Your response to "Torn" really missed the mark. She is the 35-year-old woman whose friends and family think her 43-year-old boyfriend is lazy and not good enough for her and will end up living off her. She has a full-time job with benefits, while he works part time and saves up when he wants to buy something. She says he supports her emotionally: "He...has my back to an unreasonable degree." Yet, you contend that his lack of ambition may lead her to resent him. My advice to her: "If the relationship works for both of you, enjoy it. Nurture it. Keep the outside influences outside. And for crying out loud, woman, pull up your big-girl Underoos and tell your friends and family to take a deep breath and say a prayer to Saint Eff You."
--Better Idea

Your advice -- that "Torn" should just flip the bird at all of her boyfriend's detractors -- is the perfect solution for any woman who has a number of smelly, unsightly friends and family members cluttering up her life. I offer a similar redo of decluttering queen Marie "KonMari" Kondo's advice that we should go through all our stuff and see what brings joy. Yawn. The AlkonMari method: "Strike a match and run."

But, wait, you say. He supports her emotionally. That, you insist, should be enough. Should be. And though it's reasonable to prefer that it would be, the late Albert Ellis, co-founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, explained that "should" involves the irrational demand that the world manifest itself in an idealized way -- the way it SHOULD be. This keeps us from dealing with it as it is. For example, I should be writing this response to you in a villa in the south of France with servants, a helipad, and a moat. But here in the real world, unless I start moonlighting as a drug lord, I will continue writing from the cute shack in LA that I share with my dog and several million termites.

Likewise, in that magical land where children's dentists send glitter instead of a bill, the perfect husband could be a sweet man who splits his time between a low-stress part-time job and chillaxing on the couch with a doob. But women evolved to have emotional mechanisms pushing them to seek men who are willing and able "providers," and a man's ambition is a cue for that. Women can't just yell at their genes, "Hey, it's 2016, and I'm the VP of a successful startup!" As anthropologist Donald Symons explains, changing any "complex adaptation," like those driving mating psychology, takes "hundreds or thousands of generations." This is why -- as I explained to "Torn" -- research finds that women married to a Mr. Mom often end up resenting him, making those marriages more likely to end in divorce.

Should "Torn" stay or go? That actually isn't for you or me to say, because our values aren't her values and what works for us may not work for her. That's why I suggested she mull over the potential issues -- over time -- and make an informed decision about whether to go all in with her Laid-Back Larry. Yeah, I know -- love should "conquer all." And yes, in a perfect world, we could respond to utility company disconnect notices with a sweet note: "Please don't shut my lights off! XOXO!"

I'm a 32-year-old lesbian and an aspiring fiction writer. I use my life in my work, but my girlfriend gets mad when she shows up in it. I think she's being unfair. Isn't anything I experience fair game?

--Storyteller

There she is crying, and you're rubbing her back, all "Baby, that's terrible." And then you duck out of the room and dictate everything you can remember into your phone.

Um, no. Think of the details of your girlfriend's life like some stranger's lunch. The fact that their cheeseburger is within your reach doesn't mean you get to grab it and be all "Mine! Yummeee!" As Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren explained in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article on privacy, unless somebody is a public figure, they have a right to privacy, meaning the right to control who gets to know what about their persona and private life.

You cross the line from fiction writer to privacy invader when a character is recognizable as a particular person. It isn't that you can't use anything at all from another person's life. Publishing expert Jane Friedman says you can create a composite character "with traits and characteristics culled from several people." In other words, steal from the many instead of "the one." Remember, it's called an "intimate relationship" because it's supposed to be between two people -- not two people and the 8,423 others one of them gave their novel away to on Goodreads.

My husband of a year is very tight with cash. It's always save, save, save. I recently traded in my car, and I needed $1,000 more for the new one, but he never offered to give it to me. My parents ended up paying it. I make my own money, but not a lot, and I'm wondering what kind of financial arrangement makes sense in a marriage.

--Confused

Your husband comes into the living room, and there you are -- sitting on the floor with a Starbucks cup and a cardboard sign that says, "Anything helps. God bless."

Unfortunately, the passive-aggressiveness of the wife-as-panhandler approach is toxic in the long run. However, the theatrics would get your message across better than the nonverbal forms of communication you've probably been using -- pouting and closing cabinet doors a little more forcefully than usual.

Like a lot of women, you may assume that whatever subtle emotional cues you can read, men can also read. However, research by social psychologist Judith A. Hall finds that women are far better than men at spotting and decoding nonverbal signals in facial expressions and body language. Women's having evolved greater aptitude for this makes sense, as newborn infants generally aren't in the habit of expressing their needs with, "Hey, mom-lady...would you grab me a pack of smokes and a beer?"

So, yes, if you want something from your husband, you do have to put that out there in spoken-word form. But beyond that, you two need to sit down and hammer out a fiscal policy for your relationship -- where the lines get drawn on "yours"/"mine"/"ours" and "what if one of us has a financial crisis and needs an alternative to, oh, stealing a mule to get to work every day?"

In coming up with this policy, it's important to go beyond the cold dollars-and-cents view and discuss each other's attitudes surrounding money, especially any issues and fears. Then, when there's a conflict, each of you can maybe start with a little compassion for the other's point of view.

It also might help to understand that our views about money are influenced by genetics and what behavioral ecologists call our "life history strategy" -- a term that relates to whether our upbringing was stable and "safe" or risky and unpredictable. Child development researcher Jay Belsky and his colleagues find that a stable childhood environment tends to lead to a more future-oriented approach (saving, for example), whereas, say, growing up ducking gunfire or just having divorced parents and getting moved around a lot tends to lead to a more now-oriented approach (spendorama!).

Whatever your past, going off into the sunset being chased by creditors can be a marriage killer. Family studies researcher Jeffrey Dew finds that married couples with a bunch of "consumer debt" (owing on credit cards, loans for consumer goods, and past-due bills) fight more about everything -- from sex to chores to in-laws. And research by sociologist Carolyn Vogler, among others, finds that couples who pool their money (like their money got married, too!) tend to be happier. I would guess that the spirit in this is important -- going all in financially..."us against the world!" instead of, "If you lose your job and can't pay your share of the rent, don't worry, baby. I'll help you pitch your tent on the front lawn."

Pot is legal where I live, and it helps ease my knee pain from years of running. I've noticed that it also makes me feel more sensual. I want to share the marijuana experience with my boyfriend when we make love, but he says pot (even the "energizing" strains) makes him "inert" and "obsessively analytic." How do I get him to be more open-minded?

--Merry Jane

Pot does open your boyfriend's mind -- to a four-hour rumination on the meaning of burritos.

Welcome to what biologist Ernst Mayr called "human variability" -- the existence of individual differences. We see it in how some of us enjoy a surprise kick of peanut butter in our chocolate milkshake, while for others, it's "Wow...look how I've swelled up, just like a human balloon." Likewise, research on the cognitive impact of pot by neuroscientist Antonio Verdejo-Garcia shows varying effects on research participants' "sustained attention" (among other things) -- in line with which one of two genotypes they have.

Consider that being nagged to start smoking pot is probably as annoying as being nagged to stop. Sure, you have the best of intentions -- sharing your sensual experience with him. And, if he smokes pot, you can -- after he stops communing with the rug, asking the little fibers, "Did you ever consider that the tortilla is the perfect metaphor for human consciousness?"

A female friend of mine just broke up with her billionaire boyfriend. She told me she wasn't happy. The guy is super-picky about whether you put things back in exactly the right spot and doesn't have the greatest sense of humor. Still, I think she's making the biggest mistake of her life. Doesn't she know how hard it is to find a decent and wealthy man? I'm a happily married woman, so why does this make me so mad?

--Irate

The way you see it, your friend found that mythical leprechaun with the pot of private jets and beachfront property -- and she was all, "Too short! Too green! NEXT!"

Okay, you concede, she was a little miserable, but hey -- happiness can't buy money! And no, money isn't unimportant -- and it's especially vital when you don't have enough to get lunch from the grocery store instead of from the dumpster. But even money is subject to what economists call "diminishing marginal utility." This is a term for how the benefit ("utility") we get from each "unit" of a thing we're consuming -- like a good or service -- decreases for us once we've filled our basic need for it. Norman Li, an evolutionary psychologist who started out in economics, explains this pretty simply: "Enough oxygen to breathe is a lot better than no oxygen, but extra ("marginal") oxygen is not much better than enough. Thus, oxygen has" diminishing marginal utility.

Li, helpfully, took an economist's look at mating preferences, meaning he didn't just ask the open-ended question, "So...what would you like in a mate?" -- which leads people to shoot for the moon ("Oh...ringer for Hugh Jackman, funnier than Chris Rock, annual earnings matching the GDP of France...") Here in the real world, most of us have to settle -- at least somewhat. So Li tested which attributes people would consider necessities (versus luxuries) in a long-term relationship by giving subjects either a tight budget or a generous one to "spend" on various qualities they'd want in a partner.

When women (the childbearers and carers of the species) had limited mate-shopping dollars, they allocated most of them to having a Mr. Provider -- a man with status and resources -- saying "Oh well!" to hunkaliciousness and other qualities. Men on a tight budget disproportionately allocated their mating dollars toward hotitude -- not surprising, because beautiful features are like a flashing "Fertile Myrtle!" sign. However, even on a constrained budget, women and men each saw kindness as a must-have -- ranking it a close second to their top priority.

Getting back to your friend, who is dumping what you see as a perfectly serviceable billionaire, consider that his pickiness and humorlessness may play out as unkindness. Apparently, for her, having, oh, 100 bedrooms on four continents to cry herself to sleep in doesn't make up for that. And consider the view from diminishing marginal utility: "Okay, a billionaire is nice, but maybe I could make do with a funny, easygoing millionaire." To stop being mad, focus on what you have to be grateful for instead of what she's, uh, squandered -- a lifetime of 26-hour arguments about how she failed to use the micrometer calipers to return the loofah to its rightful position.

I've been with my girlfriend for over a year, and I love her and think she's beautiful. However, she is very insecure about her looks, and she asks me all the time whether I think she looks pretty. It's getting tiring constantly reassuring her. Is there some tool I could be using to help her feel more secure?

--Stumped

I'm sure it's exhausting doing the daily "Hi, gorgeous!" skywriting and cleaning up after the rented elephant that pulls the "You're beautiful, baby!" billboard.

Only -- oh, wait... you're actually just tired from verbally "reassuring her," which, admittedly, probably takes at least several words and a whole 10 seconds -- if you include the time it takes for her to beam and go, "Reeeeally?!"

Yes, it is important for you to reassure her -- but, in doing that, motivation counts. Social psychologist Shelly Gable finds that relationships tend to be happier when those in them are guided by "approach" rather than "avoidance" goals. In normal-person terms, this means striving for positive outcomes rather than trying to avoid negative ones. In this case, an avoidance goal would be telling your girlfriend she's beautiful in order to keep her from nagging you, but taking the "approach" approach would be doing it because you want her to feel good. And here's a secret: Break out the compliments before she asks and you might keep her from starting to worry that she needs "extra-coverage" makeup -- the kind that involves scaffolding, three workmen, and $200 worth of drywall.

I'm a woman who's on the feminist dating app Bumble, where women have to make the first move. Men can only write back to women who message them. I thought this would be empowering, but even pursuing a guy in this small way feels unsexy and overly aggressive. Do I just need to get over my retrograde thinking?

--Uncomfortable

The gazelle doesn't wake up one day, decide it's time for a change, and give the sleeping cougar a kick with its hoof: "Run for your life, you big ugly feline!" The cougar turns around, confused: "What are you doing, man? Haven't you ever seen National Geographic?"

Who does the chasing in dating also isn't some arbitrary thing. It comes down to what evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, in 1972, called "parental investment." His theory -- borne out in research on humans, animals, and insects -- is that the sex that has the highest cost from sexual activity (the female -- in almost all species) will be choosier about whom they mate with than the sex that invests less (which is almost always the male).

In humans, of course, women are the ones who get pregnant and stuck with the kids, and men can, as anthropologists quip, just "inseminate and run." So -- over thousands of generations -- women being choosier and men being, uh, chase-ier got wired into human psychology. We can't just shrug off the emotional mechanisms that drive this behavior even today -- even if Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe deems it "heteronormative" hooey that women damage their desirability by chasing men.

A trip to the Panamanian wetlands would show her she's wrong -- that what drives which sex does the chasing and which does the choosing really is about who gets stuck with the child care. Yes, in most species, that's the female. But check out the role reversal in the wattled jacana, a long-legged South American wading bird.

Zoologist Stephen Emlen and his team found that it's the male jacana, not the female, that sits incubating the eggs in the nest and cares for the chickies after they hatch. And right in line with Trivers' parental investment theory, female jacanas are the ones who do the chasing, competing for the males, and some even have "harems" of up to five boy birds. And it gets worse. The Emlen team found that as male jacanas sit tending their egg brood, they're sometimes forced to watch while their girlfriend bird gets it on right in front of them with the other boy birds in her harem.

Getting back to Bumble, where the app goes wrong is in removing the filtering that comes from a man needing to lay his ego on the line and expend effort to pursue a woman. The notion that it's "empowering" for women to do the chasing ignores that it's in men's genetic interest to not turn down a mating opportunity -- even with a woman they aren't that interested in. Also, because men evolved to expect choosier women, even subtle forms of chasing like your contacting a man first may send a message that you're not all that. If you're really looking to put him off, why not turn the tables all the way and send a panorama shot of your erect penis? You: "Yoo-hoo? Where'd you go?!"

I've been dating a 55-year-old guy for a year. I have two teenage boys; he has no kids. He initially mentioned marriage but now doesn't want to "rush" moving in with me and my boys. As a first step, he's moving closer. He just signed a lease on an apartment near me. I love him, but I'm overwhelmed handling two teenagers alone. Should I tell him he needs to speed up the pace?

If a relationship leads to an outpouring of feelings, a man tends to prefer "You're the love of my life!" to "Screw you! You're not my real dad!"

Perhaps because you're seeing this through "I need a break!"-colored glasses, you confuse being careful with not caring. But zoologist Amotz Zahavi has some good news for you. His research finds that when a message involves some expense to the sender, it's more likely to be for real. For example, anyone can claim they're committed, but as the saying goes, talk is cheap. Moving, however, is not. It's costly. Stressful. Horrible. Especially if you are older than 21 and own more than a sleeping bag, a Nintendo, and a couple of bongs.

Your boyfriend may ultimately decide that the package here isn't for him, but pressuring him is unlikely to help. In fact, it's likely to pressure him right out of your life. There's a reason he doesn't have kids, and it probably isn't that he was too put off by the possibility of life imprisonment to kidnap a few at the mall.

I'm a man who likes to girl-watch. I do this from behind very dark glasses, yet I still elicit scowls from women. Recently, I was at a help desk, and I availed myself of the view down the receptionist's top. She quickly covered up with a scarf. I'm puzzled, because there's no way she could've seen my eyes. What's going on here?

--Sunglasses

We all appreciate a nice view, but your eyes might be lingering a bit long in the wrong places if you hear stuff like "Sir...are you ready for my areolas to take your order?"

Hiding your boob recon behind pitch-dark shades doesn't help matters -- but not because we have some magical ability to know when someone is staring at us. Sure, people will swear that they can tell -- even if the starer is behind them or is behind dark glasses. However, unless they grew up someplace else -- like on Planet 34 -- they have no organ that would detect this. (Here on Earth, "eyes in the back of your head" is just a figure of speech -- save for any rare genetic accidents.)

Why might we think we know when we're being watched -- even by someone we can't see? Well, we may -- subconsciously -- be picking up on subtle reactions of people around us who can see the watcher. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains that our amygdala -- part of our brain's threat detection circuitry -- reacts beneath conscious awareness, messaging our body to get ready to run or rumble (that "fight or flight" thing). Among our body's responses, our little hairs stand on end. That's a creepy feeling -- leading us to whirl around to see what gives -- and whoa!...there's some dude angling to cavity-search us with his eyeballs.

We have a term for that "hairs standing on end" feeling, and it's "being creeped out" -- which is what women are experiencing when they can't see what your eyes are up to behind those dark glasses. Evolutionary social psychologist Frank McAndrew published the first study on the nature of "creepiness." He explains that the feeling that something is "creepy" is a self-protective response to "ambiguity" -- our being unsure of whether we're facing a threat. We err on the side of assuming that we are -- and in rushes the palace guard to barricade the cleavage with a scarf.

This woman you stared at was at the "help" desk, and no, that isn't short for "Help yourself to a nice long look down my boobage." Close-range staring at a captive audience like that is particularly creepy -- as in, it's rude. Again, the sunglasses don't change that; they make it worse. If you're going to girl-watch, do it in wide-open spaces, like on the street or in a mall, so you don't make women feel like sitting ducks in pushup bras. You might also take off those spy glasses and engage with one of these ladies. If you get something going with a woman, gazing admiringly at her will seem like a form of flattery -- as opposed to a sign that your mom reset the Net Nanny to block all those "filthy" webcam sites.

I met this woman who'd dated my ex. In talking, we realized that he used the same romantic lines on both of us. Granted, these made me feel good at the time, but I feel angry and stupid for falling for them. How do you know when a guy is sincere?

--Scammed

Understandably, you want a man's lovey-dovey talk to come from the heart, not from a Word doc he saved on his hard drive.

However, a guy whose heartfelt remarks turn out to be a renewable resource isn't necessarily some sneaky recycler. Consider how personality plays into this. Personality is a pattern over time of thoughts, feelings, and desires that shape how you behave. Research by social psychologist Nathan W. Hudson suggests that you may be able to change aspects of your personality through behavioral change -- like by repeatedly acting more conscientiously. Still, Hudson -- along with about 10 truckloads of other social psychologists -- sees a good deal of evidence that personality is "relatively stable."

In other words, even a sweet, sincere guy is likely to use some of the same romantic wordery with any woman he's dating. What tells you whether he's a good guy or he just talks a good game is time -- reserving judgment on what you have together until enough time passes for you to hold up the sweet things he says to what he actually does. Wanting to see any discrepancies is really the best way to protect yourself from serial romancers -- or worse. ("I bet you say that to all the girls you put in your freezer!")