(You bring up a point I wish to address, and I'm inclined to agree with you, so I direct my comment to you.) Does anyone ever consciously choose mates based on good qualities they see in them? Admirable qualities? Useful qualities? For example, does anyone say to themselves, "This person is [intelligent|physically beautiful|strong|empathic|emotionally resilient], and I want my children to be like that, and I suspect these traits are heritable, so I'll have kids with this person"? Or, "This person [complements my weaknesses well|is good at [cooking|managing a household|managing finances|entertaining friends|...]|understands and accepts me like few others|works well with me in various situations|enjoys similar activities as me], so I expect living with him to be pleasant and work well, so I'll marry him"? I wouldn't call myself an expert in this area, but that seems to be the obvious thing to do.

I would expect a well-developed person to think about things like this, and to have this conscious thought get compiled into reflexes and emotions: you notice a guy can cook really well, and you start paying attention to him more and maybe reconsider your evaluation of him; you notice a guy behave terribly without good reason, and your estimation of him lowers.

The picture I get from this blog post is that the husband and the wife are unaware of any admirable qualities the husband might have, and are unaware that they should expect any to exist. Or, if the husband has any good qualities, the wife doesn't care about them--e.g. maybe he writes blog posts well, but she does not do blogging and cannot admire his skill there. Why are they married? Why did she marry him? The author supplies an answer at the top: "I got married young". I guess she was young too and maybe it can be explained as a dumb youthful mistake. Anyway, the lesson seems to be that if you suddenly wake up married to someone because God knows why, and you have no idea what qualities of yours might appeal to her, then you can appeal to her in the lowest-common-denominator way: putting on behaviors that make you seem like an alpha male who can afford, socially, to carelessly hurt people.

That can be understood as an extremely limited form of "exhibiting admirable qualities": exhibiting some negative personality traits that, apparently, the unconscious mind has some hard-wired admiration for, because they are correlated with admirable qualities found in alpha males. ... Maybe it has some use, maybe I would use it if I were thrown into a primitive, violent society where you do not expect to have much interaction with potential mates before making your decision--but I can't admire this. I want much better. I'd like to enjoy and admire my mate with my full conscious mind. I'd like to pick a mate based on this desire.

Do people seriously not do this? (I expect there are people who come from primitive, violent societies who are unaware of anything else and will tell me "no, of course not; lol, this guy srsly believes in fairytales". This will not faze me. I'm basically soliciting input from civilized people here. Also wondering if there's anyone with a similar perspective as me who can explain the thought-processes of people like "Dave from Hawaii" in that blog post: has he simply not been brought up to think that this "idealism" is a serious possibility? 'Cause that was probably true once--that there weren't many admirable qualities to look for (if the most important things about a man are those that determine how he'll fare in a hunt, and maybe how large a section of the winnings he'll get--and how he'll do in tribal politics), and not much opportunity for a woman to observe them herself. Other personal qualities would be more important in a husband who goes homesteading and raises a nuclear family with you on a farm. So I expect some people come from cultures that haven't gone through something like the latter phase; that might explain the difference between them and me.)