found an audience, particularly among men who feel that conventional therapeutic language has described them mainly as defective women.
Taraban tells them that attraction is not a moral reward.
Nobody owes them desire. Effort does not guarantee romantic success.
If they want different outcomes, they must become capable of producing them.
There is something bracing about this.
There is also something somewhat stunted.
Taraban is very good at explaining how human beings inspect one another across the marketplace. He is considerably less convincing when he tries to explain what happens after two people go home together.
He can explain selection.
He can explain leverage.
He can explain bargaining.
But he cannot quite explain how another human being becomes beloved.
The Unspeakable Economics of Love
Taraban’s central idea is that people form relationships because each person supplies something the other values.
The exchanged goods need not be identical.
One partner may offer beauty, sexual access or social vitality. The other may offer status, protection, competence, emotional steadiness or money. The relationship continues while both believe the arrangement remains preferable to their alternatives.
This language sounds brutal when applied to love. It also contains more psychological truth than many therapists would care to admit.
Researchers have spent decades studying satisfaction, investment, dependence and alternatives.
The investment model of commitment holds that commitment is influenced not only by satisfaction but also by what life partners have invested and how attractive they believe their alternatives to be.
A meta-analysis of the investment model found substantial support for these relationships across numerous studies. Taraban is not imagining the economic layer of intimate life. It is there.
Power matters as well. The partner who is less dependent often possesses greater freedom—and therefore greater leverage.
Taraban did not invent relationship economics. He removed the academic upholstery and installed Klieg lighting.
He is willing to say that people notice what their partners provide.
They notice when those provisions disappear.
They notice when their own options improve.
However fervently we insist that love should be unconditional, most adult romantic relationships contain conditions.
A person who becomes persistently cruel, sexually unavailable, financially destructive or emotionally absent may eventually discover exactly where those conditions were hiding.
Taraban’s refusal to sentimentalize this is useful.
His mistake is assuming that because the economic floor exists, we must spend our entire marriage crawling around on it.
Averages Are Not Marriages
Taraban becomes less reliable when he moves from tendencies to commandments.
His account frequently emphasizes gender asymmetry: youthful beauty supposedly gives women their greatest romantic leverage, while men tend to acquire value later through status, competence, wealth and achievement.
There are population-level findings supporting some sex differences in mate preference. Physical attractiveness, age, resources and status can influence romantic selection. Denying this would be silly.
But the pattern is neither as clean nor as deterministic as sexual-marketplace theory makes it sound.
A 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined more than 9,000 post-date attraction reports from over 6,000 middle-aged adults using a matchmaking service. Men and women were equally inclined to feel greater attraction toward younger blind dates.
The finding does not erase every documented sex difference in mate preference. It does make the familiar male-youth/female-status formula look considerably less like a law of nature.
Research has also repeatedly found that the characteristics we say we want may poorly predict whom we actually desire when a living, breathing person appears before us.
A major review and meta-analysis found that declared ideal-partner preferences often possess weak or inconsistent power to predict responses to actual potential partners.
Folks may say they want beauty, money, intelligence or a particular personality configuration.
Then someone walks into the room.
No couple arrives in therapy as a population average. They arrive as two particular nervous systems carrying two particular histories.
Their attraction has been shaped by class, culture, religion, attachment, neurotype, family mythology, previous betrayal and meanings neither partner entirely understands. One person experiences confidence as safety; another experiences it as domination. One finds emotional reserve reassuring; another recognizes the silence of an unavailable father.
Life partners do not merely select desirable traits.
We become caught by meanings.
A voice can feel like home. A distance can feel like chemistry.
Familiar deprivation can be mistaken for destiny. An emotionally unavailable partner can awaken the ancient hope that this time, finally, love will be won.
The marketplace may explain who receives the first invitation.
It cannot explain why some keep returning to the same locked door.
When a Theory Explains Everything, It May Explain Nothing
Taraban’s claim that folks remain with their “best perceived option” possesses an attractive, nearly mathematical tidiness.
It is also circular.
How do we know someone considered a partner the best available option?
Because that was the person they chose.
Why did they choose that person?
Because they considered that person the best available option.
The theory can swallow nearly any outcome.
If a man marries a beautiful woman, beauty was highly valued.
If he marries a less conventionally attractive woman, he must have valued peace, loyalty or compatibility more.
If someone remains with a disabled spouse, devotion, identity or moral satisfaction supplies the compensating value.
Once value can mean beauty, money, sex, affection, safety, memory, duty, guilt, familiarity, religious commitment and the desire to regard oneself as honorable, the theory becomes impossible to lose.
It wins by redefining every human motive as a transaction.
This is not rigor. It is conceptual taxidermy.
The theory preserves the shape of love only after draining the life out of it.
Taraban gives us a powerful lens and then quietly promotes it to a law.
It is one way of looking—and one that becomes increasingly distorted as intimacy deepens.
What the Marketplace Cannot See
An economic model is particularly good at explaining courtship.
Courtship contains comparison, signaling, competition, scarcity and uncertainty.
Both partners are acquiring information. Each is deciding whether their counterpart deserves further investment. Rejection remains relatively inexpensive because a shared world has not yet been created.
Marriage changes the unit of analysis.
Over time, couples develop a common history, a private language, financial entanglements, children, rituals, injuries and dreams. They become emotionally interdependent.
Established relationships can become communal bonds in which life partners respond to each other’s needs without demanding immediate equivalent repayment.
This is not merely romantic language. Classic experiments conducted by Margaret Clark, Judson Mills and Michael Powell distinguished between exchange relationships and communal relationships.
In exchange relationships, we monitor benefits with an expectation of comparable repayment. In communal relationships, we attend to another person’s needs even when immediate reciprocation is unavailable. Friendships, families and romantic relationships frequently operate according to these communal expectations.
In the researchers’ experiments on communal and exchange relationships, participants seeking a communal relationship remained attentive to their counterpart’s needs regardless of whether they would have an opportunity to repay them.
A husband gets up repeatedly with a sick child without invoicing his wife for the lost sleep. A wife carries the household while her husband recovers from surgery. One partner remains beside the other through cancer, unemployment, disability or grief.
Taraban’s model can absorb these acts by calling meaning, duty or devotion another form of profit.
But that move is too clever by half.
A woman sitting beside her husband with dementia may no longer be receiving much that a sexual marketplace would recognize as value.
She stays because their lives have become joined. She made a promise. Abandoning him would violate something she understands about love—and something she understands about herself.
To describe her devotion as a transaction is not hard-headed realism.
It is emotional illiteracy with a calculator.
From Market Attention to Bestowed Attention
Love may begin with evaluation. Mature love cannot survive as permanent evaluation.
At first, we ask:
What do I see in you?
Later, if the relationship deepens, the question becomes:
What have we become responsible for together?
This does not mean healthy couples ignore inequity.
Reciprocity matters. Desire matters. Chronic exploitation should not be renamed sacrifice.
Nobody should remain in a destructive relationship because suffering has been dressed up as moral nobility.
Research supports that caution. A meta-analysis of 82 datasets involving more than 32,000 participants found that willingness to sacrifice could benefit both personal and relationship well-being. But sacrifices experienced as costly could also damage the person making them.
Sacrifice is not automatically noble.
Neither is it merely a bad trade.
Its meaning depends upon the relationship, the motivation and the freedom with which it is given.
The strongest couples do something more complicated than maintain a favorable exchange rate.
They bestow attention.
Bestowed attention is not the attention automatically given to the most beautiful, powerful or entertaining person in the room. It is deliberate attention given to this particular person because the bond itself has become worthy of protection.
It sees the partner not as an interchangeable collection of assets but as a particular human being whose inner life has acquired moral weight.
Market attention follows desirability.
Bestowed attention helps create devotion.
It doesn’t take a lot to love your life partner. It takes everything.
This is where Taraban’s model fails most decisively. It assumes that value precedes attention: we attend to people because they possess value.
Love sometimes reverses the sequence.
The attention we repeatedly bestow helps make someone valuable to us.
Years of intimate knowledge accumulate around an ordinary human being.
Her face contains the history of the marriage.
His voice carries a thousand private associations.
A gesture acquires meaning because of every previous time it appeared.
None of this makes the partner objectively superior to everyone else wandering through the world.
It simply makes the partner irreplaceable.
Taraban’s marketplace can rank.
But it cannot comprehend irreplaceability because markets depend upon substitution.
Commitment Changes the Shopper
Taraban’s model tends to portray people as continuously inspecting the field, comparing their current partner with whatever else might be available.
But commitment does not merely constrain that comparison.
It changes the person doing the comparing.
A major review of close-relationship science found that highly committed partners engage in relationship-maintaining processes such as devaluing attractive alternatives, forgiving transgressions and making sacrifices on behalf of the bond.
The committed person does not necessarily remain faithful because nobody better has appeared.
Commitment alters what counts as better.
This is not blindness. It is one of the ways human beings protect what they have decided matters.
Taraban’s model imagines value as something people possess before entering the relationship. But relationships also generate value. Shared history changes perception. Responsibility changes preference. Commitment reorganizes attention.
The shopper who entered the marketplace is no longer quite the same person.
Why Men Are Listening
It would be lazy of me to dismiss Taraban as merely another red-pill psychologist.
That avoids the more uncomfortable question of why so many men find him clarifying.
He gives men an account of suffering that does not immediately scold them. That is highly engaging and seductive.
He acknowledges male loneliness, romantic invisibility and sexual rejection. He tells men that wanting to be desired is not shameful, while also insisting that grievance will not make them desirable. He emphasizes discipline, agency, competence and results.
Much of this is culturally useful.
Contemporary therapeutic culture has become remarkably fluent in describing male privilege while remaining strangely tongue-tied about male disposability. Taraban enters that silence with confidence, structure and an explanation.
But he also offers market strategy in place of psychological development.
A wounded man learns to ask:
How do I increase my value?
How do I obtain more leverage?
How do I prevent a woman from replacing me?
Those questions may improve his dating performance. They may rescue him from passivity. They may even help him get laid.
But they will not help him understand why dependence humiliates him, why tenderness feels dangerous, why he confuses admiration with love or why he loses desire the moment a woman genuinely knows him.
A man can become highly competitive in the sexual marketplace while remaining almost entirely unavailable for intimacy.
He may acquire women without acquiring the capacity to love one.
That is the nasty little secret beneath much of relationship optimization: it can produce a more successful consumer without producing a more developed human being.
The Gospel of Never Needing Anyone
There is another reason Taraban’s model travels so well online.
It flatters the defensive fantasy that dependence is weakness.
If relationships are exchanges, the safest position belongs to the person with the highest value and the best alternatives. Improve yourself. Maintain options. Avoid overinvesting. Never need the other person more than they need you.
This is a shrewd strategy for preserving leverage.
It is also a plan for never being fully known.
Love necessarily creates vulnerability. The partner who matters can disappoint us precisely because they matter. Commitment gives another human being access to our unguarded places. There is no psychological hack that eliminates this risk without eliminating intimacy along with it.
Partners wounded by abandonment often attempt exactly that bargain. They seek enough beauty, money, status, sexual skill or emotional detachment to ensure that they will never again be at another person’s mercy.
It does not work.
They may become difficult to leave.
They also become difficult to reach.
Taraban promises realism, but his realism sometimes conceals an adolescent dream: become valuable enough and you will never have to surrender control.
Mature love requires the opposite achievement.
Not helpless dependence.
Chosen vulnerability.
The Marketplace Is Real. It Is Also Where Love Begins, Not Where It Ends.
Taraban sees something many relationship writers evade: romantic life is not exempt from power, competition or self-interest.
We evaluate one another. Me make trade-offs. We protect our advantages. We sometimes leave when better alternatives appear. Desire is not a public accommodation, and relationships are not sustained by virtue alone.
But I feel Dr. Taraban takes one floor of the house and presents it as the entire building.
Above the marketplace are attachment, identity, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, bestowed attention and the strange human capacity to value another person beyond what that person can presently provide.
The economic model can help explain why two people select each other.
It can reveal why resentment grows when one partner gives substantially more than the other. It can expose dependency hiding beneath romantic language.
Used carefully, it is a valuable corrective to sentimentality.
Used as a complete theory of love, it becomes sentimentality’s equally foolish opposite.
It cannot fully explain how a soul becomes irreplaceable.
That is the question at the center of lasting love.
Better alternatives almost always exist, at least on paper.
Someone younger, richer, calmer, brighter, healthier or more sexually adventurous is wandering around somewhere.
A durable marriage becomes possible when the continuous audit of the field loses its authority.
The achievement of commitment is not finding someone whose market value can never be exceeded.
It is creating a relationship in which market comparison is no longer the highest court.
The marketplace asks:
Can I do better?
Love eventually asks:
What do I owe the life we have made?
Taraban is not wrong about the sexual marketplace.
But he is wrong to confuse it with love.
Why Work with Daniel?
Couples rarely come to therapy because they have entirely stopped valuing each other.
More often, they have lost the ability to experience that value beneath resentment, betrayal, loneliness or years of defensive distance.
Effective couples therapy does not pretend that attraction, reciprocity and power are irrelevant. It helps couples discuss these realities without reducing the marriage to a negotiation between competing interests.
Couples therapy cannot make two people more valuable on the open market.
It can help them discover whether they are still capable of becoming irreplaceable to one another.
If your relationship has become a continuous calculation of who gives more, who needs less or who possesses the power to leave, a focused block of couples therapy might help you understand what is happening beneath the arithmetic.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Clark, M. S., Mills, J., & Powell, M. C. (1986). Keeping track of needs in communal and exchange relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(2), 333–338. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.2.333
Eastwick, P. W., Finkel, E. J., Meza, E. M., & Ammerman, K. (2025). No gender differences in attraction to young partners: A study of 4,500 blind dates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(5), e2416984122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2416984122
Eastwick, P. W., Luchies, L. B., Finkel, E. J., & Hunt, L. L. (2014). The predictive validity of ideal partner preferences: A review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(3), 623–665. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032432
Finkel, E. J., Simpson, J. A., & Eastwick, P. W. (2017). The psychology of close relationships: Fourteen core principles. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 383–411. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044038
Le, B., & Agnew, C. R. (2003). Commitment and its theorized determinants: A meta-analysis of the investment model. Personal Relationships, 10(1), 37–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6811.00035
Righetti, F., Sakaluk, J. K., Faure, R., & Impett, E. A. (2020). The link between sacrifice and relational and personal well-being: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(10), 900–921. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000297
Taraban, O. (2024). The value of others: Understanding the economic model of relationships to get (and keep) more of what you want in the sexual marketplace. PsycHacks.