CHAPTER 10: SHOW THEM WHAT YOU’RE WORKING WITH

(SIGNALING THEORY)

Show, don’t tell.

—The universal screenwriter’s maxim

Step 2 in this book is all about understanding and improving the traits that define your mate value—such as how well your body works (physical health) and how well your self-control systems work (willpower). If you make all of those changes, or even some of them, you’re going to increase your mate value. But by itself, that’s not enough.

Why? Because having attractive traits is not the same as displaying attractive traits.

Signaling theory states that when you’re trying to display attractive traits to women, you must follow the screenwriter’s dictum: show, don’t tell. You can’t just claim you have a good trait; saying “I’m smart!” means nothing. You have to actually show your intelligence and how it’s already made your life better, in specific, concrete ways.

There are countless ways to show off your traits to women. These displays, called “proofs,” are the focus of Step 3—what they are, why they attract women, and how to improve them. We’ll explain social proofs like dominance, status, prestige, and popularity; material proofs like resources and wealth; aesthetic proofs like taste, style, and art; and romantic proofs like gifts, love, and commitment.

In each case the signaling logic is similar: what proof of your value can you show to a woman that a man with lower value could never succeed in showing? We’ve already explained that women are scanning for physical, sexual, and social threats, like robbers, rapists, and embarrassing Trekkies. But women are also scanning for mating opportunities—potential lovers and boyfriends. Your signals and proofs are the main way that you get her interest from across the room. They reveal your physical, mental, and financial health. They rank you relative to other males. They testify to your good genes, your good partner ability, and good dad potential. If you don’t display them, however, women can’t even see you as a mate, much less feel attraction to you. You could have the highest mate value and the most amazing traits in the world, but if you don’t send out any signals or proofs of your traits, you’re the Invisible Man.

Make no mistake; everything you do and say is sending these signals and proofs out in all directions all the time: your clothing, your grooming, your body language, your facial expressions, your shoes, your friends, and everything else about your appearance and actions. Women are bombarded by these signals from men all around them, and they sort through them very fast and unconsciously. Have you ever tried to talk to a woman, but you felt like after one glance she’d already made up her mind about you, even before you had a chance to talk to her?

That’s probably because she did. But she wasn’t being a bitch. She didn’t think she was better than you! She just didn’t need to talk to you to figure out what kind of guy you are; she could already tell from how you looked and acted that you weren’t going to be her type. She was responding to your signals.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, 998 of yours were “No.”

GET MORE CONSCIOUS ABOUT YOUR SIGNALS

We hear a lot of bad advice from parents and teachers about life, but chances are the worst advice we get is something like this:

What matters is what’s on the inside, not the outside. If people don’t take the time to get to know you, then that’s their loss.

This is not only wrong; it is cripplingly stupid and corrosively toxic for men (or anyone) to believe.

Everything you wear, everything you do, every gesture you make tells a story about you. Women perceive these behaviors and traits and then use them to make judgments about your mate value and boyfriend potential.

Yes, what’s on the inside is very important, but we can judge each other’s deepest traits only by what we can observe and verify. EVERYONE judges EVERYONE else by what’s “on the outside.” We do it because we’re wired by evolution to show off our inner traits through our surface behavior and to expect everyone else to do the same.

That is the essence of signaling, and it is the heart of honest courtship, the foundation of win-win relationships, and the most powerful principle for increasing your attractiveness to women.

The entire concept of signaling goes against the incomplete advice to “just be yourself” with women. The one thing that people never mean by “just be yourself” is “make zero effort to cultivate or display any of the traits that make women feel happy, safe, impressed, and attracted.”

The reality is, you can’t escape signaling; you can only do it badly or do it well. Most of the guys you see out there doing well with women—especially the guys you think don’t offer anything special—understand this implicitly. Many of them probably don’t even have better traits than you; they just know how to signal their traits more effectively.

The problem most guys have is that they overspecialize. They figure out in high school, “Hey, I’ve got one or two traits where I’m a little above average, and I’m going to just run with those,” and they overinvest in developing those early strengths at the expense of everything else.

Or they develop a certain narrow, stereotyped way to display their traits. They think, “Hey, I’m bright. I’m good at chess. I’m going to become a chess genius. That’ll get the women.” No. That doesn’t work. Very rarely do women like guys who are overspecialized in some arbitrary, culture-specific proof like chess skill. It just doesn’t reach deep enough into her mating instincts. No woman has ever said to herself, You know what I want? A man who can effortlessly navigate the Luzhin Defense but can’t find his ass with two hands, a map, and a flashlight.

In nature, mating signals are almost exclusively physical traits: the peacock’s tail, the lion’s mane, or the elk’s antlers. Displaying them is all the males can do to get females, and if they are subpar, they’re shit out of luck.

But it’s different for humans. For us, in addition to physical signals (which are very important), human signals are behavioral, mental, and even moral traits. Across every culture, our primal masculine mating signals—like muscularity, handsomeness, intelligence, humor, conversational skill, and musical creativity—melt women’s butter and provoke sexual interest. We have a lot of ways to show women we are attractive and awesome.

HONEST COURTSHIP (OR, WHY YOU CAN’T JUST TELL A WOMAN YOU’RE GREAT)

Here’s the problem with mating signals though: what keeps animals from lying about how great they are?

Of course, all males of all species would love to send signals of maximum awesomeness so they could attract all the females. They would all love to lie about having the highest possible mate value. Seriously, if all animals could send signals that they are totally formidable rivals, uncatchable prey, and hot mates, they would. Evolution rewards signals that manipulate the receiver’s senses and brains into acting in the interests of the signaler: deferring to them, mating with them, or not eating them.

But evolution also rewards receivers who aren’t easily duped by lies and unreliable signals. Rivals evolved to be skeptical about unmerited claims of awesome formidability. Predators evolved to be skeptical about prey pretending to be evasive or poisonous. Females evolved to be skeptical about males pretending to be amazing.

So there’s a signaling arms race between signalers (e.g., males) and receivers (e.g., females). The signalers try to influence the receivers in the signalers’ interests, as when males try to seduce females. And the receivers try to distinguish the genuinely useful information in the signals from the deception and manipulation, like women on dates, trying to figure out if this guy is for real or just all talk.

As is its tendency, evolution ends up at a dynamic balance point between this honesty and deception. There’s always a little bit of deception around the edges, but if a signal has lasted for many generations, it probably conveys reliable information most of the time.

Humans are a tricky case when it comes to honest signaling, because language has made it so easy for us to lie. We can claim anything with words. Half the romantic comedies ever made are based on some lie a man told to impress a beautiful woman. Thus, because verbal boasts about quality are so easy to fake, women rarely rely on them, and it’s always better to demonstrate a trait than to claim it verbally.

That’s also why the best signals in nature, the most honest ones, tend to be the most expensive (in biological terms). Most sexual ornaments, like the peacock’s tail, for instance, are quite costly. A sickly, starving, parasite-ridden, brain-damaged peacock can’t strut around for hours expertly displaying a huge, symmetrical, colorful tail; therefore, any peacock that can must not be sickly, starving, or otherwise impaired. The cost of the signal (the tail) guarantees the quality of the signaler (the peacock), and peahens evolved to instinctively understand that conspicuous cost and precision make signals reliable.

Many signals, especially the genetic ones, combine a conspicuous waste of material with conspicuous precision of design, and both are hard to fake. Can you grow a perfectly symmetrical face and body? You can’t fake that. Do all your organic parts work together with a high level of “fit and finish,” like a fully loaded Lexus? Can’t fake that either. Does your brain work right so it can keep a musical rhythm accurately, solve hard problems quickly, tell interesting stories, or imitate other people’s behavior in accurate and funny ways? Not possible to fake any of those.

Another reliable signal is conspicuous consumption. The point of luxury goods is not actually to bring pleasure to the wealthy. It’s to signal how much money they can burn. It’s a reliable signal because if you’re poor, you can’t afford it. That applies to houses, vehicles, clothing, jewelry, education—anything you can buy that’s visible to women.

Sure, you can send fake signals in some of these domains and fool some women some of the time, but experienced women are very good at detecting fake signals and sexually rejecting the guys who send them.

Here again, being honest is a useful principle, both practically and ethically. The strategy that is better than buying a twenty-thousand-dollar watch when you make forty thousand dollars in a year is to actually develop the underlying traits that the watch is a proxy for and then display them with costly signals and reliable proofs. This keeps you honest with yourself, with women, and with your signaling tactics.

THE SIGNALING CUES YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND

The good news is that you control nearly every aspect of how you present yourself. You determine the signals you send out into the dating world. Period. And if the signals you are sending out now are bad, you can change them to increase your attractiveness to the women you want to meet. So enough of the signaling theory; let’s make this practical. How does signaling work in your life?

It’s a Friday night, it’s been a long week at school or work, and you walk into a bar or a party. You get a drink and see a pretty woman across the room. If you’re like most guys, your immediate reaction comes from your animal brain: “I want to rub our privates together until the white stuff comes out of the pee place.” In the second that thought is ping-ponging around your brain, she sees you too. Her immediate reaction? To immediately and instinctively assess you, based on these main categories:

Size: How big are you, physically? Are you tall, average height, short? This immediate unconscious judgment is first a threat assessment. All humans assess size first because size is the best proxy for a threat in the natural world.

Shape and movement: After she takes in size and makes her threat assessment, then her brain shifts to social evaluation. Humans are the most social apes, and quite a bit of our cognitive ability is about assessing and evaluating relative social status within our group. We do this by reading the signals others send out.

Are you muscular and healthy (physical health)? How are you walking (physical health)? And what is your posture saying about your mental state (mental health)? Are you smiling and happy or angry and violent (and what does this mean about your mental state)? Her brain makes these assessments instantaneously and unconsciously and creates the appropriate emotional reactions to your signals.

Body details (sex, race, age): How old are you? What sex? What race? All the specific details of your humanness come next, after your absolute size, shape, and movements.

Clothing: Do your clothes fit? Do they look good on you? Or does it look like you robbed a schizophrenic street person’s cardboard house and got dressed in the dark? Women will make very specific conclusions about you based on what you wear.

For example, if you have a suit on, that sends a very different signal than if you are wearing a nice leather jacket and comfortable jeans, and those both send very different signals than if you’re wearing a ratty T-shirt with wing sauce all over it or a neon-pink tank top that has “Female Body Inspector” on it.

Jewelry and ornamentation: Everything you put on your body, like tattoos, jewelry, watches, wearable technologies—what an anthropologist would call “body ornamentation”—sends a visual signal that tells the world about who you are at an aesthetic level, and women immediately look at these things and evaluate you by them.

You may think you are “expressing yourself,” and you are. But more important, you are signaling to other people who you are and what you believe. Do you wear any jewelry or have any tattoos? Are they tasteful and discreet, beautifully ornate, or gaudy and ridiculous? Do you look like a functional member of society, like a dedicated body-art enthusiast, or like a Cash Money video and a Sons of Anarchy gang war exploded on your body?

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with any choice along the spectrum regarding jewelry or body art. There is only effective and ineffective—based on the women you are trying to attract.

Grooming and smell: Grooming is very important to women, and they immediately register things like your basic level of cleanliness. How clean and well groomed are you? What is your hair like (and that means from tip to tail)? What about your teeth? Nails? Skin? What condition are they in? Are you zestfully clean or a filthy pig? Do you smell like a man or a metrosexual or her uncle?

Many guys don’t think about this, but smell is incredibly important to women, and it forms a large part of unconscious attraction. If you smell bad to a woman, there’s pretty much nothing you can do to overcome that. She will be immediately and totally repulsed.

IMPROVE YOUR SIGNALING

Remember that most of this happens while you’re sipping your drink across the room, before you’ve spoken one word to her, and usually before you’re even in physical proximity. The old cliché about most communication being nonverbal is true.

You have probably figured out that very few high-quality women respond to verbal boasting because words are like the women they are determined not to be: cheap and easy.

Instead, you need to translate those words into actions. Don’t tell women about your attractive traits and fitness indicators; show them. If you want to improve your signaling, this lesson alone will carry you nearly all the way. Men who have had consistent mating success understand this. They know these things about signaling:

• Funny guys don’t talk about being funny. They make you laugh.

• Smart guys don’t talk about being intelligent. They engage your curiosity.

• Confident guys don’t talk about being confident. They make you feel at ease.

• Dedicated guys don’t talk about being dedicated. They act loving and faithful.

The next four chapters in this section are all about showing. They are about signaling that you have combined those attractive traits from the inside (physical and mental health, intelligence, willpower, tender defender) and applied them effectively to your life on the outside.

They are proof that you are fit and effective in all the ways that women need.