Picking option 2 is a "bah, she's out of my league" decision. It may not be a smart choice, but it's a choice that a whole lot of men make. The best explanatio

Picking option 2 is a "bah, she's out of my league" decision. It may not be a smart choice, but it's a choice that a whole lot of men make. The best explanation I've heard for this is that it's an evolutionary adaptation. If you're in a tribe of mammals with a strict social hierarchy, trying to mate with the alpha male's partner is an excellent way to get expelled from the tribe if you're lucky or killed if you're not. So we developed a survival instinct to not approach females that we see as above us socially. This could be another evolutionary psychology just-so story, but it fits exactly with my experience. If I seriously consider approaching an attractive woman I get an immediate physical reaction very much like vertigo, which I believe is the primitive part of my brain frantically trying to signal danger. Of course this is actively harmful in our current environment, but our genes don't know that; we're adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessma...).