CHAPTER 15: FIND THE RIGHT MATING MARKETS
To know values is to know the meaning of the market.
—Charles Dow (co-founder Dow Jones)
If you are like most guys, the most important decisions you make about mating won’t feel like mating decisions at all.
Where you decide to live, study, work and hang out are not just random, superficial lifestyle choices. They’re crucial to your success—or failure—with women. Most mating is local, so geography matters. A lot. The fact is, you can’t meet the right women if you’re in the wrong place.
This means that your city, your college campus, your workplace, your gym, and your favorite coffee shop are not just physical locations. They’re also what scientists call “mating markets.”
WHAT IS A “MATING MARKET?”
Imagine a map of all the single people around you, wherever you are. The women are pink dots and the men are blue dots. Each person has a certain “dating radius”—the maximum distance they’re willing to go for a date. If they have to walk, that might be two miles; if they have a car, it might be twenty miles. Each person’s dating radius marks out a roughly circular territory—their pink or blue “dating zone.”
Your local mating market is simply the set of all the single women and men whose dating zones overlap with yours. It’s a giant Venn diagram full of lust, love, and longing.
If you’re shipwrecked on a small island with just one woman, your mating market is just two people: one pink dot and one blue dot in the same tropical dating zone. Your only option is to mate with her, or spend your days making sex dolls out of coconuts and palm leaves. But her options are similarly limited: mate with you or stay celibate. Your mate value on the mainland might have been mediocre, but here, your mate value suddenly becomes relatively high.
But if you add one more guy to the island, now the woman has options, and your relative mate value might drop if the other guy’s good-looking, physically healthy, or not a crazy person making sex dolls out of vegetation.
On the other hand, if you add one more woman to the island, now you have options, and the two women will probably compete harder for your attention. You’ll have even higher mate value and more bargaining power to get what you want from either woman.
Most modern mating markets are much bigger than an island, but the principles are the same. About 1.6 million people live in Manhattan, and all of the single ones make up one big mating market. Whether they live in an NYU dorm, a TriBeCa loft, or an Upper East Side penthouse, they’re all within fairly easy walking, subway, or taxi distance of each other. They’d all prefer not to date someone who lives up in the Bronx (a long subway ride) or down in Staten Island (a ferry ride). They’re all sort of stuck with each other. Even if they never meet more than 1 percent of the opposite sex, everybody’s relative mate value is influenced by everybody else’s mating options. And since there are 30 percent more college-educated single women than college-educated single men in Manhattan, the quality guys are in short supply and can get away with acting like they’re lords of an island harem.
There are lots of mating markets at intermediate scales between the tiny desert island and the vastness of Manhattan. The practicalities of meeting, dating, and travel shape how this works. Mating markets can be tiny and transient (the twenty single people at one party, for one evening) or larger and relatively fixed (a dorm floor or a law school class).
All of these mating markets, at all different scales, overlap and intersect in complicated ways. But within a given mating market, there are some simple principles that govern how men and women interact. Understanding these mating market principles and choosing your mating markets carefully is your golden ticket to mating success.
HOW DO MARKETS WORK?
In economics, a market is a set of sellers and buyers exchanging goods and services for money. For example, all of the customers and retailers at your nearest shopping mall form a small physical market, whereas eBay is a big online market.
If it’s a free market, the exchanges are voluntary rather than forced, so sellers will sell only if they expect a net benefit from the exchange, and buyers will buy only if they also expect a net benefit. The result is mutual benefits called “gains from trade.” Like romantic relationships, free markets are founded on seeking win-win interactions. You buy a shirt because you value it more than the money you exchange for it, and the store sells it because they value your money more than the shirt. This exchange maximizes everybody’s well-being, and this principle largely accounts for the world’s dramatic rise from medieval misery to modern prosperity.
But even free markets differ in how efficient they are. In an efficient market, sellers and buyers can find each other quickly and easily, can communicate what they are offering and seeking, and respond adaptively to changes in local supply and demand by raising or lowering prices. In markets that are both free and efficient, prices tend to reflect supply and demand.
But not all markets are efficient. This is a key point about markets that many people, even some economists, forget: no central authority is in control. Nobody has to measure supply or demand for them to affect prices. The information about supply and demand is distributed throughout the market, and buyers and sellers just act on the local cues of abundance or scarcity that they have to make the best deals they can. The prices reach an equilibrium that reflects supply and demand throughout the whole market—even though nobody knows who’s in the market or anything about what they want.
Let’s be very clear about one thing: most mating markets are genuine free markets that operate by the mutually beneficial exchange of value according to supply and demand, but that doesn’t mean they depend on money or are really “about” money or resources.
It doesn’t mean that dinner dates are really just economic exchanges of lobster for blowjobs. Getting surf and turf doesn’t mean she has to play with your balls too. It also doesn’t mean that your mate value depends mostly on your wealth.
A lot of people take the market metaphor too literally, to serve their own ideological agendas. Religious fundamentalists promote family values by trying to keep marriage as a socially acceptable form of prostitution in which a wife offers sex for her husband’s protection and support—but that’s not how modern marriages work. Gender feminists promote their theory that patriarchy is a zero-sum game of men economically oppressing women, which is also nonsense, as women tend to economically benefit more from marriage than men. The more cynical manosphere writers think women are just trying to con men out of their resources, while men try to con sex out of women—as if all of human mating is just one big argument between greedy hookers and horny clients. This perspective fails to recognize that men substantially benefit from marriage in emotional, social, and physical ways.
They’re all wrong. They’re missing the real “gains from trade” between the sexes that can happen even when no money changes hands. The mating market concept has proven useful in understanding sexual relations in all sorts of nonhuman animals that don’t have money, from insect courtship to bird pair-bonding. Throughout nature, the forms of value exchanged between females and males are hardly ever monetary—and often don’t even involve any material resources like food. They run much deeper.
In mating markets, males and females exchange forms of biological value, like good genes, good partner traits, and good parent abilities, that have been important for hundreds of millions of years.
As you’ve learned, your mate value depends mostly on the quality of your physical and mental traits, not your bank balance, and it’s expressed through your social, aesthetic, and romantic proofs, not just your material proof. In fact, if you go around offering women money for sex, or implying that “romance” is just a polite smokescreen for exchanging resources, you’re not just misunderstanding human mating, but you’re also being an asshole and displaying very low mate value: low social and emotional intelligence, paranoid delusions that all women are gold-diggers, and zero capacity for romantic commitment. And even worse, if someone actually bites on that line, it is almost certainly someone you want nothing to do with.
The exchanges that happen in mating markets tend to be mutually beneficial (win-win), not zero-sum. This is why we harp on creating “win-win” relationships so much—that is the point of mating. The more efficient a mating market, the faster and easier it is to develop great win-win relationships, and the more of them happen.
In other words, everybody who just wants sex gets to enjoy more sex! And everybody who just wants to find a spouse is much more likely to get happily married.
Efficient mating markets make most people about as happy as they could realistically hope. Efficient markets tend to “clear” themselves, meaning that almost everybody who wants a mate finds a mate, and most romantic desires are met by an offer of some sort, from somebody. Inefficient markets, on the other hand, don’t clear. They frustrate the shit out of most everyone. In inefficient mating markets, you end up with a lot of women with cats and guys with metal detectors.
Of course, mating markets differ from economic markets in lots of other ways, but the basic dynamics are similar: people get together to seek what they want and offer what they have, and their success in making deals depends on what all the other people are seeking and offering.
Here’s why this matters to you: are you offering what women are looking for in your local mating market? Because if you aren’t, you will fail at mating.
LEARNING YOUR MATE VALUE FROM MATING MARKETS
Mating markets also have an information-sharing function. They help you learn your local mate value, given what the local women want, and what the other local men can offer.
Given an efficient mating market, you can run little experiments to gauge your mate value: Will this gorgeous woman talk to me? No? Then how about this other, slightly less attractive one? If you can’t get a “hello” from anyone but the seventy-year-old Walmart greeter—whose job is to say hello—you know you’ve got some work to do.
You can also observe how other people’s apparent traits, proofs, mating goals, and mate preferences seem to be influencing their success or failure (the healthy confident guys are going home with girls, the flabby insecure wallflowers are going home with 2 a.m. pizza). And you can gossip with friends about everybody’s mating successes and failures, in relation to the quality of potential mates that they pursued (Jim finally got laid last night but made her leave under the cover of darkness before any of us woke up. Maybe she was a vampire?).
Then you can combine all this information to guide your decisions about which women to approach and what kinds of interactions you can realistically expect. You probably do that already but don’t realize it. It’s based on a fundamental process called “assortative mating.”
In assortative mating, similar people tend to pair up together. Brainiacs prefer brainiacs. Hipsters attract hipsters. Mormons marry Mormons (and decades of psychology research show that opposites almost never attract, so wipe that idea from your head). Similarity at the level of specific traits like these—intelligence, aesthetic style, and religion—is important.
But the most important similarity is your overall mate value. Generally high-quality men tend to mate with generally high-quality women, leaving mediocre people no option but to pair up with each other. And then the even lower-quality people face the hard choice between mating with another reject or staying single. This overall “mate-value matching” ain’t fair, it ain’t nice, and it ain’t pretty. But it’s reality. And it speaks to the power of the human desire to connect, to pair up, to mate.
Mate-value matching isn’t anyone’s intention. It’s just the outcome of everybody wanting the highest mate-value person that they can attract, combined with the fact that human mate choice requires mutual consent. It happens naturally in every efficient mating market, from Paleolithic clans to Manhattanites on Match.com.
In modern society, the men with the highest mate values get their first pick of women. They can “afford” almost anything in their mating market. Case in point: Physically attractive guys with lots of talent, money, and fame (like Brad Pitt) are in high demand among women, so they usually get the relationships they want.
On the flip side, since beautiful, clever, and kind women (like Angelina Jolie) are in short supply and high demand, those gems can select almost any partner they want as well. When high-quality boy meets high-quality girl, they tend to pair up, and they’re hard to separate for more than a fling. Brad + Angelina = “Brangelina,” the super-couple.
Here’s the crucial thing: once the highest-mate-value people pair off and take themselves out of the mating market, the rest of us don’t just give up and stay at home masturbating to replays of Mr. and Mrs. Smith on TNT. We can’t all be Brad Pitt, but each of us can still find a mate. We just have to settle for a woman who’s not Angelina—one who has similar mate value to us, given the other men and women left in the mating market.
The reality is that most people end up in relationships with people who are nowhere near the top of their mating list. And that’s OK, because as we saw in the romantic proof chapter, we evolved the ability to fall deeply in love with imperfect mates. The low-mate-value couple can enjoy making babies with each other almost as much as Brangelina can. They just might have to turn the lights off first.
So when people go “shopping” in their mating market, they quickly learn that they’re not paying money for their mate; they’re offering themselves—their own mate value—as their contribution to the deal.
What they can get in return depends on all the factors of that mating market; their own mate value, the number of men versus women, and what women in that market are demanding from men.
Why does this matter to you? Because your mate value is often determined by the mating market you are in, not an objective measure. A 7 in Milwaukee is not a 7 in Manhattan. So picking a mating market that is good for you greatly increases your ability to attract a high-quality woman.
PRINCIPLES FOR CHOOSING GOOD MATING MARKETS
You’ve learned already that you can’t meet a woman unless you’re in a mating market that includes at least one woman. You probably know that if you spend all evening playing Settlers of Catan with three male friends and no women, none of you will get laid tonight. Women aren’t like State Farm insurance agents—they’re not like a good neighbor, and they’re not just there when you want them.
But that’s about as far as most of you guys get. You don’t think about how many or what kinds of women are within your dating zone. You don’t think about the mating goals those women pursue or what traits and proofs they value in men or offer to men. You don’t think about your sexual rivals—how many other men are in your mating market or what kinds of mate value they offer to women. You don’t think about which mating markets are actually efficient. You don’t think about any of this shit, all to your detriment.
In general, you’ll achieve much more mating success and find more women who are both attractive to you and attracted to you if you know the answers to all those questions and focus your effort in mating markets that have these key features:
1. A large number of women
When it comes to mating markets, size matters. Lots of women means you have lots of choice—both in the aggregate and specific to your preferences.
If you’re a very bright guy looking for a very bright woman, you’re far less likely to find her outside a big city or an elite college town with lots of very smart people. If you’re into freaky sex, you probably won’t find your ideal partner-in-kink in your tiny Appalachian hometown. If you really like Hispanic girls, Albuquerque (population 550,000, 47 percent Hispanic) would be a much better option than Detroit (population 690,000, but only 7 percent Hispanic): you’d have a pool of 130,000 rather than 24,000 Hispanic women.
Also, in tiny mating markets, the women all know each other, which can get awkward for them. In big cities, it’s easier for women to be sexually adventurous without accidentally sleeping with their best friend’s ex and without their friends slut-shaming them.
2. A low sex ratio
In biology, sex ratio is defined as the ratio of males to females in a breeding population. If there’s a high sex ratio, like three guys for every woman (e.g., a typical Comic Con or computer science class), most of the guys will fail to mate. If there’s a low ratio, like two women for every man (e.g., College of Charleston or University of North Carolina), it’s a mating paradise for almost every guy.
There aren’t enough men to go around, so the women compete harder for men in every possible way. They’ll become more emotionally generous and sexually adventurous; they’ll adore you and boost your confidence rather than make you feel disposable. Also, a low sex ratio means less competition from other men—they’re too busy getting laid and enjoying girlfriends to throw salt in your game or fight you. With a low sex ratio, you can relax your guard and enjoy being a lover rather than a fighter.
(We’ll wait to move on for a second while you go look up flights to Raleigh-Durham.)
3. A subculture open to your mating goals
Some communities (e.g., Mormons in Utah) are more sexually conservative, and everybody expects long, chaste courtship followed by faithful marriage. If you want to find a wife and minimize your risk of marital infidelity, these communities are mating markets that will appeal to you.
But if you are into short-term mating or swinging or other sorts of very open sexual mores, there are numerous subcultures that might be more attractive mating markets. Subcultures can arise, for example, in temporary or transient situations, and those themselves become mating markets. Places with high turnover rates, like airport hotel bars, ski resorts, and tourism-based cities (Las Vegas, Orlando), tend to have a lot of short-term mating. The ultimate short-term mating destinations are, of course, Florida and Mexico beach resorts during spring break (hence Tucker’s adventures in Cancun). Everybody knows that they’re unlikely to see someone again after a night of passion, so expectations of romantic commitment are low.
4. A place where your mate value is competitive
Some places just attract higher-quality people who have their shit together. Major metropolises like New York, San Francisco, and London attract a lot of talent in every domain: finance, law, medicine, academia, media, and the arts. Successful people make big money and drive up rents, and people with high mate value drive up dating standards.
Those places can be very difficult for young men to compete in unless they have amazing looks, brilliant wit, early fame, or family money. If you’re in a mating market like New York, understand that you’ll be competing against many rich, powerful, smart, older guys who are very experienced with very attractive women. You can still compete, especially given the favorable sex ratio for men, but you need to cultivate your traits and proofs before you can expect much success.
On the other hand, it can pay to be a big fish in a small pond. If you’re a medium-quality guy in a mating market where most guys are losers, your mate value will be relatively high, and lots of cute women will be interested. This often happens in smaller cities where industry’s collapsed but the service sector is still functioning (so men don’t have jobs but women do), or college towns where the female undergrads and grad students are sick of frat boys and listless stoners.
When you’re looking for a mating market, pay as much attention to the men there, who are your rivals, as to the women there. Women aren’t measuring you against all the men on earth; they’re measuring you against the other men they have access to.
If you have your life much more together than most of the other guys in your mating market, you can do very well, even if the women seem way out of your league. You don’t need to be as cool as Brad Pitt, you just have to be a little more Pitt-like than the other guys in this bar, on this night, in this town.
5. A place where your age is especially attractive
A mating market’s age structure can also influence your relative mate value. Women tend to prefer slightly older men. When there aren’t enough slightly older men to go around, women lower their standards and act more promiscuous. The 1960s sexual revolution was caused partly by the Baby Boom demographics: there was a huge surge of young women and young men, but the young women wanted slightly older men who were in scarce supply, so they offered more sex and expected less commitment.
The same effect still happens in most college towns: if you’re a twenty-five-year-old guy in a place full of undergrads, you can do very well. Likewise if you’re a decent guy in your 40s in a place full of frustrated women in their 30s (like NYC), they’ve already realized that most of the men at their ideal age are either married, never-married losers, or divorced-and-damaged dads. You might be the droid they’ve been looking for.
6. A place where your distinctive traits and proofs are especially attractive
Americans move around a lot, and they move to cities full of like-minded people. So different American cities develop very different social norms about particular traits and proofs.
For example, places that attract lots of good-looking people (e.g., wannabe movie stars flocking to LA) put a big premium on handsomeness, so if you have the face of an extra (like “redneck zombie #5”), don’t move there.
Some places (e.g., Denver, Austin) have high expectations about physical fitness. Don’t move there if you’re obese, because your mate value will be appreciably low. The Gulf Coast states would be more accepting.
Some places (e.g., Cambridge, Silicon Valley) attract lots of smart people who have high expectations about book smarts. Move there if you have a Ph.D. (women will love it); don’t move there if you can’t spell Ph.D. (women will be repulsed).
7. Ease of meeting people
Some college campuses have buzzing student union buildings where everybody goes for lunch, and you can meet tons of women; other campuses with equal numbers of students seem like post-apocalyptic wastelands devoid of life.
Some cities have pedestrian-friendly downtowns, mixed-used developments, and great indoor malls where you can easily meet new people. Others are mostly sprawling suburbs with mini-malls where nobody gets out of the car unless absolutely necessary and the only way to meet somebody in another car is to run into them.
East Coast cities with good public transportation are much easier to get around in if you don’t have a car, so your dating radius can be big even if you’re poor.
Some cities (e.g., Austin) have vibrant nightlife scenes for short-term mating, others (e.g., Cincinnati) not so much. Some (e.g., Houston, Louisville) have excellent mega-churches where you can find a devout spouse, others not. Even among online dating sites, some (like OkCupid) make it much easier to find out enough about someone to send them an interesting personalized message; others (like Tinder) offer so little information in profiles that it’s harder to strike up a conversation.
Think about each potential mating market not just in terms of who’s there and what they want, but how you will actually meet them and interact with them in the most basic practical ways.
TAKE ACTION AND MOVE INTO YOUR IDEAL MATING MARKETS
Think about why you live where you live. Was it just your arbitrary birthplace where your parents happened to settle? Did it just have the best college you could get into at the time?
Those are inertia-based reasons for living somewhere, not conscious reasons. If you’re willing to move somewhere for the sake of a good education or a good job, shouldn’t you be willing to move for the sake of a good potential mate?
That was a rhetorical question—of course you should be willing to. If you’re not, you’ll be disappointing a lot of women who’d like to meet you, and you’ll be short-changing yourself.
At the very least, think about spending your time in different places than you’re used to. Wherever you study, work, and hang out now might not be the ideal choice for your overall lifestyle, much less your mating success. That’s OK. You didn’t know how much leverage the right geography could give you.
The most important mating markets in your life, roughly from largest to smallest, are these:
1. What country you live in
Most people stay in whatever country they were born in. But that’s rarely the ideal country for them to find mates. There are big differences across nations and cultures in everything related to mating, from their mating goals and sexual norms (like the Netherlands versus Saudi Arabia) to the traits and proofs that are most valued (like intelligence in England, wealth in Russia, or style in Italy).
2. What city you live in
Even within America, cities differ hugely in their populations, sex ratios, age profiles, and sexual norms (think Las Vegas vs. Salt Lake City). They differ in the ease of meeting new people and ease of traveling for dates (think walkable Boulder vs. drivable Tucson vs. undrivable LA). Some cities (like Indianapolis and Detroit) just suck for everybody who’s single, and some (like Austin and Seattle) are better for most singles, but none are ideal for everybody.
The city that’s ideal for you, given your goals and desires, is probably not the city you happen to be living in now. You should be willing to move to achieve the mating life you want.
3. What neighborhood you live in
Within each city, neighborhoods differ dramatically in all the same ways that countries and cities do. They also differ in the proportion of single people actively seeking mates: within Manhattan, think about the Upper West Side (married people with kids) vs. Tribeca (rich young banking couples with kids) vs. Greenwich Village (tons of horny NYU students). Move to neighborhoods where active singles live, study, work, and mingle. Pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods also make it much easier to bump into women than car-based suburban sprawl does.
4. Where you go to school
A low sex ratio at a college is a huge predictor of your mating success as a male student (helloooo, UNC-Chapel Hill!). Schools differ in sexual norms and mating goals, from “party schools” focused on short-term mating (Tulane, UCSB, Penn State) to Christian “ring by spring” schools where virgin students try to get engaged before their final semester (Baylor, Occidental, and any school with the word “Wesleyan” in the name). Choosing a school with a good sex ratio and sexual norms that fit your mating goals can be more important to your college experience than its academic reputation or financial aid package. It’s a lot easier to study economic theory or Russian imperial history when you’re not in a frozen, sexless wasteland.
5. What job you work
Work is a major mating market: a lot of people hook up with coworkers and marry work colleagues. What kind of job you do matters: service jobs in big restaurants, bars, coffee shops, grocery stores, malls, and bookshops let you mingle with lots of female customers and coworkers.
Where you work matters as well: an office job in a busy, pedestrian-friendly downtown offers a lot more opportunities to meet women during lunch and after work than an office job in a suburban office park. Jobs that involve conferences, trainings, and getaways are especially fun, because everybody hooks up at off-site events.
6. What social groups you join
Your social network isn’t just a form of social proof; it’s also a mating market in its own right. Female friends and acquaintances can become lovers, and they extend your reach into new social circles through friends of friends. Are you often hanging out with mixed-sex groups of friends who know other cool people, or are you just staying at home watching imaginary relationships between TV characters who can’t introduce you to anyone?
7. What leisure activities you do
What fun things do you do on evenings and weekends? Do any women do those things? You might like guns, but shooting ranges suck for meeting women—there aren’t many of them, and they’re probably there learning to defend themselves against guys like you, and it’s too loud to talk. If you’re into live-action role-playing games (LARPing) or Civil War battle re-enactments, you’ll face a sex ratio of about ten men for every woman.
On the other hand, if you take classes in salsa dancing or acroyoga or acting, you’ll probably have five single women for every guy, lots of opportunities to talk, and a teacher telling them to touch you! Also try speed-dating events—local singles events specifically designed to introduce you to the largest number of women as quickly and efficiently as possible. Go where the women already are, doing the things they like.
8. What online dating sites you use
Online dating sites and mobile dating apps give you mate-search superpowers. Each site or app tends to specialize in different mating goals (e.g., AdultFriendFinder for casual sex with “hot, horny singles… NOW!,” Tinder and Zoosk for short-term dating, Match.com, eHarmony, and PlentyofFish for longer-term relationships, OkCupid for polyamory).
Some niche dating sites have specific clienteles (e.g., JDate for Jewish people, FarmersOnly for “good ol’ country folk,” 420 Singles for marijuana enthusiasts). Apps differ in how much information the profiles can contain (from tiny Tinder self-descriptions to massive OkCupid question-banks) and how much interaction the apps allow (from simple text messaging to Speed-Match’s live video).
But remember, online dating is only as good as your local mating market—unless you’re willing to take a plane to your first coffee date. Match.com works a lot better in Brooklyn than in Fresno.
We’re not saying you should start packing tonight and take the next train to Brooklyn—not with all those annoying hipsters jacking up rental prices. Moving to a new country, city, or college is a serious, costly life-change that could bring massive benefits—or bitter disappointment. We’re just saying you should seriously consider it.
Or you could just stay in the same city for the moment, and try to rediscover its best local mating markets. They’re probably right under your nose. Think about changing jobs to somewhere surrounded by the kind of women you like. Think about what you like to do in your spare time, and go where the women are. In your social network, reach out to female friends of friends.
We’ve explained what mating markets are and how to find the ones that are best for you—now it’s time to shop.
Takeaways
• Mating markets are geographically defined local dating zones (even if you’re using online dating) that operate on the supply-and-demand dynamics of free markets in order to yield win-win outcomes for men and women whose mate-values are comparable.
• Picking the best mating markets for you, given what you want and what you offer to women, is the single most powerful way to improve your mating success. But you must understand your mating goals (what kinds of interactions or relationships you want), your mate preferences (what kinds of women you like), and your mate value (the traits and proofs that you can offer to women).
• Moving into better mating markets is a win-win for everybody. You’ll have a much easier time meeting more women who value you. You’ll have more dates, more sex, and better relationships. And they’ll have a much easier time meeting you. By redeploying yourself wherever more women will want you, you’re bringing more joy to more women and reducing their frustration that “there aren’t any good men out there” (meaning, within easy driving distance).
• The ideal mating markets for you have these features:
1. A large number of women of whatever age and ethnicity you prefer
2. A low operational sex ratio (fewer men than women seeking mates)
3. A subculture open to your mating goals (whether short term or long term)
4. A market in which your mate-value is competitive, compared to the other guys there
5. A market in which your age is especially attractive, given the ages of women and male rivals there
6. A market in which your distinctive traits and proofs are especially attractive, given the women’s preferences there
7. An environment in which it’s easy to meet people, given the practicalities of public life
• Don’t let geographic inertia rule your mating life. Nobody else can choose your mating markets for you. Take responsibility for your attractiveness by taking responsibility for where you live and spend your time.