Who is the most idealistic about mating? It seems to me it is children, post-menopausal women, and young male “nerds”, i.e., with especially weak current mating prospects. These folks talk as if they hold themselves and others to the highest standards of ideal love, while happening to speak when they have an especially low chance of fertile sex.
Coincidence? I think not. Remember, sex is near; love is far. In Far Thoughts Fit Ideals, I said:
We tend more to say we will act in accord with our verbally expressed and proudly embraced abstract ideals, e.g., individualism, collectivism, universalism, environmentalism, when we are put into the mental mode that was designed more for talking relative to doing – the far mode. In contrast, when we are in our usual near mode … we tend to ignore those abstract ideals, … practically achieving our usual ends.
A counter-example: more intelligent people are more likely to approve of pre-marital sex, but less likely to have it. I'm a counter-example to that, perhaps related to a highly religious formative period (Robin himself once belonged to a "cult", and might generalize from that experience or milieu) whereas intelligent people tend to be irreligious and may have been so from an earlier age.
Consider people in sexless marriages. Wouldn’t sex be far for them? Do you think they’d be particularly idealistic about it?
No, sex is a "near" issue in this case. No sex is the couples near mode way of dealing with sex.