Your answer to "Roseless," the woman bemoaning her boyfriend's lack of "romantic ambition," hit a nerve with me. My wife of 19 years and I shared equally in raising our three children. She only sort of "works" now, but I do the home chores and all the cooking -- while running a very stressful business that keeps her shopping habit afloat. She can buy all the expensive shoes she wants; however, like Roseless, she complains that I don't buy her flowers...enough. I don't write cute Post-it notes. When I have grudgingly bought flowers or left a note that I'm at the gym and drawn a heart on it, I've been amazed at how appreciative she's been. Well, I resent this. I'll cook a gourmet meal or be under the sink changing the garbage disposal, and I make enough money to put us in the 1 percent, but all that comes up short.

You get no thanks for the 60-hour workweek, the cooking, the handymanning, but scrawl a heart on a sticky note and...you da man. When the disposal's on the fritz, it's got to be tempting to just write "xoxox" on scratch paper and stick it in the drain. Toilet overflowing? Shut the lid and slap a rose on top.

Your wife's longing for romantic trinketry can be explained by a quote from evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Barash: "Sperm are cheap. Eggs are expensive." This is shorthand for the physiological differences between men and women and the differing male and female psychologies that evolved out of them. A man can have sex with a woman and walk away, but a single sex act can leave a woman with mouths to feed. So, as I wrote to "Roseless," women evolved to seek commitment cues from men -- signs they're emotionally attached. Bringing home the bacon (and gourmet cooking it, too) is important, but what's essential to many women are all those sweetiepookiewookie shows of affection. In fact, you could say Hallmark is in the multibillion-dollar business of catering to female evolutionary adaptations. So, do keep drawing her those hearts and bunnies. "Want shoes with that?" you growl to yourself. And yes, it seems she does.

You'd like to point out that your chore wheel is not a Ferris wheel. Or is it? You mention that you're in "the 1 percent." If I were even in the 5 percent, I'd hire people to do just about everything for me except get out of bed. But, maybe you're secretly into feeling superior, so you keep silently slaving away and cling to your resentment like it's a pet.

The need to be right tends to be a stumbling block to being happy. Your marriage would probably be happier if you treated your problem wife like a problem employee (assuming you'd explain how he needs to improve, not throw flowers on his desk and storm out of his office in a huff). Take her to dinner and tell her you love her but have been feeling a little hurt. Tell her what you need: regular notice of and thanks for all you do to keep your life together running. Once you're feeling more appreciated, maybe you can ditch some of your John of Arc routine. You're rich! Hire a handyman! Spend Saturday having sexytime together in a swank hotel instead of feeling morally superior that she's out shoe shopping and you're under the sink snaking gunk out of the drain.

I know you tell men they must risk rejection to get dates. I'm pathetically shy, so I'm thinking of asking out this girl at the gym by giving her my card and telling her to call me if she wants to do something sometime. Win-win for the shy guy?

Your card will come in handy -- if she needs to fix her car's CD player or pick something out of her teeth. Women go out with men who ask them out, and handing one a piece of card stock with your phone number on it doesn't count as asking her out. But, your shyness doesn't have to be a drawback. (Own it, baby! "I am mouse, hear me squeak!") On my radio show, therapist Dr. Robert Glover suggested approaching a woman with something like "I'm actually kind of shy, but I had to come talk with you..." Women are impressed by authenticity. Chances are, a woman will be especially impressed if you not only are open about your shortcomings but flip the bird at your fears to ask her out. Keep doing that and you'll soon become one of those smoothboys who scores with women even while carrying on conversations with their breasts. Well, okay, maybe that's overpromising a little. But, you can at least graduate from handing women litter to asking their shoes to the movies.

I'm an Occupy girl, age 45, into eco-shamanism and planetary consciousness stuff. I've mostly dated engineers with a playful side who initially seemed open to my interests but quickly became resentful of them. My boyfriend of two years is different -- easygoing and willing to expand his horizons. He actually reads the articles I post on Facebook and discusses them with me. We laugh effortlessly and are very giving to each other, but I can't shake the feeling that I should look for somebody more my type (more artistically, politically, and spiritually inclined). I fantasize about meeting an artistic shamanic guy who is gorgeous and open and shares my sense of purpose, but the truth is, guys in my social milieu can be very competitive, neurotic, and immature. I guess my question is: If you can IMAGINE a better partner, does that mean you should break up?

These guys you dated probably believed they were open-minded...until they were invited by their eco-shamanistic girlfriend to something like the "Embrace of the Earth" rite, in which participants spend the night in a grave they dig themselves. As refreshing as you may find it to "tap into the earth's restorative energies," their first thought probably went something like "Thanks, I'll take the night on the 800 thread count, slave-labor-made sheets. Could you turn on my electric blanket, please, before you go?"

If a guy thinks a girl's hot, he'll buy into whatever her trip is for as long as he can. My steak-loving boyfriend once dated a militant vegan. (He'd hit the Burger King drive-through on his way home.) Obviously, it's a problem if you go out with some engineer dude, tell him you're an "Occupy girl," and he says, "Wow, my company designs the water cannons the police use to spray you people." But, your current restlessness may stem from the notion that it's a great big drum circle out there with a lot of chakra healer-boys and past-life counselors in it.

Having a lot of choice sounds great, but research by social psychologist Dr. Sheena Iyengar suggests that most people get overwhelmed when they have more than a handful of options. Essentially, when it seems the sky's the limit, we're prone to keep looking skyward. We end up not choosing at all, or we choose poorly and end up dissatisfied. A solution for this is "satisficing," a strategy from economist Herbert Simon of committing to the "good-enough" choice -- instead of marching off on a never-ending search for spiritually evolved, Burning Man-certified perfection.

Sure, you can probably find your eco-shamanistic cloneboy -- a guy who'll take the initiative in signing you both up for "soul retrieval training" when you worry that you forgot yours at Macy's in a past life. But then maybe he'll go all hateful on you on the way home about whether to save the whales or go to the movies. The longer your list of must-haves in a man, the more you shrink your pool of potential partners. Your own appeal is also a factor, and it's probably narrowed by things like not being 22 and your plumpitude, if any. Consider whether it's possible to have friends be your spiritual colleagues and have that be enough. You can wish for the gorgeous, artistic, shamanic perfect man -- along with world peace and all the hemp bacon you can eat. But, maybe the realistic man is your sweet spiritual trainee who is fun and giving, dutifully rinses off his used foil, and smiles and pulls the Prius over when you tell him that your spirit animal needs to pee.

I'm a 32-year-old woman who doesn't particularly like kids. I told my last boyfriend I didn't want kids, but three years in, he said he wanted a family and left. He said he thought I'd eventually change my mind. How do I keep this from happening again?

You can't just sit down on the first date and ask a man if his semen has a lifeplan. But, let a kid-wanting man get attached (even second date-attached) and he'll want to believe you'll eventually mommy up. So right on date one, you need to drop into conversation that you aren't a "kid person." Make sure a guy responds like he's gotten the bottom-line message: His sperm, your egg, they ain't gonna party. Now, some guys might not have fully considered the issue of kids, so you might weave the subject in on subsequent dates for reinforcement. If you're 22, a major compatibility issue is "Eeuw, you like Coldplay?" At 32, you really need to know up front if one of you is musing "I wonder what we'll name the twins" and the other's thinking "Whatever they called them at the pound is fine by me."

I'm having a whirlwind romance with a man I met online on Thanksgiving. I moved across the country to live with him on December 20, and we're now building a life together. The problem is I have a high IQ (137), and he's very unintelligent and illogical. It's hard to have a good conversation unless we talk about sex. It's too late to leave now, so...any advice on how to keep our IQ difference from ripping us apart when things are less new and exciting? I really love him, as he's pure of heart. And boy, is he sexy and great in bed! So far, I've held back from telling him when he's gullible or irrational, but I worry that I'll eventually call him something nasty -- like "idiot." I don't want to hurt him. I crave his company and love him for who he is, not what he knows.

Is there a chance you cheated on your IQ test? You seem to pride yourself on your intelligence, yet you spent a few weeks chitchatting on the Internet with some dull blade, dropped everything and moved across the country to live with him. Now, you two lovebirds are "building a life together" -- that is, whenever you aren't too busy grumbling about needing your intellectual equal and not the coffee table's.

You might "love him for who he is," but you also despise him for who he isn't. Oops. Marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman found that expressions of contempt are the greatest predictor that a couple will go kaput. Of course, anybody you get involved with will have some annoying habits or flaws that challenge the relationship. Relatively benign bad habits are things like snoring, and for that, you can get those little strips to put on your partner's nose. What's the answer here, strapping a piece of duct tape across his mouth?

Check out your completely lame excuse for staying: "It's too late to leave now." Now check your feet. Bolted to the floorboards? If not, what's keeping you there is probably irrational thinking that economists call the "sunk cost fallacy" -- deciding to keep investing in some endeavor based on what you've already invested (an unrecoverable cost) rather than assessing how your investment will pay off (if at all) in the future. People are especially prone to overvalue prior investment when their ego is also invested -- like when sticking around helps them continue the fiction that they've behaved wisely in going all-in with a guy whose intellectual "spirit animal" is probably the amoeba.

Fools rush in, but the real fools find themselves facedown in a pool of "boy, was I dumb" and get busy coming up with reasons why staying there is a wise idea. In "The Folly of Fools" (and on my radio show) anthropologist Dr. Robert Trivers explains self-deceptions like yours, noting the difference between intelligence and consciousness: "You can be very bright but unconscious." When you realize you've been unconscious, you can choose to wake up and cut your losses -- before you start saying cutting things to your goodhearted sexy simpleton. To live less sleepwalkingly in the future, reflect on what got you into this -- what void you tried to fill by telling your rationality to shut up and go sit in the corner so you could congratulate yourself on the great love you found. And goody for you on what you actually found -- some really great sex -- but let's call a cabana boy a cabana boy, lest you turn a story that should be "My Hunky Winter Vacation" into a move-in special.

What's with all the Valentine's Day haters? Some of my single friends celebrate V-Day ironically, and I sense that they look down on my boyfriend and me for celebrating it for real, as if we're just buying into a giant marketing campaign.

Occupy Wall Street is so 2011. Trendsetting inequality haters should be occupying Hallmark: "If we don't get love, you don't get love, either," and "This is what a woman without a boyfriend looks like!" Valentine's Day has been hijacked to sell everything short of heart-shaped rubber vomit. I even got a Valentine's-linked press release pitching surveillance services. Right. Nothing says "I love you" like installing a keylogger on your partner's laptop. The louder the hyping of the day, the louder the message that somebody's a loser if they have nobody to buy a bunch of red merch for. So, your single friends' cooler-than-thou attitude is understandable, but there's something better than being cool, and it's being happy. Let them have their black-frosted cookies with the little dead cupids and their marches against romance-colored corporate greed...well, until next year, when they're sneaking into Godiva to buy chocolates for the girl they fell in love with after they got pepper-sprayed together.