THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF MATING SUCCESS

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.

—John Reed

Mating is not a checklist of sex facts and dating tactics. There is no one-size-fits-all inventory of actions you must figure out, memorize, and complete in order. That would be nonsense. Almost nothing in life works like a scavenger hunt at a pub crawl. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

As with most things in life, mating is a complex system with a deep evolutionary logic and a few essential principles at its core. To be successful at it, you must understand these principles and then apply them to your choices and actions in the infinite number of situations you will find yourself in over the course of your life.

The goal of this book is to teach you how and where to apply those principles. The goal of this chapter is to teach you the principles themselves.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE: MAKE DECISIONS WITH SCIENCE (NOT BIAS)

Most of the dating advice rampaging through our culture is outdated, irrelevant, or sex-negative. It got that way for one overwhelming reason: none of it is based on an empirical understanding of how humans and human mating actually work.

Instead, the conventional wisdom about dating has been defined by political and religious ideologies, family traditions, and cultural norms whose self-serving notions of how the world should work shaped their ideas (and most likely yours). We are going to teach you a completely different approach, one based on science and evidence.

There has never been a better time for this kind of examination than today. The science of human mating has flourished in the last thirty years, with astonishing new theories and findings in fields such as evolutionary psychology, hunter-gatherer anthropology, psychometrics, behavior genetics, and animal communication. Today, we can offer deeper insights, more evidence, and a more systematic perspective on mating than any culture ever could at any previous point in history.

We can explain not just what works with women, but why it works. We can explain not just what kind of traits you should develop to attract the women you’re most attracted to, but how to develop those traits in the most efficient ways possible.

Using science and evidence to guide your mating life isn’t just practical; it’s also ethical. Science respects reality and helps you take responsibility for what you believe, while resisting dogma, superstition, and overconfidence in the process. Thinking critically, testing hypotheses, assessing evidence, and gauging feedback isn’t just something researchers do in labs; it’s also something you should do in your mating life, and we are going to show you how.

But first understand the principle: make decisions about what you believe based on the best scientific, empirical evidence you can find.

THE SECOND PRINCIPLE: ACCOUNT FOR THE WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE

You obviously have a perspective on mating. But what so many guys fail to account for is that women have their own perspective, and it is different than yours. You have to understand it and account for it to be successful in mating.

If you don’t understand women right now, that is no accident. Women evolved to be more complicated than you can understand so they could protect themselves from being seduced, manipulated, and exploited.

But trying to attract women without understanding that and them—who they are, what they want, what they’re attracted to—is like heading out into the wilderness and trying to find your way through without a map or compass. It will just get you more lost—which is exactly the problem most guys face.

Sure, you could be a stubborn idiot and continue wandering around, guided by the North Star of your ridiculous sexual fantasies until finally you bump into someone willing to put up with your bullshit. But that’s the fast track to becoming a forty-year-old divorced loser living alone in a man cave, surrounded by resentment, shame, and regret. There is another option: you could get out of your head and into women’s heads—with curiosity, respect, and a commitment to mutual benefit. That’s the fast track to mating success.

So, throughout this book, we’ll focus on understanding women on several levels:

• why women evolved to have certain sexual concerns and preferences, given how prehistoric mating worked

• why women seek good genes, good partners, and good dads—not necessarily from the same guy

• why women feel anxious and vulnerable about sexual harassment, stalking, rape, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), unwanted pregnancies, and slut-shaming

• why different women seek different sexual experiences and relationships under different conditions with different guys, from hookups to boyfriends to husbands

• why women value some key attractive traits in men, such as physical health, mental health, intelligence, willpower, kindness, and protectiveness

• why women value some key proofs of mate value in men, such as social success, material success, aesthetic style, and romantic commitment

• where women go to meet men, and how the supply-and-demand dynamics work in those mating markets

All of this boils down to a simple principle: If you always try to understand the woman’s perspective—what they want, why they want it, and how to ethically give it to them—then you will find it much easier to become attractive to them, and you’ll be much more successful with your mating efforts.

THE THIRD PRINCIPLE: OWN YOUR ATTRACTIVENESS

One of the main things we will teach you in this book is how to be attractive to women—specifically, how to develop the traits they find attractive. If you develop them well, we can guarantee that you will find mating success.

But this is just a guide—for it to work, you must do the work. You didn’t choose which genes you inherited or what family you grew up in. But from this day forward, you must take personal responsibility for your life, your choices, your habits, your traits, your mate value, and your attractiveness to women.

Nobody else can do this work for you. Taking responsibility for your personal growth and social attractiveness has been a core principle from the ancient Stoics through Nietzsche and from existentialism to modern psychotherapy; it’s acknowledging your ethical duty to yourself, your future potential, your free will, and your personal autonomy.

The reason we emphasize this is because women don’t really “choose” to be attracted to you. They are attracted to some features (biologically, which we explain in depth later) and not attracted to others. Thus, whether or not a particular woman will be attracted to you is largely in your hands. You have to seize the opportunity to make yourself attractive to her. You can pretend you don’t have a choice, that you don’t have the time, brains, or resources to raise your game. But then you’ve simply talked yourself into perpetual mediocrity.

The downside of taking responsibility for your attractiveness is that becoming a better man will take a good amount of work. The upside is that taking charge of your attractiveness will help you have great experiences and relationships with great women that yield benefits in every other domain of life: health, money, happiness, altruism, and self-actualization.

This is because the “better boyfriend” ideal overlaps a lot with the ideals of manhood that most men aspire to. If you make yourself highly attractive to women, an amazing life tends to be a natural byproduct. For men, at least, sexual self-improvement is the road to a better overall life.

THE FOURTH PRINCIPLE: BE HONEST (WITH YOURSELF AND OTHERS)

Honesty is the bedrock of self-improvement and mating success.

If you try to fool yourself about what you really want, you’ll never form the type of life you want and implement the actions necessary to get it. There are plenty of women out there who want the kind of sexual experience or relationship that you want; you just have to find them. But you can’t find them if you’re not honest—with them or yourself.

Honesty builds your social status, which improves mating success over the long term. Most women expect that most men are lying most of the time, and they hate it. In a world of liars, seducers, and charlatans, the man who stands up and tells the truth about the world, about himself, and about what he really wants is very rare and very attractive. There is a reason most women list honesty as one of their most-desired traits.

We are not trying to tell you that honesty is the only thing that works. Of course there are ways you can lie, cheat, steal, and manipulate your way into success. A lot of them, in fact. And we know most or all of those methods very well (learning what works often involves trying things that don’t).

We aren’t going to teach those methods, nor do we endorse them, because they actually hurt you in two ways:

1. Lying reduces your long-term mating success: Once a woman sees you as a liar, there is no coming back from that. She will almost certainly tell her friends about you, and when she does you become a pariah. Of course, you can find other women to exploit and lie to, but that is a very difficult path to long-term mating success. It is far easier to have long-term social relationships based on trust than to lie through your teeth and have to make new relationships over and over again.

2. Lying makes you feel like shit, and it hurts your life: The only people who can lie without emotional consequences are sociopaths. For everyone else, there are real psychological harms that come with deception. The evidence is very clear that perpetual liars have less career success, less mating success, less satisfaction in their relationships, and even shorter lives.

So if you want to learn how to lie, cheat, and manipulate women, this is the wrong book for you. We aren’t moralizing or telling you to be honest for any reason other than this one:

An honest, ethical approach to mating (and life) works the best in the long term.

THE FIFTH PRINCIPLE: PLAY TO WIN-WIN

Some in society hold the cynical view that sexual relationships are a zero-sum game, meaning one person’s gain is the other person’s loss. This view says that in a one-night stand, the man is the seducer and the woman gets seduced, he “wins” and she “loses.” In a relationship, if a man and a woman argue, one must win and the other must lose. In sexual politics, feminism’s gain is patriarchy’s loss. This zero-sum way of thinking assumes a perpetual “battle of the sexes,” and sadly, it is common in both gender feminism and the manosphere.

This “battle of the sexes” view is totally, completely wrong. It is counterproductive, counterintuitive, and counter to thousands of generations of evolution. That is why we endorse the opposite principle:

Your mating goal is to find and create “win-win” relationships, where both you and the woman are better off because of your interaction.

Think about why you do anything that involves interacting with other people—it’s because you expect to get value from it. You give a cashier money for a coffee because you value the coffee more than what you’re paying for it. (This is economic trade, the foundational idea behind capitalism.) If economic trade wasn’t positive-sum, then neither buyer nor seller would agree to the exchange.

The same basic principle works with friendships: you enjoy hanging out with the guys in your crew because you all benefit—or else you’d just leave. Those relationships are “win-win” as well.

This is also how human mating works when it’s done honestly and ethically. Mutual benefits are the expectation, not the exception, because people avoid relationships where they don’t benefit. If human mating wasn’t mostly a positive-sum game that yielded “win-win” experiences and relationships, then neither sex would agree to play the game in the first place.

Don’t think of mating as fighting women for victory. They are not your enemy. Think of mating as finding women who want the same things you want—so you can both win.

If you only want one-night stands, then we’ll tell you how to find women who also want one-night stands (and there are many). You two can have sex, not talk to each other again, and you both got what you wanted, so you’re both better off.

If you want to have a casual dating relationship that includes sex and companionship, then we’ll tell you how to find women who want that. You two can have sex, hang out, have fun, and not commit or get into deep emotional ties, and you both get what you wanted.

If you want to find a woman to marry and build a life with, then we’ll tell you how to find a woman who wants that as well. You two can explore each other, develop a relationship, commit, and have a great life together, and you both win.

The point is that when you both approach relationships from this perspective, it enables you both to win, which is the best option for everyone.

FROM THE FIVE PRINCIPLES TO THE FIVE-STEP PROCESS

As a way to guide your decisions and actions, these principles work. But principles alone are not good enough. Men also need a clear set of instructions for specific actions. That is what the rest of this book is about: a five-step process that boils everything you need to do down to the simplest possible set of facts to learn, choices to make, and actions to take.

The five steps are

1. Get your head straight: Fix your mental framework for thinking about women, sex, and dating; replace antique nonsense with state-of-the-art insights; develop confidence, understand women’s points of view, and clarify your mating ethics and mating goals.

2. Develop attractive traits: Understand what women want in men and why, and then give it to them by cultivating the key traits of physical health, mental health, intelligence, willpower, tenderness, and protectiveness.

3. Display attractive proofs: Understand the signaling principles that underlie honest, hard-to-fake proofs of value, and construct your personal, professional, social, and romantic life around building and displaying those proofs.

4. Go where the women are: Understand how mating markets work, given the supply and demand of men and women; how to find women who offer the highest value and best compatibility, given your tastes and goals; and how to meet those women in specific places, from local leisure clubs to online dating apps.

5. Take action: Understand how to talk to women, date them, have great sex with them, and learn from your experiences to build a positive-feedback cycle of personal improvement, sexual experience, and delighted women. All of which will help you create and execute your mating plan.

These steps are simple to understand, but they’re not always easy to accomplish. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you bullshit. We are not offering a get-laid-quick scheme. We know that a third of the dudes who bought this book haven’t even read this far yet. Another third will skim the rest of this book, think some of it is cool, recommend it to their friends, and fail to change their lives or improve their mating success in any significant way.

This book is really for the last third of you—the smart, hungry guys who will get inspired to think, choose, and act. You’re the guys who will bring these five principles alive. You’re the guys who will delight the women in your lives—and who will be the envy of the guys who may never read this far.