CHAPTER 17: MEETING THE WOMEN YOU WANT

If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

—Orson Welles

In this section so far we’ve explained how mating markets work, and how to pick good women. Those are strategic issues.

Now we’re going to get tactical. We’ll put the pieces together and explain precisely where, why, and how to actually meet the kind of women you want.

BARS AND CLUBS SUCK

Before we dive into the right ways to meet women, let’s first get rid of a limiting belief that has probably handicapped your mating life and your sexual confidence for years: the idea that you should be able to walk into any bar, confidently approach a woman, and seduce her into a hookup… this is total bullshit and a toxic myth.

Wait, you’re thinking, how can this be? If you’ve read Tucker’s books, you know he did very well meeting women in dark, crowded, noisy places full of drunken rivals and tipsy women.

What you don’t know is that Tucker is extremely outgoing, friendly, confident, loud, funny, and verbally fluent, even when drunk, in addition to being in great physical shape. Tucker in a typical bar is like a lion at a crowded savannah watering hole—he’s going to drink all the water and probably take down a wildebeest. Which is to say, he happens to be very well adapted to that specific environment.

Most guys aren’t like that. Which is why bars and clubs are so bad for them. Men want to protect their physical safety, display their ability to show off attractive traits to women, and protect their sexual self-confidence. But what do most bars and clubs offer men? A set of drunk, sexually frustrated male strangers, some looking for a fight, in a noisy, crowded, chaotic environment that makes it impossible to display anything other than physical attractiveness, material proof, or extreme charisma, and a set of tipsy women, already irritable about being hit on by lots of men, ready and willing to reject you in a way that everybody can see.

You couldn’t design a worse environment for men to meet women.

And it’s not much better for women either. Women value their physical safety, their power of female choice, and their social safety. But what do most bars and clubs offer to them? A dark, exposed environment with few places to hide; little protection from stalking or harassment; a jostling crowd of male strangers, mostly looking for short-term hookups, who are uninhibited enough to approach any available woman; and a set of female rivals and acquaintances competing for the same men, watching who goes home with whom, who are capable of spreading malicious gossip.

The idea that bars and clubs are good places for men to meet women goes against everything in human biology.

There are virtually no cultures in history that expected their young people to find mates by throwing them randomly together into dark, noisy, threatening environments, with no structured activities or reasons for interacting, and hoping they’d sort themselves out into viable pairs. Bars and clubs present the exact opposite of a safe, easy, stress-free way to meet potential mates, to display your traits and proofs, and to work your way through a normal courtship process.

It’s not your fault you’re still clinging to the myth of the mating efficacy of bars and clubs; it’s the fault of American bar-and-club culture, and the Hollywood system and Madison Avenue marketing machine that glamorize and celebrate it.

If you’re still not convinced, look at it like this: on a deep, primal level a woman’s worst fear is that a man will assault her, and a man’s worst fear is that a woman will sexually humiliate him. BOTH of these elements are directly in play at bars and clubs. It literally puts men and women into the worst possible situations for mating.

Stop thinking you need to fight this natural instinct to avoid them. It’s OK to not like bars and clubs as places to meet women.

MEET WOMEN THROUGH YOUR SOCIAL LIFE

So where should you meet women?

The best way to meet a lot of women is to make your dating life an extension of your social life.

Imagine you volunteer at a community event, like a weekend park or beach cleanup, picking up trash to make the neighborhood nicer for everybody. Suppose that after you’ve been working alongside everyone for an hour or so, you notice that there’s an attractive woman there. You hold some trash bags open for her, and she helps you load them onto a truck. You work alongside each other for another hour or so, just being cooperative and friendly. Eventually the cleanup is winding down, and you want to strike up a longer conversation with her.

Think about how much better this scenario is for meeting a woman compared to approaching a random woman in a bar:

Instead of being a potentially unsafe stranger approaching her in a dark bar, you’re a guy who is part of a group she is also in, you have a legitimate reason to talk to her, and you have things to talk about related to your group or activity.

Furthermore, there are virtually no social consequences for her (or you) in talking in this situation, so you can be free to explore each other as much as you’d like.

You don’t have to worry about her rejecting you, because your interactions are in the context of a volunteering event. You can interact with her in a risk-free way and get much more feedback on her attraction to you before you make a decision to actually move toward a romantic relationship.

You can show her your attractive traits in this context as well. If you’ve worked together for a couple of hours on a goal-directed activity like cleaning a park, she’s already been judging your traits and proofs unconsciously, and she can see the attractive parts of you far easier in this setting than in a crowded bar full of other guys vying for her attention.

Even in a simple volunteering task, you have the opportunity to show her not only that you care about something she cares about, but that you’re intelligent and socially conscious and that you can lead people, talk to people, etc. This gives you the chance to shine in many ways, all in a completely normal context, and in a way that is very low risk socially and psychologically.

You can use these conversations to learn all about her and find out if she is someone you’d like to pursue. She’s no longer a mysterious, terrifying sex-goddess in a dark bar; she’s just a sweaty, normal girl who’s spent her Saturday afternoon doing the same thing you did.

Plus, the stakes remain low, since you’re both there for a reason other than mate-seeking. If she’s enthusiastic, your conversation easily escalates into exchanging numbers, or an immediate, informal coffee or dinner date. If she’s not enthusiastic, you won’t feel as hurt and upset, because the whole context isn’t a high-pressure dating situation like a singles bar.

BONUS: The more social activities you do, the more people you meet. And the more people you meet, the more of their friends you meet, and the more friends you make and social activities you get invited to, where you can meet more women. Rinse and repeat.

The moral of this story is this: when you think about “meeting women,” do NOT imagine trying to approach a beautiful woman you don’t know in a crowded bar full of strangers. This makes you anxious for very good reasons.

Instead, think about putting yourself into social groups and activities that include women, where you do things you already enjoy with people you like. When you meet a new woman in a social context and setting based on shared interests and activities that you can talk about, you don’t have to try to escalate all the way from total stranger to potential lover in just one conversation (which is very hard to do, by the way, even for the most experienced guys).

You only have to upshift from known, familiar, trusted, like-minded, socially popular guy to potential lover. And if a woman in your group thinks you’re even slightly cute or interesting, she’s already anticipated that upshift in her own mind before you even say hi. She’s just waiting for you to sack up and do it.

If you’re not sure which activities to do, picture the woman you are looking for right now. Imagine her lifestyle, her tastes, her activities, and her friends. Ask yourself: where are her favorite places to spend her time? What does she do for fun? And, especially, where would she go to try to meet the kind of quality men that she wants, whether as a lover, boyfriend, or husband? Make a list of all of them you think she might be into.

Let’s say the list has twenty-five items. Which of those activities do you like? God forbid you take swing-dancing lessons, hate it, and find yourself dating a girl who is actually into swing dancing. The worst! But you will probably have overlap with at least five to ten of the activities.

Now go do those things in a social group! It really is that simple.

This is exactly what Tucker did to meet his wife—he realized she’d be an active professional who does CrossFit, so that’s where he went to meet her. And he didn’t meet her directly, he was introduced to her by his CrossFit coach, and now they are married.

What types of activities are there to do? There are essentially an infinite number, but we’ll try to give you a list of the ones we have had success with and ones that are popular with women:

Social Activities

1. Volunteering: Volunteering for charities or social causes you like is one of the best ways to meet women. Tucker’s met dozens of women through volunteering for his favorite causes (like no-kill animal shelters such as Austin Pets Alive, where about 80 percent of volunteers are young, single women). In fact, there is a running joke that they have no single male volunteers, because even if they start off single, they get taken fast. (This is also an example of a great mating market.)

You get to demonstrate your tender-defender traits, meet hot girls, and help dogs. What’s not to like?

2. Group Fitness Activities: These could be acroyoga classes, SoulCycle classes, hip-hop dance classes, or anything at your local gym (as long as the sex ratio is good, if the activity allows some conversation, and if there’s a social norm of going out together sometimes after the workout).

CrossFit is perfect for this—the intense, breathless workout of the day is usually only a small portion of the typical hour-long class, and people hang out before class and often do social activities together. Plus it selects for fit, dedicated people who tend to be successful and interesting in other parts of their lives; it has a strong subculture and group identity, so you become part of a national tribe; and it’s usually around 60 percent women—most of whom are attractive and cool.

Another option is any kind of fun amateur athletic event with a big social component. Tough Mudder and Spartan Race obstacle-course events have a lot of fun, fit women, and there are always parties and get-togethers afterward where you can talk and laugh about how dirty everybody got.

3. Acting/improv lessons: These are so good for building social skills and meeting women that they deserve their own entry. Drama attracts beautiful, outgoing, edgy women and not enough straight guys—these classes are typically about 70 percent female, and the whole point is to interact with them through fun role-playing, especially in the intro classes. Most classes are in the evenings and you go out for drinks afterwards. We know a ton of guys who have taken improv classes and simultaneously improved their sense of humor, built their confidence, made great male friends, and met great women.

4. Intramural co-ed sports leagues: Any opportunity to play a sport with a co-ed team, especially if you’re even halfway decent at it, is super fun and a great way to meet lots of women. And of course, most of these leagues are built with a social component; teams often go out to bars in large groups after games.

5. Dance lessons: Don’t worry that you suck at dancing—that’s why you’re taking lessons. Most dance classes have a perpetual shortage of male partners and a hugely advantageous sex ratio. Focus on partner-oriented touch dance styles like salsa, tango, country, or swing, where you’re switching off between women—it’s like speed dating in motion. After a woman has danced with you a few times, you automatically feel familiar, safe, and manly to her.

6. Music and singing groups: All cities have amateur groups for instrumental music and singing where you don’t have to be that good to participate. Local choirs are especially good for meeting women—the group singing puts everybody in a great mood, there are lots of women (and gay men), and there are plenty of opportunities to talk. You’re also building a hugely attractive courtship skill.

School Activities

1. Student groups: If you’re in high school or college, try a lot of extracurricular activity groups, and keep going to the ones that have lots of fun girls in them (probably not chess club or Dungeons and Dragons club—think French club, drama, yearbook, art club, the literary magazine). Focus on ones that naturally let you display your good traits and proofs, so you can have higher status in the group than you might in the school at large. Found your own group if there isn’t one that appeals to you, so you get social proof as the leader.

2. Small college seminars: Go outside your major. Choose a juicy topic that’s fun to talk about and that attracts lots of women—psychology, education, journalism, art history, English lit, and biology are all female-dominated subjects. Small seminars are great because students are encouraged to talk in class so they get to know a bit about each other, and there’s time before and after class to mingle and chat about the course content. Seeing the same people every week for a semester builds familiarity and trust, both of which make you more attractive.

3. Continuing-education classes: Check out your local universities’ continuing-education classes, which are open to any adults—including current college students. Avoid the male-dominated business, computer, and professional development classes. Focus on classes that attract young women, that involve fun interaction with other students, and that teach attractive skills—things like cooking, wine tasting, arts, crafts, music, dance, yoga, and psychology. These classes usually include a lot of middle-aged married women, but don’t ignore them—they usually have younger sisters, daughters, nieces, and coworkers that they’d love to introduce you to if you seem nice.

4. Teaching a skill in group classes: If you have any particular skill or special knowledge about anything, you can start teaching it to people, and those people will include female students. Get whatever teaching certifications you need—it’s usually easier than you think. If you know English, get your TOEFL certification and teach English to immigrants. If you know firearms, teach the women’s concealed carry class at your local shooting range. If you did well on the GRE, MCAT, or LSAT, teach prep classes to college students (like Tucker did). If you’re even half-decent as a teacher, female students will automatically admire and respect you.

Important: understand the legal and social norms about dating students. In some cases (like most university-affiliated classes), you can get in big trouble for hitting on students while they’re taking your class (and it’s creepy).

Work Activities

1. Conferences: Focus on the ones that women enjoy and attend. These could be work-related or professional-development conferences (that your employer might be willing to pay for), leisure-interest conferences (Paleo f(x), or TEDx events), political or religious conferences (Freedom Fest for libertarians, Evangelical revival meetings), or anything that brings a lot of like-minded people together in multi-day events that let them bump into each other repeatedly so familiarity grows. It is no coincidence that some 80% of the academics Geoff knows met their long-term mates at a conference. Plus, when they happen inside hotels, there’s an extra sexual subtext—everyone’s bedroom is just an elevator ride away. Add into the mix the fact that typically a large percentage of conference attendees are traveling outside their local dating zone, and it also becomes a recipe for good short-term mating opportunities.

2. Work volunteering: Many jobs offer charity activities. These can be just as good as volunteering on your own to meet women, so pay attention to what’s available at your job and the jobs of your friends.

Local Activities

1. Political groups: Local activist groups focused on progressive issues are especially female-dominated, full of single women open to shorter-term mating. The Obama campaigns were incredible mating markets for young male Democrats, since most of the volunteers were college women and suburban MILFs.

If you’re conservative or libertarian, avoid the Republican or Libertarian Party groups, which skew heavily male. Instead, find local groups working for a few female-friendly progressive issues that you can genuinely support—abortion rights, animal rights, environment, education, free speech, drug legalization, anti-capitalism, LGBT rights, whatever.

2. Religious groups: If you’re religious, make the most of it socially. Young Christians can’t mingle that easily at the big, highly-structured Sunday morning services, but the Wednesday evening Bible study groups have all the perks of a college seminar. And most church groups are mostly women, so attractive young single guys are in very high demand. Pick your specific denomination carefully—no need to stay with your parents’ doctrine.

If your mating goals are longer-term, more orthodox and conservative churches (Evangelical Christian, Eastern Orthodox, Mormon, Muslim), are great places to find serious girlfriends and wives—and you’ll get a huge amount of match-making help from older relatives, mentors, and do-gooders.

If you’re seeking shorter-term interactions, more liberal churches are better—progressive Christianity, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Metropolitan Community Church, Unitarians, Reform Judaism. (Generally, churches that are gay-friendly and politically liberal tend to be more sex-positive and include women who are more open to shorter-term mating.)

3. Meetup groups: Meetup.com lists dozens of meetings a month in every major American city, for a vast range of interests, from digital photography to paleo eating. For each group you join, you can see the complete list of members with photos, so you can get a sense of the sex ratio and average age and attractiveness of the women. And for each planned event, you can see exactly who plans to go. This can be a very efficient way to meet like-minded women and to learn more about cool things that fascinate you.

The beauty of all these activities is that even if you don’t meet any attractive women at one of them, assuming you pick things you already like, then they’ll still have been worth doing. They all improve your mate-value, expand your social network, and build your self-confidence, and you like doing them.

TRY ONLINE DATING

The stigma against online dating is long dead. There’s absolutely no shame in that game. On the contrary, online dating is the most awesomely powerful method ever developed for meeting women.

In modern America, it is also usually the most efficient way for young men to meet desirable local women—whether for a hookup or a serious relationship. In fact, for most guys, online dating can be your primary way to meet women. If you’re not using it, you’re handicapping your sex life for no good reason.

Which Online Dating App Should You Use?

This is a fast-changing sector, and since today’s hot app might become tomorrow’s MySpace, we won’t spend a ton of time talking about specific services. Instead, we’ll give you the general principles to determine which online mating markets are good, and how to use them:

• Your mating goals: With more and more dating apps entering the marketplace every year, make sure to do your research and use only the online dating services that fit your needs. For example: AdultFriendFinder and Pure focus mostly on casual sex. Tinder and Zoosk focus on short-term dating. Match.com, Plenty of Fish, and OkCupid span short-term to long-term dating goals, whereas eHarmony and MatchMaker are more oriented toward long-term relationships. Ashley Madison focuses on extramarital affairs. SeekingArrangement and MissTravel match young women with sugar daddies willing to support them financially. OkCupid is especially good for alt-sex people into polyamory, BDSM, D/s, or kink. ChristianMingle is for Christians, BlackPeopleMeet is for black people, JDate is for Jewish people, OurTime is for people over 50.

• Your mating market: If you live in Denver, it doesn’t matter how many registered users a site has in New York or Shanghai; it only matters how many Denver women are using it. You can discover how many local women there are only by trying it out in your local market.

• Your mating preferences: Some apps are simple to use but give you almost no information about potential mates, apart from a few photos and very brief self-descriptions. If your goal is just to meet a lot of women, Tinder is very effective, but if you’re looking to meet a specific type of woman, it’s not so great; it tells you a woman’s age, location, appearance, and a few words about her interests but gives you no information about her background, marital status, number of kids, personality, mate preferences, or mating goals. By contrast, OkCupid allows “advanced searches” that specify your preferred height, ethnicity, education level, income, body type, drug use preferences, monogamy vs. polyamory preferences, etc.; and it allows sorting the results by match percent, amount of sexual experience, kinkiness, or even “dorkiness.” This makes it much easier for everyone to find good matches—even for casual sex.

How to Set up Your Profile

Most guys fuck this up royally. Think about the whole range of traits and proofs, explained in this book, that you need to display. Most guys display only two or three of them in their profile and leave out all the others, pointlessly handicapping their attractiveness.

Photos: They’re the first thing that women look at, and most guys’ photos suck so badly that they’re immediate deal breakers. Include several good, high-resolution photos that other people have taken of you (no selfies, unless you are under twenty-five or they are funny).

Your main profile photo should be a headshot with a warm, genuine smile. Other photos should show things like you doing something athletic (physical health), having fun with friends (social proof), traveling somewhere exotic (openness, resourcefulness), doing something productive (willpower, material proof), cuddling a pet (tender defender), and dressed up stylishly for a special event (aesthetic proof).

Show your photos to female friends and get their help selecting the best ones. You can even test-market photos by posting them on Facebook or Instagram and seeing which get the most likes.

Profile statement: Take this seriously. Before you write a first draft, look at what has worked on other people’s profiles and steal their good ideas. When it’s time to polish your statement, check out advice blogs like OkCupid’s data blog for reference. Get feedback from friends and dates (without sounding like a desperate validation-seeking weirdo) and keep fine-tuning it.

Women don’t care about what you have in common with other men. You enjoy movies, comedy, and sex? What a shock, get in line behind the other 30 million men who said the same thing.

What women want to know is what makes you different and better than other men. Now is the time to be honest—about your shortcomings, your awesome qualities, and your mating goals. Because if you’re not, your phony attempt to sound different and better than other men will make you just like them.

Messaging women: Once your profile is done, start searching for the women who fit your mating goals and preferences. For each one who looks attractive in her photos, read her profile carefully before you message her. This shows respect and serious interest—it’s like an early form of romantic proof. Also, the more carefully you read her words about what is important about her life, the easier it will be to engage her in conversation.

Your first message should be warm, friendly, and reassuring, showing insight into her profile and giving her a question to answer and ask in return. It should not be so long that it feels like a homework assignment or so short that it feels like 95 percent of the other messages she gets—all of which are a variation on some kind of universal douchebag haiku:

Yo girl, cute photo

Whatchu up to right now, huh?

DTF or what?

Once a woman responds to your first message, you’re off to the courtship races. The critical point to remember here, though, is that online dating is not an end in itself. The goal of exchanging messages with a woman is to bring your interaction into the real world, face to face, where you can really get to know each other and possibly touch each other’s privates. All of which we will discuss shortly in Step 5.

SPEED DATING

If you’re fifteen to twenty-one years old and you try to show up at a speed-dating event, people are going to think someone had to bring their kid because they couldn’t find a babysitter. The target audience for speed dating tends to be older, urban, and professionally successful. But for those of you who are in your twenties or older and have some demonstrable talent or professional success, speed dating is worth a discussion.

A typical event requires advance registration, includes about twenty to forty men and women at a venue filled with small two-person tables, and involves men rotating from table to table for 3-to 8-minute dates with each woman there. The organizers give everybody a scorecard, and each person puts a check mark next to the names of anybody they’re interested in meeting again. At the end of the event, everyone turns in their scorecard, and whenever there’s mutual interest, the organizers forward contact information to both people a day or two after the event.

Speed dating dovetails with mating psychology in several ingenious ways:

• Everybody there is looking for some kind of mate.

• There is an equal sex ratio.

• The venue is optimized for pleasant conversation.

• The organizers are essentially professional matchmakers who can help introductions, facilitate interactions, keep people circulating, and enforce social norms.

• The structured one-on-one interactions minimize approach anxiety, interference, jostling, and cock-blocking from sexual rivals and other women.

• Face-to-face interaction means everyone can judge everyone’s appearance and attributes much more accurately than in online dating.

• The 3-to 8-minute “dates” are just long enough to do “thin-slice” person perception while talking and short enough that you’re not wasting much time on anyone who’s not interesting to you.

• It’s excellent conversation practice.

• You get clear feedback.

• It’s time (~2 hours) and cost (~$40) efficient.

Takeaways

• Contrary to popular myth, bars and clubs are awful places to meet women.

• The best way to meet women is to make your mating life an extension of your social life.

• Social, school, work, and local activities are all great venues for meeting women because they do not involve many anxiety barriers.

• Online dating is the most powerful tool ever designed to meet women. The key is to use the sites and apps that are best suited to your mating goals, mating market, and mating preferences.

• While it skews older, more urban, and more professionally successful, speed dating can be a fantastically efficient way to meet many women.