HACK YOUR MATING
An evolutionary psychologist’s guide to a life of sexual abundance
Tony Vakirtzis, PhD.
Copyright © 2018 Antonios Vakirtzis
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the copyright holder, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: tony@matinghack.com
Old Marston Press
ISBN: 978-1-9996301-1-9
Cover design by ciusan.com
To Chris Deoudes.
I am grateful to the people who gave valuable feedback on earlier versions of this book: Chris Murray, Patricia Vakirtzi, William Knight, Maria Delioglani, George Tsouvelas and Ioannis Stavrakas. Cheryl Harding and Elaine Hatfield kindly allowed me to quote from their works; permission was also obtained from Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis, respectively. The male images used in Figures 2 and 3 are publicly available on the web courtesy of Lisa DeBruine and Benedict Jones.
Contents
Chapter 1. Human mating: the big picture
A bird’s eye view of our mating system
Chapter 2. Psychological methods
What is a psychological method?
The stuff psychological methods are made of
A case study in scientific theories
Evolved faculties and acquired skills
Chapter 3. The ecological method.
The evolutionary logic of your social life
Meet your mate value sociometer
The root of your mating problems
Sequential mate choice and mating probabilities
How cold approach will change your life
A world without mating constraints
The best partner and womanizer
Recap: the rational path to sexual abundance
A vast disconnect, and a not so low hanging fruit
Approach anxiety and mating anxiety
Afterword: saying goodbye to the regret factory
Hack
noun (informal): method for solving a problem or gaining large benefits with modest time and effort; shortcut
A girl once asked me if I had ever been rejected. I don’t remember who or where. We were around seventeen, this much I remember. I looked her in the eye and proudly told her I had never been rejected, and it was the truth. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d barely been kissed. If the girl asked me the same question today, more than twenty years later, I would tell her I’ve been rejected more times than a man could possibly remember. With a gun to my head I’d say probably between two and three thousand times, maybe more. If I could somehow count the rejections of my father, and his father, and the father of his father, hundreds of generations back, I would confidently predict I’ve been rejected more times than all those men combined. But I’ve also had a better mating life than any of them. Better, I suspect, than all but a small minority of men who ever lived. I’ve done things with women that to my ancestors would seem like magic. They would seem like magic to me a few years back. And I did them not because I was richer, smarter or better looking. It was because I hacked my mating: I aligned my behavior to the social reality around me. When people ask me to describe my book in one sentence, I tell them it is about the cost of rejection in modern environments. There is none . Understanding this – and acting accordingly - is all you need to change your relationship with women and your life.
A few words about my background, so you can better understand the origin and nature of this book. I am an evolutionary psychologist by training. After undergraduate psychology studies in Greece, where I am from, I came to the UK in 2005 to do a master’s degree in evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool. The program was run out of the biology department, and we were instructed by a group of biologists and psychologists. Two years later I went on to do a PhD at the same university. My thesis was in female mate choice, or the way in which women select their sexual partners. For three years I studied a phenomenon known as nonindependent mate choice. [1] This is when women are influenced in their choice of men by what they see other women doing - in particular who other attractive women are selecting. If you ever dated a very attractive woman you might know what I mean - you probably found yourself getting more attention next to her than any other time in your life. While baffling from a sociological perspective - why should other women be interested in a taken man, after all? - biologically the phenomenon is straightforward, and we will visit it briefly in the second chapter.
What is evolutionary psychology? In one sentence, it is psychology that is informed by biology, especially evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists’ overarching principle is that their theories and research programs must agree with what is known in biology, just like those of biology must agree with chemistry, those of chemistry must agree with physics and so forth. This principle of interdisciplinary compatibility is referred to as conceptual integration. [2] Human behavior is generated by the brain, which is a biological machine created by genes that have evolved over millions of years. If we consider the environments where these genes evolved, we will more easily understand the types of brains they built as a response and consequently the types of behaviors these brains are generating today. Stunningly, prior to the recent arrival of evolutionary psychology, psychologists did not generally bother with conceptual integration, as straightforward and even mundane a concept as it is. As a result, the field was littered with arbitrary theories that ignored our evolutionary past and were disconnected from biological reality. These disparate theories had nothing in common except that, after a period of initial excitement and popularity, they fell by the wayside and were largely forgotten. [3]
The most studied area in evolutionary psychology is human mate choice, and mating behavior in general. [4] Like all people, scientists like to pick the low hanging fruit first. In this case the low hanging fruit was the wealth of biological research on other species’ mating behavior which psychologists had not, up to that point, even bothered to look at. Evolutionary psychologists have spent four decades turning what did not even exist as a field into one of the hottest areas of research in all of psychology. We will put their most relevant findings to good use throughout this book.
What evolutionary psychology is still lacking, however, is practical interventions for people’s daily lives. As far as I am aware there has been no popular evolutionary psychological method for fighting depression, for example, or a book for child-rearing. And there has been, sadly, no attempt to help men improve their mating life. This is not that surprising. Scientists’ primary research priorities are that their topics be easy to study (low hanging fruit) and fit nicely within their existing theories. The social usefulness of their research - the degree to which it can help real people - is usually of little importance to them. Consequently, the areas they study are often of no immediate benefit to society. Also, the format in which findings are produced and disseminated is not designed with the common man in mind, and evolutionary psychologists are no more interested in applying their knowledge to their own personal lives than, say, chemists or geologists. Your average evolutionary psychologist, even the one who studies human mating behavior - I can assure you from personal experience - has no more success with women than the man on the street. He simply has not been trained to think in these practical terms and wouldn't know where to start if the task were presented to him.
In the absence of science, the void has been filled with lay “Pickup Artist” (“PUA”) and “seduction community” material. I will use the umbrella term psychological methods to refer to commercially available taught methods that are supposed to enhance a man’s sexual success via scripted language or behavior. A substantial part of this book will be devoted to explaining why psychological methods simply cannot work as marketed. But you don't have to be familiar with psychological methods to make the most of this book. It is written in a way that will benefit the largest male audience, including men who have never heard of PUA or have never picked up a book on women before. The only thing you will need is motivation, the sincere desire to improve your mating life. The specifics of your motivation are irrelevant. The book will work regardless of what you want from women: have sex with as many of them as possible, find and marry the love of your life, or anything in between.
I won't promise you that after reading this book you'll be able to have any woman you want. You won't. Nor will I promise a secret technique that will effortlessly have women approaching you. Unless you're a celebrity or a millionaire, that's never going to happen in the real world, and we will see why in the very first chapter. Much less will I promise you that you can have your ex-girlfriend back, money-back guaranteed. Your ex-girlfriend has already evaluated you thoroughly and rejected you – it is very unlikely she will ever want you back. A man who has gone without a woman for some time will often get so desperate as to eagerly hand over his money in exchange for ridiculous promises like these, promises which I took from popular seduction websites. But if you are willing to give up on psychological methods and on the idea of having any one particular woman, I can assure you that no other book will transform your relationship with women as quickly and dramatically. It is your best chance of turning the corner and joining the very small and elite group of men who have hacked their mating and can have as many women as they want. At the end of the book I will share some thoughts on the knock-on effects this hack can have on other areas of your life and how it can be the impetus for your transformation into a better all-around man.
CHAPTER 1.
HUMAN MATING: THE BIG PICTURE
Mating
noun
:
the pairing of animals for reproduction; copulation
Why you're cheap
Independent of how useful they are, the price of goods is determined by their scarcity. Take water, the basis of all life - it is so abundant as to be nearly free at the tap. Or take coal and diamonds, both made of carbon. Because diamonds are scarce and coal is abundant, a tiny diamond costs thousands of dollars while an entire ton of coal is around fifty dollars.
In matters of human biology there are no explicit market prices, but the same fundamental relationship between scarcity and value applies. Men and women are in the business of reproducing, and both bring to the table invaluable resources towards this common goal. Without either sex there would be no reproduction. Having said that, the sex that contributes the scarcest resources should be most valued and “expensive,” while the other should be correspondingly “cheap.”
Superficially both sexes might appear equally scarce, given that our sex ratio is 1:1. In other words to every woman there corresponds roughly one man. But this is not the end of the story. The relevant ratio here is that of the reproductive cells, or gametes , that each sex offers. The gametes of the woman - her eggs - fuse with the gametes of the man - his sperm cells - to create the first cell of every future baby. When it comes to the gametes of each sex the quantitative disparity is mind boggling. Women are born with a limited supply of eggs that are stored in their ovaries and from sexual maturity will start releasing one egg a month until menopause. The average woman will release around 400 mature eggs in her lifetime. But men create many millions of sperm cells daily. An average load of male sperm - the ejaculate - can contain between 100-500 million sperm cells, and a healthy male can ejaculate several times a day, releasing several hundred billion sperm cells over his lifetime.
Equally impressive is the sex difference in the energy investment in each gamete. The male sperm cell is little more than a swimming string of DNA with a tail - it is so basic and tiny that a man can produce a thousand of these cells per second. In comparison the female egg is a gigantic, nutrient-rich ball that will supply the DNA with all the precious materials it needs to begin building the new organism. The monthly maturation, release and discarding - if no fertilization occurs - of this single egg is a major physiological event, dependent on the interplay of various hormones. These affect the woman's body so profoundly that her monthly ovulatory cycle can be reliably tracked by monitoring the changes they induce to her body temperature.
But with these physiological differences we have not yet scratched the surface of how cheap men are. What matters even more than reproductive physiology is the difference in the supply of time, energy and resources that each sex commits to raising the child until it can look after itself. Here the differences are even more staggering than the billion-fold disparity in gametes. From the moment a woman conceives she is bound to carry the fetus for nine months. This is her absolute minimum time commitment, even if she then decides to dump the baby on somebody else’s lap and run away, something that women rarely do anyway. After birth a further few months or years of breastfeeding will follow, all provided again exclusively by the woman. At least one to two years of a woman’s reproductive lifespan will be tied up, during which time she will not be able to conceive another child. [5] The man, on the other hand, does not commit to anything. Historically, there has been nothing to stop him from simply walking away from a pregnant partner. During the nine months when she will be stuck with his baby he can philander and impregnate other women. Later, when the woman is breastfeeding and caring for his baby, there is again nothing to stop him from further philandering. In theory, a man could have a practically endless number of children during a period in which a woman can only have one.
In the language of biology, women provide more parental investment than men. Parental investment is defined as any investment by the parent in a child that increases that child’s chances of survival but at the expense of the parent’s ability to invest in other children, either present or future. [6] A man who has casual sex with a woman expends practically no parental investment on the potential child. His only investment is a cheap batch of sperm that he can fully replace in a couple of days. A woman who agrees to - or is tricked into - casual sex risks pregnancy, with the massive investment of her egg, nine months of gestation, months or years of breastfeeding and decades of child-rearing. For one or two years she will not even be able to conceive another child, and every future child she produces will have to compete for her limited attention and resources with this child. Add to this her limited reproductive window, from puberty to her early forties, and it becomes apparent that every act of intercourse a woman consents to could, potentially, lead to massive parental investment. Women are therefore the limiting factor in human reproduction, and men have to compete amongst themselves to gain access to them.
As the sex with the higher parental investment, women have evolved two fundamental strategies for dealing with cheap men who are all too keen to provide their abundant sperm. First, they are difficult. They like to take their time and make sure the man who is courting them is sincerely interested and will not simply abandon them after sex. The whole process of pre-sex courtship, the text messages, the phone calls, the candle-lit dinners and multiple dates, the entire “getting to know each other better,” is initiated and controlled by women. The man is the seller, the one who will hardly ever turn down the opportunity for sex because it is “too soon” or he doesn’t “feel ready” yet. On the relatively rare occasions when women are open to quick and easy sex, they have evolved another strategy for dealing with an abundance of cheap sperm providers: they are picky. They will only have sex with someone they are genuinely attracted to. Compare that to yourself when you are in the mood for sex: are there that many women you would turn down?
Psychologists’ studies confirm what parental investment theory predicts, and what we are all familiar with through personal experience. [7] In study after study women report less interest in short-term sexual relationships (like one-night stands) compared to men. They also report less actual seeking out of these types of relationships. When asked about the minimum requirements in a potential short-term mate, women maintain the same high standards they set for a long-term partner, but men’s standards plummet. When asked to indicate the number of different sexual partners they would ideally desire in any given time period, like the next month, year, decade or across their lifetime, women also invariably report lower numbers.
In a pair of classic experiments, psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield employed a small group of psychology students – the “confederates” - to approach students of the opposite sex on the campus of Florida State University. The confederates told the students they approached that they found them attractive and then asked one of the following three questions: a) “Would you go out with me tonight?” b) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or c) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” The replies of the students who were directly asked to sleep with the confederate were revealing. While 75% of men agreed to have sex with the confederate, exactly 0% of women did. Consistent with these figures were men and women’s emotional reactions:
In general, the female experimenters reported that men were at ease with the request. They would say “Why do we have to wait until tonight?” or “I cannot tonight, but tomorrow would be fine.” The men that said “No” even gave apologies, i.e., “I'm married” or “I'm going with someone.” In contrast, the women's response to the intimate requests from males was “You've got to be kidding,” or “What is wrong with you? Leave me alone.” [8]
Similar studies have since been conducted in France, Denmark and Germany. They all replicated the massive sex difference found in Clark and Hatfield’s experiments. [9] Combining data from hundreds of participants from all four countries, around 1% of women agree to an unsolicited sexual invitation from a member of the opposite sex compared to 50% for men. [10] This difference in the desire for casual sex is one of the largest sex differences in all of psychology. [11]
Having said this, there are many instances where men offer substantial parental investment. In all human societies the predominant mating arrangement is the monogamous pair bond, where a man and women form a long-term relationship with the explicit or implicit goal of raising children. [12] So we know for a fact that men are often happy – and sometimes not so happy - to go with a woman for the long ride and invest in their children. Precisely because they are offering something more than just cheap sperm, namely years of sexual exclusivity, energy and resources, men are also picky in these scenarios and will generally not settle for the first woman that says yes. They will only enter a long-term relationship if they feel the woman is worth their time. The degree to which he is inclined towards long-term relationships at the expense of short-term sex varies from one man to the next. As we will see later, these individual differences are partly due to genetics and partly to feedback the man receives from his environment during development and adulthood.
Just how cheap are you?
Now that we understand why men are cheaper than women it would be useful to put a number on this cheapness. Are we, say, a billion times cheaper, as per the disparity in gamete supply? Obviously not; women would hardly even look at us if this were the case. What about two or three times cheaper? Intuitively a figure like that seems to underestimate our cheapness by a wide margin. The answer must lie somewhere substantially above two and substantially below a billion - but where exactly?
To answer this, we would first need a useful measuring stick by which to compare our biological “price” relative to that of women. Because we’re not dealing with a market in the literal sense of the word, i.e. a place where things are bought and sold for money, the notion of being cheap or expensive is just a useful analogy – there is no perfect or absolute measuring stick. Even if we were to examine the very small minority of men and women who do exchange sex for money, the findings would not be useful for our conversation. We would, for example, note that while almost any woman who wishes to sell her body is certain to find willing clients, the reverse will only hold for a tiny minority of extremely attractive men. But it would be very difficult to quantify this disparity. Comparing the prices charged by male and female prostitutes would also be useless. All the male prostitutes who cater to women will be highly attractive and charge correspondingly high prices to have sex with very unattractive or elderly women; no other woman would have to resort to their services.
For our purpose a useful measuring stick is the typical number of different sexual partners men and women are willing to have in their lifetimes. Cheap men will be willing to have sex with many different women, whereas difficult and picky women will be more selective. For women the ideal number of lifetime sexual partners is easy to know: it is their actual number of lifetime partners. Because women supply more parental investment and are the limiting factor in sex, if they desired more lifetime partners they would simply have them. That they don’t have more is because they don’t want them. When it comes to men things are trickier. We can’t rely on men’s actual number of lifetime sexual partners, as this would underestimate their tremendous appetite for casual sex that falls upon women’s largely deaf ears. The useful data here comes from the number of lifetime sexual partners reported by a very special subgroup of the male population: men who have sex with men. Homosexual men share the same appetite for sexual variety as heterosexual men but direct it to members of the same sex, who also share this appetite. The ease with which two homosexual men have casual sex betrays the ease with which heterosexual men would have sex were they not held back by women. Indeed, apart from their choice of sexual object - man instead of woman – male homosexuals are strikingly similar to heterosexuals in all the sexual behaviors and appetites that so clearly set us apart from women. They have an insatiable appetite for pornography. Their sexuality revolves around immediate and direct genital stimulation, with little use for foreplay. They can lose all interest in their partner upon ejaculation, and often grow quickly bored of sex with the same partner. They also place tremendous emphasis on their sexual partner’s youth and attractiveness while being largely indifferent to his social status and prestige. Homosexual men's sex lives offer the best window into how most men would behave if women just allowed them to have their way. [13]
As it is impossible to directly track or observe any given person’s number of lifetime sexual partners, the relevant studies have all relied on self-reports. A typical man in the United States between 40 to 44 years of age will report having had sex with 6 or 7 different women in his life. In the same survey a typical woman of the same age will report around 3 or 4 different lifetime partners. [14] “Typical” here refers to the median value. This is found by ordering all men - or women - in the population, starting from the ones with zero sexual partners all the way to the man - or woman - with the largest number of partners. The median belongs to the person in the middle who is flanked by an equal number of lesser and more experienced men or women on either side. The number reported by this man or woman is the median. [15] Now the problem is that mathematically, given an approximately equal number of men and women in the population, the reported median values should be equal for both sexes. [16] It seems that either men, or women, or both, are fudging the numbers. Men might be inclined to boast about their sexual achievements and inflate what might be a very modest performance. Women, on the other hand, could be prone to “forgetting” some sexual partners, to avoid appearing too easy. Let's accept, as a compromise, that the real number lies between that reported by men and women, which would be five.
The most comprehensive study of male homosexual behavior surveyed several hundred men in the San Francisco area in the late 1970s. [17] The study found that two thirds of white homosexual men reported more than 10 different sexual partners in the previous year - more than the typical heterosexual man will have in a lifetime. Forty three percent of white homosexual men reported more than 500 lifetime partners and 28% reported over 1000. Due to the way responses were structured, the study did not provide a median number of lifetime sexual partners but making reasonable assumptions from the data we can calculate a median of around 400. [18]
Not only are the typical numbers of lifetime sexual partners reported by homosexual men enormous, but the nature of their sexual encounters is qualitatively different. [19] Anonymous sexual encounters with complete strangers in wholly inappropriate public places like restrooms are common. These can be initiated and completed in a few minutes, without a single word being spoken. A common pastime activity of these men is “cruising.” This is the colloquial term given to the purposive search for a sexual partner that can take place anywhere and at any time: on the street, in gay bars, parks, movie theatres, parties, beaches and, of course, gay bathhouses. The purpose of these bathhouses is to facilitate anonymous, one-on-one or group sex with strangers in a public setting. Patrons of these baths can go through up to several dozen partners in one night. [20] Critics of homosexuality can understandably condemn such wildly promiscuous behavior, be it on religious or moral grounds. But what they usually can’t understand is that this is only male sexuality left to act out without restraints. Straight men simply cannot find women willing to indulge their desires – this is the only reason it is exceedingly rare to find them behaving like this.
We now have the data we wanted. We have a direct estimate of women’s ideal lifetime number of sexual partners and a proxy measure for men. Comparing the median value for women (5) with that of men (400) we see that, in a modern Western society, the typical man is about 400/5 or 80 times keener to have sex with different partners than the typical woman. Based on the proxy nature of the data used for males, as well as biological and historical considerations, I consider this an absolute minimum value which is likely an underestimate. But let's accept this 80-fold difference. It would be helpful if we visualized it on a pie chart.
Figure 1.Sex differences in the desire for sexual variety
We are not very good when it comes to applying probabilities to everyday situations, and seeing these numbers as pieces of a pie can be a powerful aid in appreciating the situation. If you are simply a typical, healthy, normal male, what you're trying to do is squeeze a vast universe of never-ending desires into the tiny sliver of biological reality that women will allow. At the same time, you are competing with the rest of the male population for access to this tiny sliver. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of male desires will go unfulfilled, frustrated and rejected.
Now I'm not going to spin it on its head and try to convince you how amazing it is to be 80 times cheaper than women. I'm not going to ask you, for example, to bring to mind how nice it feels to finally get a “yes” after ten straight women have said “no.” It does feel nice and if it makes you feel good focusing on it this is perfectly fine, but it still doesn't make being cheap something beautiful or sublime. Nor am I going to ask you to imagine how boring it would be if every woman you wanted said yes straight away. I am actually pretty sure you wouldn't mind if they all gave in to you immediately, without putting up any resistance. History has endless examples of powerful leaders who throughout their life did not in the least bit tire of having sex, on a daily basis, with a renewing supply of very obedient women. These men simply fulfilled the evolved desires that most men cannot.
Being cheap is neither here nor there. It’s no cause for celebration but it's not the end of the world. It’s only a biological reality. If you want to follow the blueprint outlined in this book for transforming your mating, accepting your cheapness is a sine qua non, an essential precondition. To begin with, you will know what to expect. You will understand that rejection is your biological destiny, and this will help you keep the rejections separate from your worth as a human being. This is a point worth emphasizing. You can be the most special, creative, loving, intelligent or talented human being - you will still get rejected most of the time, because your average, generic, unexceptional woman is still more precious than you in terms of parental investment. Understanding this will allow you to preserve your self-esteem.
Coming to terms with this will also save you headaches and wasted energy in trying to figure out why women turn you down. I have met more men than I can remember who beat themselves up after a rejection. They endlessly replay the interaction in their head, looking for clues to what they did wrong. Was it the way they were standing? Was their body language not assertive enough? Should they have persisted when she said she had a boyfriend - was it just a test? Did they come across as too needy in the texts? There is a use to self-reflection and striving to improve, but you should always keep things in perspective by framing rejection as the statistically expected outcome. Most rejections will have little to do with you anyway, and they won't be because you did something wrong. The girl was just not interested in hooking up, for whatever reason, because women are generally not even as remotely interested in hooking up. She probably already had a boyfriend, or was still not over her ex, or was simply in a stage of her life where she wants nothing to do with men. Then there are the more mundane reasons like she was in a hurry to catch her bus, she had a headache or was on her period. She has been calibrated by millions of years of evolution to be picky and difficult, regardless of who comes across her.
But even if it did have something to do with you, you had better not beat yourself up trying to figure it out. You will probably fail. Maybe you reminded her of her ex, or maybe you're not the type of guy she goes for. Maybe it was your shoes or the small piece of lettuce stuck between your teeth. Maybe you just weren't good enough for her, and she felt she could do better. Whatever the case, there is not much you can do other than move on to the next. We will consider some of the reasons you possibly didn’t succeed very shortly. But before that, in the next section we will briefly sketch an outline of the human mating system.
A bird’s eye view of our mating system
The first thing that stands out about our species’ mating behavior is its tremendous variability. In most species males and females can be expected to mate at specific times and places, using specific rituals, and with specific individuals - there is very little to distinguish any individual or mating interaction from the next. Humans are nothing like that. The variability and flexibility of human mating can be seen, for example, when we compare men to women, or when we compare one individual at various points in his or her life, or to another person of the same sex. It is also evident in the extent to which human mating is influenced by a variety of environmental and contextual factors [21] or its variability across cultures and historical times. At the extremes the differences are so dramatic as to be without precedent in the animal kingdom. The most reproductively successful man in recorded history was Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, a 17 th century Moroccan emperor who is believed to have sired around a thousand children with his numerous wives and concubines. [22] Scientists would refer to a system like this as harem polygyny . The standard mating arrangement in certain areas of contemporary Tibet could not be more different. Here two or more brothers marry, live and have sex with the same woman. Sexual jealousy is kept to a minimum and all men participate equally in raising the children, regardless of who the biological father is. This arrangement is called fraternal polyandry , and though declining it is still practiced to this day. [23] Mating systems like harem polygyny and fraternal polyandry are unheard of in contemporary Western societies, where men typically marry one woman, spend most of their lives with her and have an average of two children.
Having recognized the variability, we need to look past it. In order to understand our mating system scientists try to get past the noise by looking for unifying, universally applicable findings. The most important clues can come from examining our anatomy. Sexual size dimorphism - the degree to which the males of a species are larger than the females - correlates reliably with the species’ degree of polygyny (the extent to which some males have multiple mates at the same time). Females are typically the optimal size given a species’ physiology, habitat, and ecology; to the degree that males of a polygynous species compete violently against each other for access to females they need to evolve larger sizes that are better suited for fighting rather than surviving. Males in monogamous species, where every male gets one female, lack this incentive for violent conflict. They therefore do not usually deviate from the species-optimum female size. Men are taller than women by about 8%, with a body mass around 15-20% larger. When compared to other species, a sexual size dimorphism of this magnitude indicates mild levels of polygyny. [24] This, however, may not by the whole story. Women are unique among primates [25] in that they have large stores of fat for purposes of child rearing and as sexual ornaments; if we exclude this and consider lean muscle mass alone men are about 60% larger, a figure indicating substantial polygyny. It suggests that throughout our species’ history most men probably had one partner, but it was very frequent for some men to have more than one, meaning that others went without any partners. The anatomical evidence is complimented by a survey of human societies in existence today. Cross culturally, over 80% of human societies can be classified as polygynous in that they permit a man to have more than one wife at the same time. The remaining societies are classed as monogamous. [26] Interestingly, even in those societies which are polygynous according to the above criterion most men and women are in monogamous bonds, and polygynous unions (one husband, multiple wives) are feasible only for a minority of mature men with high social status. This data suggests that while polygyny is generally men’s most desired mating arrangement only a small minority can achieve it. Most will have to settle for monogamy, focusing their mating efforts to attracting and securing one desirable partner. Indeed, in a cross-cultural sample of 97 countries the mean percentage of men who have married by the age of 49 is estimated at nearly 92%, meaning the large majority of humans mate monogamously. [27] , [28] Based on this data scientists usually characterize the human mating system as serial monogamy or social monogamy . Let’s see what these terms mean.
Serial monogamy refers to the fact that human pair bonds typically do not last, and people go from one monogamous relationship to the next. Cross-culturally, the frequency of divorce peaks at around 4 years of marriage. This would have been the minimum time necessary to ensure any children the couple had would have survived in ancestral environments (the ancient environments where the relevant genes evolved). After each divorce men typically marry successively younger wives. Social monogamy is a mating system where animals form long-term pair bonds but without guarantees of genuine sexual exclusivity. It is the polite term biologists have given to systems with sexual cheating. The prevalence of cheating in socially monogamous species varies widely. Various lines of evidence suggest that humans’ monogamous social bonds are usually, but not always, genuinely free of cheating. The size of males’ testicles relative to their entire body size is a reliable index of the degree to which males have been under evolutionary pressures arising from sperm competition. [29] , [30] Sperm competition takes place when sperm from more than one male simultaneously occupies the reproductive tract of a female, for example when a married or engaged woman has an affair. Under sperm competition males have to evolve larger testicles which allow them to produce more sperm and increase their chances of reaching the female egg before their rivals. Our closest living relative, the promiscuous chimpanzee, is subject to tremendous sperm competition: one female can have sex with all the males in her group within a few days or even hours. Accordingly, chimpanzees have evolved massive testicles. In sharp contrast, our second closest living relative, the polygynous gorilla, has evolved in social environments with very little sperm competition and has retained small testicles relative to his size. Men’s relative testicle size lies between the chimpanzee and the gorilla but much closer to the gorilla, indicating relatively moderate levels of sperm competition. Genetic paternity data are in line with the cross-species anatomical comparison. Worldwide, among couples with children where the father has no reason to suspect a child is not his, less than 2% of children turn out to have been fathered by another man. When the man is in doubt, however, the rate shoots to 30%. [31]
As I said at the start, human mating is very messy. You might have noticed how often in this section I have used qualifying adverbs like “typically” or “usually” – it is impossible to make absolute, sweeping statements. Most research papers in the field use similarly tempered and cautious language. In all analyses humans fall between monogamy and polygamy, fidelity and promiscuity. We can be hedonistic sex machines or passionate and committed lovers. We are everything and nothing at the same time. Absolute laws of the physics and mathematics variety do not exist in human mating.
What women want
Different people will not be equally desirable as mates to the opposite sex. A woman who rolls her eyes in disgust at the sight of a homeless beggar might throw herself to a rich CEO or prime minister. Similarly, men will not find an overweight housewife in her fifties to be even as remotely attractive as a twenty-year-old lingerie model. Biologists and psychologists use the term mate value to refer to these differences in the desirability of people. Individuals with higher mate value will be more desirable as mates whereas those of lesser mate value will be less desirable. Mates are biological resources, like food and water, and members of each sex will compete for access to high mate value individuals of the opposite sex. This is especially the case for high mate value women - historically men have often fought to their death over them. Women sometimes also compete amongst themselves for men, but their competition is more rare, non-physical and subtle.
On the flip side of mate value, we find mate choice criteria . These are the criteria according to which members of a sex select their mates. Though there are individual differences, all members of each sex will tend to broadly agree on their mate choice criteria. Individuals of the opposite sex will satisfy these mate choice criteria to differing degrees: those that satisfy them the best will have the highest mate value, while others will be of lower mate value.
In many species, particularly those where the males provide no parental investment besides sperm, males have no mate choice criteria. Apart from the obvious requirement that the female belong to the same species, [32] males in these species will happily and indiscriminately mate with any female that comes their way. But because men often do provide extended parental investment, they have mate choice criteria and will prefer women of higher mate value. This is especially the case if they are considering a woman as a potential long-term partner, like relationship or marriage material. When they are only after uncommitted sex men lower their standards but all else being equal will still prefer a woman of higher mate value.
I will venture a guess that you won't be surprised when I tell you that men’s single most important mate choice criterion is how pleasing a woman is to the eye. A woman's physical attractiveness is linked to her youth, reproductive potential [33] and physical health, and men have evolved to value any visible sign of these underlying biological qualities. I won't bore you with the details - you know what you like, and you don’t need me to tell you about it. You are far more interested, I am sure, in how women view you: the mate choice criteria they use when deciding if you're good enough. Evolutionary psychologists have approached the topic from a variety of complementary research avenues [34] :
a. Theoretical considerations from our species’ past. Over the last few million years, women evolved in specific social and physical environments. Depending on what mate choice criteria they used and the mate(s) they subsequently selected, individual women were able to leave behind them surviving offspring to varying degrees. Some of these ancestral women left more offspring, others fewer, and some none at all. Their offspring, in turn, inherited their mothers' mate choice criteria and tended, statistically, to leave a similar number of descendants as their mothers. The humans alive today are descended from ancestral women who left the most surviving offspring, outcompeting all other women of their time. To leave the most offspring these women had to employ the optimal mate choice criteria, criteria which modern women have inherited. Using this logic and our - however limited - understanding of our ancestral environments we can “reverse engineer” modern women and make educated guesses as to what they are likely to desire in men. We can then take these hypotheses and see how well they stack up against the empirical data.
b. Other species. By studying females of species with similar mating systems, like social or serial monogamy, we can often get a good idea of mate choice mechanisms that might be at play with women. For example, my doctoral dissertation was based on the observation that females of some species copy the mate choices of other females: they tend to select the males they see other females selecting. There was some evidence that a similar process could be at play with women, and I spent three years formulating a theory as to how this process could have evolved in humans and what its results would look like today. [35]
c. Demographic data and government or other public records. Population-level or aggregated data are the higher-order result of the interplay between the mate choices of millions of individual men and women. For example, the average age difference of married couples in the United States, a country where both men and women are completely free to choose their partner, is roughly three years. [36] This finding can be understood with reference to the fact that women generally prefer slightly older partners, while men prefer younger ones. Similarly, the sociological finding that more attractive women tend to marry men with higher incomes [37] is explained by the preference of these high-income men for attractive women and the preference of attractive women for high-income men, which we will discuss below.
d. Questionnaire studies. The most obvious way to find out what women like is to just ask them, and this is what evolutionary psychologists first did when they started studying women’s mate choice in the 1980s. Questionnaire studies on women's mate choice criteria conducted across dozens of countries reveal a remarkable consistency in their stated preferences. The obvious caveat is that women themselves often don't know or understand what they want from a man, so the results of these questionnaire studies must be interpreted with caution and corroborated, if possible, by other methods. For example, women's self-reported preference for slightly older partners is corroborated by the demographic data on the average age difference of married couples we described above.
e. Experimental studies. This is the bread and butter of the evolutionary psychologist, most commonly used to evaluate the parameters that influence women’s perception of men's physical attractiveness. Typically, psychologists will present a series of male stimuli like facial photographs or sweaty t-shirts to female raters, who indicate how attractive or sexy they find them. By seeing how differences in the male stimuli map on to the female raters' responses, psychologists can get a good idea of the various components that determine male attractiveness as well as their relative importance. This method also allows them to estimate how much different women agree in their evaluations and the factors that can account for individual differences in taste. We will cover some of this literature in the next chapter.
f. Observational studies. Often it is best to just sit back and observe women as they interact naturally with men. This has been done in a variety of settings, from shopping malls to bars and clubs, online dating sites, speed-dating venues, and even strip clubs.
g. Ethnographic studies. A bit of an old-school method, this involves travelling to, living among and closely observing primitive hunter-gatherer societies, usually in Africa or South America. The power of this approach is that it allows researchers to study female mate choice in societies that more closely resemble the ancestral environments where humans evolved.
To begin explaining the very messy human mating system, evolutionary psychologists distinguish two dimensions of female mate choice. [38] These are a) long-term mate choice, when a woman evaluates a man as a prospective long-term partner, like a boyfriend or husband, and b) short-term mate choice, when a woman evaluates someone for a short-term sexual encounter like a one-night-stand. [39] Though the mate choice criteria women use in both dimensions largely overlap, their relative importance can sometimes vary. I briefly outline women’s major groups of mate choice criteria below. [40] , [41] , [42]
a. Resources and resource acquisition potential. Being the weaker sex and bearing most of the costs of child rearing, women have historically had to rely on men for many of the resources necessary for their own and their children’s survival. Ancestral women who preferred men with more resources - or at least the potential to acquire resources -tended to survive longer and leave more surviving offspring compared to women without this preference. Modern women have inherited this preference. In today’s division-of-labor economies men’s capacity to provide resources can be directly tracked by their financial success. Unsurprisingly, in cross-cultural studies financial and career success are among the attributes women value most in a man. A steady job, high salary and good financial prospects make a man very attractive. Furthermore, the more financially successful a woman is, the stronger her preference for financially successful men. This sex-specific preference is as universal and absolute as can be: researches have yet to find a nation or society where men value their partner’s finances more than women do. Not only does this female preference influence who women choose but also who they stay with: cross-culturally, marriages where the wife earns more money than the husband are more unstable and problematic, as are marriages where the husband loses his job.
b. Social status and dominance. Closely related to resource acquisition potential is social status. Historically, men of high social status have used their position to gain preferential access to the group’s precious resources, such as food, tools and shelter. They could also better protect their partners and children from acts of sexual coercion and violence by other men. Female preference for high-ranking males is nothing unique to humans, being common in apes and mammals in general. As with the preference for resources, women’s preference for men of high social status is universal across continents and throughout recorded human history. [43] In surviving primitive societies where a man’s status is linked to culture-specific skills and traits, like hunting ability or strength, men who are high in these are also the ones women desire most. [44] Closely related to social status is a man’s perceived dominance. Experiments find that merely being exposed to a man with a dominant personality is enough to lower a women’s commitment to her current partner. [45]
c. Physical characteristics. Unlike what older generations of psychologists believed, the physical characteristics women value in a man are not capricious, arbitrary or culturally imposed. Throughout the millions of years of our species’ history, women have evolved to be attracted to male characteristics that signaled good health and good genes. Women without these preferences would often choose sick, unhealthy or low-quality mates. This meant they would either not conceive or, if they did conceive, bear unhealthy children of lesser genetic quality who also fared poorly reproductively. Because this latter group of women would have been wiped out from our species’ gene pool, women alive today have inherited strong preferences for physical characteristics that signal health and genetic quality in men. These are the characteristics women find “attractive” or “sexy.” Despite significant individual differences, women are also in substantial agreement as to what is attractive. After nearly four decades of research we know that women use most of their sense organs to capture complementary sources of information regarding a man’s genetic quality, physical condition and health:
1. Facial attractiveness. [46] , [47] Within and across cultures, women are in significant agreement as to which male faces are attractive and which are not. The three structural dimensions of a man’s face that most determine its attractiveness are its symmetry , its averageness and its masculinity . Let’s see these in turn.
i) Symmetry is the extent to which the left and right side of the face are similar. The more similar the two halves, the more symmetrical the face is said to be, and women prefer symmetrical faces. This is because symmetry is a signal of genetic and developmental quality: since the same genes create the left and right side of the face, increased facial symmetry means a man’s genes were able to perfectly express themselves during his development. Asymmetries, on the other hand, signal that disorganizing events took place during the man’s facial development - these were due to genetic defects, environmental insults or a combination of the two. In the image below, you can see digitally manipulated male faces designed to differ in symmetry.
Figure 2. Facial symmetry. In the middle the original facial photograph of an 18-year-old male. The images on either side are artificial manipulations of the original: the image on the left is 50% less symmetrical, whereas the image on the right is 50% more symmetrical. Women will prefer the most symmetrical version (image on the right). [48]
ii) Averageness is the degree to which a man’s face resembles other male faces in the population. Scientists can artificially create more or less average facial images through digital composites of individual faces - the more faces go into the composite the more average it becomes. Somewhat surprisingly, women rate more average male faces as more attractive. The reason is not well-understood. One possible explanation is that more average faces signal better genetic quality; alternatively, they might simply be more easily processed by women’s face-processing mechanisms, and this make them more attractive.
iii) Male and female faces tend to systematically differ in the relative dimensions of specific facial features. Men for example tend to have larger jawbones, more prominent cheekbones and brow ridges, as well as thinner cheeks and lips. The more exaggerated the differences in a man’s face from the typical female face the more masculinized it is; conversely, the smaller the differences the more feminized the face. Using digital composites of male and female faces psychologists can create artificial male faces that are more masculinized or feminized and study how attractive women find them. Unlike symmetry and averageness, however, the relationship between male facial masculinity and attractiveness is equivocal. On the whole women tend to find slightly feminized male faces more attractive, but there are instances where they are more attracted to masculinized faces. In the next chapter we will review this complex relationship in more detail.
Figure 3. Facial masculinity. In the middle the original facial photograph of a 19-year-old male. The images on either side are artificial manipulations of the original: the image on the left has been feminized by 50%, while the image on the right has been masculinized by 50%. [49]
2. Height and bodily attractiveness. While men generally prefer partners that are slightly shorter to themselves, it should surprise no one that women prefer men who are taller - ideally much taller. This female preference for height is borne out of multiple research methods, such as women’s self-reported preferences, analysis of online dating profiles and speed-dating interactions, and data from actual couples. The percentage of women who would accept a partner shorter than themselves is only 4%. [50] Women are also attracted to specific body types that match the masculine ideal: lean, muscular bodies with broad shoulders relative to the hips or waist - the coveted “V-shape” you find in fitness magazines. While women’s preference for masculinity in male faces is equivocal, their preference for masculine bodies is strong and almost absolute. [51]
3. Skin attractiveness. It is easy to understand that simply by looking at our skin women can get a good idea of how old we are, how well we’ve been taking care of our self and the general state of our health. What might surprise you, however, are the findings of a study published in 2005 by a team of evolutionary psychologists in the UK. These researchers photographed skin patches from various men that were less than 2cm wide. The men also donated blood samples that were subjected to genetic analyses. Simply by looking at the skin photographs, without any other information, women were able to distinguish males of high genetic quality from those of lower quality. [52]
4. Attractiveness of bodily odors. Though as a species we are heavily reliant on vision, the ability of the human nose to assist humans in social situations is remarkable. [53] Just by being exposed to someone’s odor, experimental subjects can assess that person’s sex, personality, health status and age, among other characteristics. Women also use information in men’s body odor to assist them in their mate choice. The perceived attractiveness of a man’s odor is linked to his visual attractiveness and dominance: the sexier women find a man’s smell, the more visually attractive and dominant he tends to be.
5. Attractiveness of voice. As with scents, humans are remarkably good at using voices - presented without accompanying visual or other stimuli - to assess a person’s characteristics. Simply by listening to a stranger’s voice, untrained listeners can estimate the person’s age, height and weight with nearly the same accuracy as if they were seeing the person’s picture. Unsurprisingly, women have taken our species’ excellent voice assessment abilities and put them to use in the task of mate choice. The properties of male voices women find pleasing or sexy are increasingly thought to be reflective of underlying genetic quality, health and good overall condition. Accordingly, men with more attractive voices have more lifetime sexual partners. [54] , [55]
While attractiveness - be it visual, auditory or olfactory - clearly matters to women in the context of long-term mate choice, it becomes even more important in the short-term. This makes sense when we consider that a short-term partner is by definition unable to provide long-term material investment to the woman or any child they conceive; the most important contribution he can realistically make is good genetic material. Accordingly, across a variety of questionnaire and experimental studies women systematically assign greater importance to good looks and physical attractiveness when considering a man as a short-term partner. They are also more likely to consent to uncommitted sex with an attractive man, and when they have affairs these tend to be with more attractive men. Women who are more promiscuous compared to the general female population tend to place a greater premium on men’s physical attractiveness and masculinity. In line with all this, attractive men report more short-term sexual partners compared to their less attractive peers. [56]
d. Age preferences. Cross-culturally, women prefer men who are slightly older to them, while men prefer women who are younger. From an evolutionary perspective this is explained by the fact that older men tend to have more resources and higher social status, and they tend to be more emotionally mature and sexually experienced. At the same time older men are nearly as fertile as younger men. On average, across all cultures that have been studied by evolutionary psychologists, women prefer men between three to four years older than themselves. Moreover, while men desire increasingly younger women as they grow older, women do not have this preference. Across all age groups, women prefer men who are slightly older than themselves.
e. Personality traits and intelligence. We saw that women like a man with a dominant personality, but what they like even more is a man who is dominant and kind. Other desirable personality traits are warmth, emotional stability and conscientiousness. Intelligence and a good education are also highly valued in a man, especially in the long-term context.
f. Signals of a man’s commitment and willingness to invest in the woman and their offspring. These are very important for the long-term and can take the form of the man being caring, emotionally invested and in love with the woman. These attributes are so desirable that women consistently place them at the top of their most valued traits in a long-term partner. Tangible signals of commitment like gifts are also desirable. Women also value a potential long-term partner’s willingness to invest in children and are surprisingly good at identifying men who show an interest and are caring towards children simply by looking at them. [57] In a short-term mating context, the importance of these traits is dramatically reduced.
Can I increase my mate value?
Yes, you can, but only to a certain point, and it is going to take time and effort. If you’re expecting a miraculous secret formula you will be bitterly disappointed; these are all the things you probably already know very well you should be doing. For this reason, I'm not going to break it up into baby steps. If you're not already taking action along the lines below then this is probably for lack of motivation, not lack of insight.
You must accept that there are certain components of your mate value “package” which you cannot change. The biggest one is obviously your genetic makeup, your DNA profile. You came into this world carrying a unique set of genes and for better or for worse you will take them to the grave. So if you're a fully-grown adult you won't be getting taller anytime soon, nor is your nose going to be getting any smaller - I'd love that myself - or your face any more symmetrical. You will just have to work with the set of DNA cards you were given. The other thing you obviously can’t change is your age. If you're a bit on the young side, say in your late teenage years, you can afford to be patient. Time is on your side. You can still make the best of today, and you will find that with every passing year women of an ever-wider age range are increasingly attracted to you. Similarly, if you’re past your biological peak, say in your late forties or fifties, there's nothing you can do but accept it and make the best of what you have today, starting from this moment.
Having said that, here are some general steps you can start taking to increase your mate value. They are ordered from the easiest and quickest to achieve to the most demanding, time-consuming, and potentially rewarding.
a. Improve your clothing, personal hygiene and grooming. For what it's worth, this very attainable, low-cost step will often be all you need to get your foot in the door. If you are severely lacking in this area, it might even make all the difference in the world. Put yourself in the woman's shoes: would you give out your number to someone in dirty clothes? What about somebody with dirty teeth, greasy hair or black fingernails? You don't need to win a competition; all you want is to signal that you are a competent, functional adult male without any glaring problems.
b. Work on your body, especially if you have a weight problem. An estimated 32% of adult men in the United States are obese, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) over 30. [58] For the UK the corresponding figure is 25%. Obese is a polite way of saying someone is fat - unless you're a bulky athlete like a heavyweight boxer or power lifter, a BMI over 30 will look very unattractive. So, if you're reading this book in a developed Western country there’s a good chance you have a serious weight problem, and it needs to be addressed.
Psychologists and sociologists have long known what any man in the street will tell you: the sight of an obese person triggers a wide spectrum of negative reactions, from subtle discrimination to full-blown disgust. From an evolutionary perspective this is to be expected, as obesity inadvertently signals significant and independent classes of deficits. [59] On the one hand are the obvious character flaws people will perceive, chief of which is the inability to exercise self-control. If a potential mate can’t even control the amount of food he consumes, how likely is he to exercise self-control in other areas of his life? On the other hand, obesity is a gross deviation from what a biologist would call species-typical morphology . It is not, in other words, what a healthy human should look like. This signals not only significant metabolic or other disease but also a possible source of pathogen infection that should actively be avoided. [60] This last point bears elaborating. In addition to their physiological immune system, made of things like white cells, bone marrow and lymph nodes, humans also have what is known as the behavioral immune system . This is a set of emotional and behavioral avoidance responses, like feeling disgusted and creating distance, that serve to minimize the risk of exposure to any potential source of pathogen infection, like open wounds and lesions. Because it makes sense in this instance to err on the side of caution, evolution has probably calibrated this system to be sensitive to anything in another person’s appearance that deviates from what is species-typical. Obesity is one such deviation, and it is very likely obese men activate the behavioral immune system of other people, including, unfortunately, the women they would like to mate with.
Even if you're not properly obese, there is more than likely room for you to lose weight: a remarkable 71% and 67% of adult males in the United States and UK, respectively, are overweight. And if you are in the lucky minority of men who are not overweight, hitting the gym to strengthen and tone your upper body, giving you the V-shape women desire, will make a significant difference.
c. Self-improvement. This is broader and can take many different forms. You can start with something as simple as reading books on time management or goal setting, for example. Simple changes in areas like these can often snowball into greater benefits. If certain things are holding you back psychotherapy is another obvious first step. There is significant research on the long-lasting benefits of psychotherapy, and I have personally witnessed close friends gain immensely from this process. Meditation is another route to achieving many of the same goals as psychotherapy and one that made a difference in my life. Besides something as specific as therapy or meditation, you can simply make a commitment to filling your life with positive and constructive interests while cutting out the junk. You can take the time you currently waste on social media and television, for example, and invest it in learning a language or a craft.
d. Build an extended, high-quality social circle, consisting of satisfying friendships. We saw earlier that a significant part of your mate value is dependent on your social standing. Women will be sensitive to things like your popularity, the respect your peers afford you, the quality and flavor of your relationships, and the nature of the people you surround yourself with. This is something that will often follow from step c above. Like sexual partners, friends are a resource, and just like you have a mate value you also have a “friend value.” Whether consciously or unconsciously the men in your life will be constantly assessing your desirability as a friend, so you can expect self-improvements to translate into social benefits. By its nature a new or improved social life cannot happen overnight. Meaningful interpersonal relationships take time to build and like old wine will only keep on getting better with time.
e. Improve your financial situation. This can hit a nerve in many of us, since we have evolved to be very sensitive to our resource acquisition potential and especially how it fares in comparison to others around us. When the comparisons are unfavorable they can leave a bitter taste, regardless of how we might try to rationalize things. And we are very good at rationalizing. We might tell ourselves that there are more important things in life than money, that money doesn't always lead to happiness and that many rich people are unhappy. That is all true but doesn’t change the fact that regardless of where you are and what you want out of life, it is better to have money than constantly worry about being broke. Another rationalization is that we don't want to attract the gold-diggers or play the “provider game,” that we want our women to be attracted to who we are rather than what we give them. This is hypocrisy. We gladly hold women accountable when they don't strive to improve themselves on the features we value in them, particularly their attractiveness. We will not only outright reject an out of shape woman without giving her the time of day but will also blame her for letting herself go. When women hold us to the same degree of accountability on the dimensions that are more important to them, we call them gold-diggers and prostitutes.
If you don’t have the kind of job or aren’t making the kind of money you’d like - worse, if you have no job or money at all - the first thing you need to do is acknowledge the situation and take responsibility for it. Own it - you have nobody to blame but yourself. The second thing is to resolve to turn things around. After resource acquisition potential itself, one thing women value immensely in a man is the ambition and drive towards higher resource acquisition potential. After you have made this commitment there is no secret outside consistent hard work. Fulfilling your potential, contributing to society and earning more money in the process – I can’t think of many better things.
***
There is work involved in improving your mate value, but at the end of the day these are things that will make you a better person all around, so ideally you should be motivated by a genuine desire to improve yourself, not just be doing it for women. The work you put in will be more enjoyable and the results quicker. Though I have treated the five different areas above as separate, they are all interconnected to some degree, and you can expect positive results in one area to have a knock-on effect on the others.
Improving your mate value to the extent it is possible can be great, even life changing, but it is not what this book is about. The last thing I want you to do is delay taking immediate action by using your low mate value as an excuse - convincing yourself that you will definitely take action at some unspecified time in the future, after you have increased your mate value. This book is about working with your given mate value to start obtaining the best possible mating results immediately - today. These ceiling results will obviously depend on each reader’s mate value. A successful, attractive lawyer in his mid-20s will see far better results than an unemployed, overweight and balding 40-year-old. But they will both experience a dramatic, night-and-day transformation compared to their present situation. Compared to the average man, even the 40-year-old’s mating life can be incomparably more exciting.
I need to qualify this with two important caveats. Firstly, there are limits to how low your mate value can drop before you find yourself slipping into the “untouchable” category. If you are morbidly obese and covered in psoriasis, for example, it is unlikely any woman will come near you. In a situation like this you would need to sort out your medical issues before worrying about women. Secondly, if you suffer some sort of neurocognitive or psychiatric impairment that severely impairs your social skills, like autism or depression, your difficulties with people will obviously spill over into the mating domain. In this case you might also find that this book does nothing for you. A good rule of thumb if you’re concerned you might fall into one of these categories is to simply look to your past mating history. If you have succeeded in having unpaid sex with at least one or two different women - regardless of their attractiveness - you are probably good to go, unless your situation has substantially deteriorated since then. If, on the other hand, you are of a certain age and still a virgin, or have only ever had paid sex, there might be an issue. In this case you could benefit from seeking medical or mental health advice.
Intuitive
adjective: spontaneously and effortlessly derived; reached, obtained or perceived by intuition
What is a psychological method?
Released in 2005, the book “ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists ” by journalist Neil Strauss, was an immediate commercial success. [61] It quickly reached the New York Times' bestseller list and sold millions of copies worldwide. There’s a good chance you've read The Game, so I won't go into the story in detail. Briefly, the book is presented as a non-fictional account of Strauss’ immersion into the community of Pickup Artists (or PUAs): men who have developed and practice various methods and techniques for improving their sex lives. These men for the most part come from earlier lives of considerable sexual frustration and limited success with women. Through personal trial and error, they develop original techniques for picking up women or incorporate and modify various elements from other techniques to evolve their own unique strain. The vast array of pickup techniques covered in the book include recipes on how to dress, behave, socialize, talk, think and feel. The book popularized a fringe male subculture that had been around in the form of books, audio courses and seminars since at least the 1970s. Shortly after The Game was released, many pickup books and other instructional material like videos and courses started to flood the market. In 2007, the US television network VH1 aired the first of two seasons of “ The Pickup Artist, ” a reality series featuring aspiring pickup artists under the tutelage of the world-famous PUA guru “Mystery, ” aka Erik von Markovik.
In the ten years since then, the PUA or seduction industry has naturally gravitated towards the internet. Type “PUA,” “pickup” or “daygame” into a search engine and you’ll get millions of hits. [62] Because there are so many different terms to describe the various pickup and dating methods, I will use the generic term psychological methods to refer to all of them. I define psychological methods as follows : a set of commercially available taught methods or practices that are supposed to enhance a man’s mating success, primarily via scripted language or behavior. At their core, psychological methods are about the psychological manipulation of women: by using them to manipulate, impress or mislead the woman, a man who would be otherwise be rejected can be accepted. The theories that underlie psychological methods are usually built by men without scientific training and limited understanding of biology and psychology. You have a curious and determined man - let's call him the “ lay theorist” - who is strongly motivated to improve his sex life. He starts trying out different techniques and methods on women or simply starts observing other men who are more successful. As observations accumulate, the lay theorist builds a theoretical model which, he hopes, will capture the dynamics of male-female interactions and allow for the identification of loopholes in the female defenses that the aspiring PUA can exploit.
Though they have evolved appreciably over the years, at their core most of the theories underlying psychological methods are what we can call “stage theories.” The entire interaction, from the first words exchanged to sex and beyond, is broken down by the lay theorist into distinct stages. The purpose of the psychological method is to familiarize the student of the method with the special characteristics of each stage and the sequence in which they follow. This will allow the student to a) structure the interaction so that it flows according to the method, b) identify in which stage he is at every moment and c) at the right time and using the right technique, move the interaction onto the next stage.
The first widely disseminated stages were advanced by Mystery as the “M3 Model.” [63] In Mystery’s words:
[…] every courtship, from meeting each other to having sex, has a beginning, middle, and ending to it. You can't get to the middle until you complete the beginning, and you can't get to the ending until you first complete the beginning and the middle.
Accordingly, the M3 model warns against the pitfalls of trying to skip through stages or getting stuck in a stage. The three main stages of his model are 1. “Attract,” 2. “Build Comfort” and 3. “Seduce.” In the first stage the student must get the girl to feel attracted to him, in the second to make her comfortable in his presence and in the third, after the previous steps have been correctly executed, to get her in bed. Each of these three stages is divided into three further substages, for a total of 9 substages:
|
Main Stage: |
Substage |
|
1. Attract |
1a. Open |
|
1b. Female to Male Interest |
|
|
1c. Male to Female Interest |
|
|
2. Build Comfort |
2a. Conversation |
|
2b. Connection |
|
|
2c. Intimacy |
|
|
3. Seduce |
3a. Foreplay |
|
3b. Last minute resistance |
|
|
3c. Sex |
Table 1. Outline of the M3 model
To successfully interact with the girl in each stage, as well as get the interaction moving along smoothly, the M3 model uses a variety of tools. These range from scripted opening lines to body language techniques, as well as rules on how to identify and respond to signs that a girl is interested, managing interactions in a large group of people and touching the girl or escalating sexually.
With the passage of time, and with lay theorists seeking unique selling points in the face of growing competition, the theories underlying psychological methods have become increasingly elaborate. An attractive, well-educated and highly intelligent friend of mine introduced me to the “Krauser Daygame Model,” developed by Nick Krauser, a UK-based PUA. My friend was convinced that his road to more success with women passed through Krauser’s model. Curious, I gave Krauser’s book a read. [64] Already in the book’s introduction, I was struck by the complexity of his scheme:
This model is a series of sequential stages. […] In order, the stages are:
Kill Momentum - The purpose is to stop her and make her talk to you, to hear you out. You do this principally by showing high value immediately. This is the most structured stage and I've broken it down further into sub-stages of: pre-approach, target acquisition, and spontaneous opener.
Vibing - You will match energies with the girl and draw her into a two way conversation that she enjoys
Investment - She begins chasing you and doing a lot of work to win you over.
Commit Her - She makes the decision to join you on a date, either immediately or at a future time.
Deep Rapport - Sitting down together you form a strong connection and feel comfortable with each other. You are no longer on the street. It may be a Day 2 or an instant date.
Verbal Escalation - You heat her up until she's horny and wants to fuck.
And then you close. Simple. (Emphasis in the original).
It did not look simple to me. Not at all. For example, the first stage, Kill Momentum, covers the student’s internal psychological state before an approach is even initiated (substages “Pre-Approach” and “Target Acquisition”), all the way to the opening words, the “opener” (substage “Spontaneous Opener”). This latter substage, Spontaneous Opener, is further subdivided into 8 sub-substages. I present these below, along with examples in brackets. Some of these examples are Krauser’s, while I made up the rest to the best of my abilities.
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“Salutation” (“Hi!”).
2 . “ Pre-frame Tease” (“I just have to say something”).
3. “Root” (“I was just over there when I saw you walk past and I knew I had to come over”).
4. “Observation.” Here you look at the girl and try to come up with a genuine compliment.
5. “Compliment” (“You have a beautiful neck”).
6. “Gentle Tease” (“It reminds me a bit of a giraffe”).
7. “Pause/ Early Qualification.” Now you stay silent and give her a chance to put in some work into the interaction.
8. “Conversational Statement.” Depending on how she has reacted earlier, you move on to normal conversation (“So, what brings you out today?”).
Nothing is random in the Krauser Spontaneous Opener. Everything is said and done for a reason. The Salutation, for example, serves to come across as socially normal. The purpose of the Root is to recognize and verbalize the situation, elicit her agreement and then move the interaction towards the desired direction. As Krauser himself admits:
The toughest part of this model is to get the opener right. It's very technically demanding and you are guaranteed to fuck it up over and over again. Gradually you'll start to put together openers that tick the boxes but have no life to them. Much of the time you'll simply not be able to construct one at all. That's normal. This is an artistic ability, not a memorisation exercise. Stick with it and do the exercises.
Krauser provides no evidence to support the importance of getting the opener right or the efficacy of his particular opener. Recall we are still at the very first stage of the model, with another five scripted stages to go.
Though most psychological methods adopt a stage approach, this is far from universal. Some lay theorists lean toward what we can call the “typological approach.” This involves breaking down the female population into discrete personality or mating types, detailing each type’s unique characteristics, and offering psychological methods tailored to each type. A further step is to break down the male population into types, so the student of the method can identify which type best describes him and if necessary take steps to progress to a more desirable type.
Mostly known by his online nickname “BlackDragon,” Caleb Jones is a successful dating and business coach out of Portland, Oregon. His system is an excellent example of the typological approach. Jones distinguishes three types of men and women. Men are classified along two axes: confidence and outcome independence. The latter dimension measures the degree to which a man cares about how any one particular endeavor in his life will turn out, be it in the domains of mating, social relations, or business. The less he cares, the more outcome independent he is said to be. [65] There are three types of men in Jones’ system:
“Beta Males”: low in confidence and low in outcome independence.
“Alpha Males 1.0”: high in confidence but low in outcome independence.
“Alpha Males 2.0”: high in confidence and high in outcome independence.
According to Jones the combination of high outcome independence but low confidence is not possible, hence only three types instead of four. Depending on where exactly they fall on the confidence/outcome independence plane, various subtypes of these three basic types are possible, such as “Typical Beta,” “Confident Beta” or “Recovering Beta.”
There are also three types of women in the BlackDragon ecosystem [66] :
“Dominant Women”: the loose female equivalent of Needy Alpha Males, these women are strong-minded and bossy.
“Submissive Women”: the very loose equivalent of the Beta Male, they are more comfortable with a man who is in charge.
“Independent Women”: These women, like Alpha Males 2.0, are characterized by outcome independence and don’t need to boss or be bossed around by a man.
According to Jones, Dominant Women make up roughly 60-65% of the female population, Submissives another 25-30%, and Independents the remaining 10%.
One of the strengths of the BlackDragon approach is that it can predict what will happen when a particular type of man and woman get involved. The 3x3 interaction matrix that results gives nine possible scenarios. [67] For example, an Alpha Male 2.0 can have a harmonious, low-drama relationship with either Independent or Submissive women, but a relationship with a Dominant would be impossible - they would clash. To take another example, a Beta Male could have a more or less harmonious relationship with a Dominant Woman, where he assumes the submissive role and the Dominant takes the lead. Pair a Beta with a Submissive Woman, however, and things are bound to fall apart - the Submissive will eventually be forced to take the lead in the relationship and lose interest in him. Armed with these insights, the student of BlackDragon can anticipate what will happen when he dates different types of women and using various relationship management techniques steer his relationships in the desired direction.
Research into personality differences in the academic literature is immense - it is one of the most studied areas in all of psychology. To the best of my knowledge, BlackDragon does not bother with this literature. His system, for example the various male and female types or their relative frequencies in the population, is based on his personal observations and informal estimates. I was not surprised to find nothing about outcome independence in the psychological literature - it simply has not been identified as a personality factor worth studying, much less as one of the two fundamental axes of the male personality. Inevitably, either BlackDragon or several thousand psychology PhDs have it wrong. In this respect his lay theory is very similar to that of Mystery, Krauser, or anyone else. They don’t particularly bother with data outside their personal, subjective experience.
I should clarify that typological approaches like the BlackDragon model and stage theories like the Krauser or Mystery model are not incompatible in principle. It is possible for a stage theory to incorporate typological elements and vice versa. [68]
In briefly discussing a sample of psychological methods here my intention was not to review the field. This is outside the scope of this discussion and due to the endless proliferation of psychological methods would require an entire separate book. Rather my intention was merely to familiarize readers with no prior exposure to the seduction industry, so that they can better appreciate what follows, particularly in this and the following chapter.
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Psychological methods are necessarily based on a series of assumptions. Though there is no real evidence to back them up, the assumptions are taken for granted and form the unchanging background against which the industry operates. The most important of these assumptions are the following:
1. The lay theorist has made a discovery about women’s psychology. If you feel that “discovery” is an unfairly strong word that the lay theorist would never claim for himself, we can instead say that the lay theorist has developed some deeper understanding of women. However we choose to describe it, there must be something the lay theorist knows that the rest of us don’t. If this were not the case, then why would the lay theorist even be talking to us?
2. The lay theorist’s’ discovery allows him to enjoy greater success with women than he otherwise would. If the discovery did not have this effect, it would not even be worth mentioning. There would be no commercial reason for the lay theorist’s existence.
3. The increased success the lay theorist enjoys can be reproduced by his students, on the condition that they learn the method. For a student to learn the method the lay theorist must teach it to him, either in person or through distance training material like books and videos. Now every lay theorist will concede that hands-on experience with women is crucial, and he might even go so far as to admit that without this hands-on experience the learning process will fail. But however important the hands-on part is, there is some element that needs to be taught. This element will make the same difference in the student’s sex life as it did for the teacher. If no such critical taught element existed, then all the student would really need is the hands-on experience bit, and the lay theorist’s input would be useless.
I will argue in the rest of this chapter that every one of these assumptions is almost certainly false. Psychological methods involve no useful discovery that can be taught, and they cannot possibly work, not even in principle.
The stuff psychological methods are made of
Aristotle, as we all learned in school, was a 4 th century BC Greek philosopher, known among many things for studying under Plato and tutoring Alexander the Great. He was a genius whose influence shaped Western thought for centuries, writing in disciplines ranging from ethics, logic and metaphysics, to theatre, politics and biology. He wrote about everything there was to write in his time. Perhaps his most historically successful contribution, however, was his view of how the physical world operates, which has come to be known as Aristotelian physics .
Aristotle distinguishes between the terrestrial and celestial realms. There are four elements which make up all terrestrial things. From heaviest to lightest these are earth , water , wind and fire . Depending on how heavy it is, each of the four elements has its natural place on our planet. Think of four concentric circles: the heaviest element, earth, has its natural place at the center, surrounded by water, then wind and finally fire. Whenever an element is outside its natural place it wants to return to it, so it can rest. The natural terrestrial motions are therefore straight lines: up for light objects and down for heavy ones. A rock, for example, is made mostly of earth, and when dropped into a lake it will start sinking straight down, as it is heavier than the surrounding water. It soon returns to its natural state of rest at the bottom of the lake, along with the other earth-heavy objects. Similarly, fire rises straight up, as its natural place is away from the center, towards the terrestrial periphery. These are examples of what Aristotle calls natural motion, i.e. motion that results from an object’s desire to return to its natural resting place. The second possible type of motion is violent motion, when an external force is acted upon an object. Violent motion can force something to move away from its natural place, like when someone throws a rock towards the sky, away from the center where it belongs. The celestial realm, according to Aristotle, is made up entirely of a fifth element called ether . As our eyes reveal to us, the natural motion of the celestial bodies, like the Sun and Moon, is circular - there are no linear motions in the celestial sphere. Moreover, unlike the dynamic and changing nature of the terrestrial sphere, where things are constantly being created and destroyed, the celestial is static and unchanging. Everything there is perfect and has no need to change. This doesn’t mean that everything celestial stays motionless, as it clearly does not. Its unchanging nature refers to the fact that all the celestial bodies always rotate around the Earth in perfectly circular orbits - their motions never change.
From a historical perspective, Aristotelian physics is by far the most successful physics theory ever created. It was the dominant theory from Aristotle’s time until well into the 16 th and 17 th centuries. In certain times and places, to question his doctrines was a serious offence - that is how much it was respected. Scientifically, however, the theory was a complete failure. Under the Aristotelian influence physics and astronomy stagnated as a field, remaining largely unchanged for two millennia. His theory also didn’t lead to any technological advances; while it looked very appealing on paper it produced nothing tangible. The reason, as people found out after Newton in the 17 th century, was that every single one of Aristotle’s ideas was wrong. The natural tendency of objects, Newton discovered, is not to rest but to travel in a straight line or rest. An external force is not required for an object to move but rather to change its state of motion, be it rest or motion in a straight line. Objects can travel in any direction; up and down are no more privileged than any other direction. The study of objects’ motions blossomed when physicists started treating all objects alike, ignoring their qualitative properties (earth, water etc.) and focusing only on their masses – their motions became fully explainable by the quantitative relations between their relative positions and masses. Finally, there is no difference between terrestrial and celestial laws: the same rules that apply on Earth govern the motions of celestial bodies like the Sun and planets.
How could a theory that gets everything wrong survive as long as Aristotelian physics did? One likely answer, as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn pointed out some sixty years ago, was how well Aristotelian physics agrees with our intuitions and everyday understanding of physical objects. [69] It was an undoubtedly ingenious, incredibly detailed and internally consistent system. At the same time, it was in full accordance with our species’ naturally occurring, spontaneous perceptions of physical reality. In our daily lives we see and expect that things rest unless an external force is acted upon them. We see and expect that unsupported objects drop in a straight line. A theory that weaves these spontaneous expectations into a coherent scientific proposition is likely to sit well with us. It can trick us into believing we understand the world better even though from a practical perspective it offers nothing. In today’s psychological lingo, we would say that Aristotelian physics agrees with our folk physics .
Folk physics, also called naïve physics or intuitive physics , is the term psychologists use to describe ordinary peoples’ spontaneous ideas and expectations of how inanimate physical objects will behave. By “ordinary,” I mean people untrained in physics, who have received no formal or informal physics education. Folk physical perceptions and expectations are effortless and automatic. There is no conscious reflection involved; as we will discuss later, millions of years of evolution have done all the thinking for us. Though they are enriched and refined with experience, principles of folk physics are present even at birth. [70] Infants, for example, come into this world with the expectation that physical objects which are not supported will fall, that two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, that an object will continue to exist after another object has hidden it from view, and that an object will exist continuously in space and time (i.e. there will be no gaps in its trajectory). They also expect that two objects cannot influence each other at a distance and that there will be no delay in an object’s reaction when it is impacted by another. When presented with artificial stimuli that violate these expectations, infants become surprised and tend to stare longer, providing psychologists with a very convenient method of understanding exactly what infants expect at various stages of their development.
Just like we have an innate folk physics that deals with the motions of solid objects, so we have an innate folk psychology . Its purpose is to make sense of, predict and manipulate the behavior of other animals, especially humans. [71] Whereas folk physics deals with visible solid objects that need to be in direct contact and exert immediate influence, folk psychology deals with invisible internal “essences.” Interaction between these invisible essences is possible at a distance, and the effects need not be immediate. These unseen internal essences consist of things like beliefs, desires, intentions and goals, and their internal generation is intimately related to visible external behavior. For example, from a distance you see someone stealing your food, and though this will make you angry you might not immediately act upon your anger. You might, for example, let the anger simmer inside and punish the thief at a later, more appropriate time and place. An outside observer with a functioning folk psychology can easily make sense of this and predict that the thief might be in for an unpleasant surprise at some future time. Like folk physics, our folk psychological intuitions are the product of evolution and come to us spontaneously and effortlessly – they are innate. [72] Unlike folk physics, however, folk psychological expectations are not present at birth, not even in rudimentary form. They mature later in life, acquiring near-adult competency at between four to six years of age.
Our folk psychological understanding is very structured. The unseen internal essences or states that generate behavior have clear causal relations to each other: perception leads to belief, which leads to intention, which leads to action. For example, a five-year old child understands that if her mother sees the cookie jar open (perception) she will understand the child has been stealing cookies (belief), become upset and want to punish the child (intention), meaning she will get spanked (action). It is for this reason that the child appreciates the need to preserve the appearance of an untampered cookie jar. At a younger age the child will fail to understand this.
Unfortunately, some children will never understand the importance of such simple acts. It has been known since the 1980s that autistic children, for example, do not develop a functioning folk psychology. [73] They are, in other words, unable to impute unseen internal beliefs and desires into other people, meaning they cannot predict what others will do or understand their social environment. Because they don’t have a folk psychology they are often said to treat people and objects alike - people are just another solid object, to be processed according to the rules of folk physics. This folk psychology failure is independent of any general IQ deficits - even autistic children of average or above average IQ lack a folk psychology. In contrast, other groups of children with abnormally low IQs, like those with Downs’ syndrome, have a fully functioning folk psychology. They can understand other people’s actions and behave appropriately in social situations.
Only humans have a folk psychology. Scientists have debated for decades whether chimpanzees might also have a folk psychology, but to this day we are the only confirmed species. The tragedy of autism can help us appreciate its importance for our species. The ability to understand and predict other people’s behavior has allowed very complicated forms of group living and forever changed the evolutionary trajectory of our species. Group living, in turn, is what has driven the evolution of our large brains, as we will see in the next chapter.
Having said that, we need to understand the function of folk psychology - the reason it evolved. Its purpose is simply to facilitate day-to-day social interactions, nothing else. When I see a large screaming man running towards me wielding a heavy stone, it is very useful for me to form the impression that he believes I did something which made him angry and, unless I move out of his reach, he is going to express his anger into specific actions with a very detrimental impact on my health. Likewise, when I am alone with a fertile woman and she removes her clothes in front of me, it is very useful for me to understand that she wants to have sex. It is also useful for me to understand that my wife should not see me having sex with this woman, because this will negatively affect her view of me, leading to significant problems in our relationship. Folk psychology handles these tasks brilliantly.
Folk psychology appeared very late in our evolution, probably sometime during the last one million years. By then we were already fully-formed apes with extremely complex brains, not that far off from where they are today. We also had very complicated neural circuits devoted to mating: these operated without a folk psychology, without a language - so you couldn’t talk your way into success - and were already vastly more complex than any artificial device modern man has created. Our newly evolved folk psychology tried to make sense of all this complexity in the simplest, most efficient way possible. Accuracy or a better understanding of reality was not its function - the only factor that drove its evolution was the facilitation of daily social interactions. Folk physics appeared much earlier than folk psychology but with a similarly limited goal: to facilitate our day-to-day understanding of the mostly inanimate objects that make up our physical surroundings. That was it, nothing more. The power of physics from Newton onwards was not that it allowed a more accurate description of everyday physical reality, which at any rate it did not. You can go about your daily business and lead a perfectly functional life whether you believe in an Aristotelian of Newtonian universe. The power of the new physics was precisely that it went beyond what is readily apparent to the senses. It reached behind the superficial, uncovering deeper regularities of motion that went against people’s intuitions. Because of its depth and power, it allowed for things like precise astronomical predictions and the creation of rockets and spaceships, things which the intuitive but hopelessly simplistic Aristotelian physics could never achieve.
Which brings us to our problem. Psychological methods, like the Mystery, Krauser, or BlackDragon method, or any other method currently on the market - to my knowledge - are products of folk psychology. They are chance elaborations of readily available, intuitive concepts. For all their slicing and dicing, their categorizing and staging, for all the dozens of arrows and boxes that make up their flowcharts, they are based on folk notions and whatever personal experiences the lay theorist brings to the table. By mastering these psychological methods students can, for example, “demonstrate” or “show” or “convey” “value.” This will “create attraction” in the girl and this invisible state of attraction will compel her to continue the interaction. Then at some point, by pushing the right buttons and saying the right things, the man will create another internal state inside her, “desire,” and then she will give herself to him. Without comparing the intellect of Aristotle to the lay theorists of the seduction industry, we can see how modern psychological methods can appeal to a student’s folk psychology, just like Aristotle appeals to our folk physics. Take any lay seduction theory – your favorite if you have one - and go through it with a dispassionate eye. Does it really tell you anything you didn’t know or could conceivably work out using your common sense? Does it surprise you in any of the ways that genuinely powerful, counterintuitive theories do? Invariably, the answer will be no.
Trying to build a general theory of courtship or mating using one’s personal experiences and folk psychology is about as likely to succeed as trying to build a rocket using folk physics. It is just not cut out for the job. But don’t take my word for it. Consider another, much older field that is also based on common sense and folk psychology. This field uses the exact same instrument as the seduction industry’s instrument of choice: talk. It even shares the seduction industry’s goal: that a woman be attracted to a man. But unlike many of the shady pickup artists and gurus of the seduction industry, the people who make up this field are all highly educated and intelligent professionals, usually of the highest moral caliber. They have spent years in universities and other higher education establishments learning their trade, and devote themselves to a lifetime of professional development. They are certified by the state and held to the highest professional and ethical standards. They communicate their methods and findings in peer-reviewed journals, printed by the most prestigious publishing houses. Yet for all their credentials and efforts, their results are far from impressive. They are actually so unimpressive that when you find out someone you know is resorting to their services, no one will blame you if your first thought is “hmm, waste of time.” I am referring to the field of marriage counselling.
Maybe you know someone who managed to save their marriage by going to a marriage counsellor - I personally don’t. I am no expert in the field, but I can assure you that if you ever visit a marriage counsellor you’re not going to get anything far removed from common sense. To my knowledge at least, the field has resisted influences from evolutionary psychology, but even if it hadn’t I doubt evolutionary psychology would be able to offer much at this point of its development. You will perhaps be shown ways of better expressing your feelings and improving communication or come to understand and revise negative beliefs that are impacting the relationship. You might be given the opportunity to openly discuss past problems or conflicts that were never properly addressed. You’re going to get the best of what folk psychology has to offer, refined by decades of research, conducted to the highest standards, by top professionals. And you will be very lucky if it works.
It would be bad enough if the differences between marriage counsellors and seduction gurus were limited to what I noted above, such as the quality of the professionals that make up the two fields or the standards they follow. There is a far more profound, night-and-day difference. The women who undergo marriage counselling are highly motivated and deeply invested in success. They want to work things out, they want to love their husbands and save their marriage. They understand that the stakes are enormous. They have children, a mortgage, shared finances and the same friends. Failure to work things out will often be disastrous. These women - and their partners - are willing to pay a lot of money, spend considerable time, and give the therapist their full co-operation to achieve this goal. But more often than not the result is failure. If the results are so poor when the woman is an eager participant who is willing to do anything for success, we can imagine how bad they will be when she can’t care less. When she is an unwilling participant who has been dragged into an interaction without being asked, talking to a man she couldn’t care less for, with zero interest or motivation.
I have argued that folk psychology is not cut out for the task of providing a deeper understanding of female mate choice. Any resulting theory will be intuitive, simplistic and useless from a practical perspective. The problem is that because we spend our entire lives seeing and analyzing our social world through our folk psychological glasses, it can be difficult to even imagine a kind of theory or research that does not depend on folk psychology. We will now visit one such example.
A case study in scientific theories
You might remember from our discussion of women’s preferences for masculine faces in the previous chapter how the relationship wasn’t as clear-cut as scientists originally expected. On the whole, women seem to prefer slightly feminized male faces, but this is a very loose tendency, and older studies tended to give conflicting results. Prompted by the inconsistent results in the literature, a team of British and Japanese scientists decided to test an original hypothesis they suspected could begin to account for the discrepancies. The results of their landmarks experiments were published in the journal “Nature” in 1999. [74] Before getting into the actual experiments let’s set the theoretical background that made them possible.
Masculine faces in men indicate underlying genetic quality; men with more masculine faces tend to have a superior genetic endowment than their more feminized counterparts. Testosterone is actually an immunosuppressant: a hormone that suppresses a man’s immune functioning. This leaves him vulnerable to attack by pathogens like viruses and bacteria. Masculine facial features like large lower faces and jawbones are indicative of high testosterone levels during development, levels which only males of a high functioning immune level ( immunocompetent males) can afford. By developing masculine facial features these men are signaling to women their desirable genetic status, which their children will also inherit. Men who don’t have a genuinely high-functioning immune system cannot afford to secrete the extra testosterone while their face is developing - if they do their health might be seriously compromised by pathogens - and remain more feminized. Though they have better genes, masculine men are also more likely to make poor long-term partners and parents. These men tend to have more sexual partners and are less interested in pursuing exclusive long-term relationships and rearing children. This leaves women with an evolutionary dilemma. On the one hand women should have evolved a preference for bearing the children of masculine men, since these children will inherit the good genes of their fathers. On the other hand, because masculine men are not very good relationship material, women should have evolved a preference for forming long-term pair bonds with more feminized men who make, on balance, better partners and parents. These are conflicting aims. You just can’t have your cake and eat it.
Or can you? The researchers hypothesized that women might have evolved a solution to this conundrum. This would be to pursue long-term relationships with relatively feminized men ( primary partners ) and have clandestine sexual encounters with relatively masculinized men ( extrapair partners ). Biologists refer to these clandestine sexual encounters as extrapair copulations , or EPC s. EPCs have been studied extensively in other species, especially birds, whose socially monogamous mating system resembles ours in many ways. Males and females cooperate in building the nest and raising the chicks, and the female is ostensibly faithful to the male. But a substantial percentage of these seemingly faithful females do engage in EPCs, almost always with males who are genetically superior to their primary partner. [75] The offspring conceived through these EPCs also tend to be healthier than their half-siblings who are sired by the female’s primary partner. [76]
A similar EPC strategy in humans would require two conditions. First, women should only pursue EPCs with masculine men when ovulating. Since the purpose of EPCs is to obtain superior genetic material for their offspring, women would have no reason to engage in them outside of ovulation, when conception is impossible. Second, this strategy would need to be subtle, otherwise the primary partners might pick up on their partners’ infidelity and abandon them. The EPC strategy should only take place in the right time and under the right conditions. At a minimum these conditions are a) ovulating woman, b) suitable extrapair partner available, and c) primary partner not around. If these conditions never materialize during a woman’s lifetime, then so be it; she will simply not pursue the EPC strategy. Evolution works in the long-term, in geological time. The reproductive consequences of a very subtle and imperceptible – over the course of a woman’s lifetime - effect can add up dramatically over many generations. And there is no better way to achieve this subtle effect than to mildly adjust the woman’s attraction to masculine faces when she is ovulating. So mildly, in fact, that she doesn’t even realize what is happening.
To test this perceptual shift hypothesis , the researchers asked Japanese women to select the most attractive male face out of a series of digitally created composites that had been manipulated to various levels of masculinity. The results supported the perceptual shift hypothesis. The Japanese women selected more masculine male faces when ovulating and less masculine ones when in the non-fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. To further confirm their hypothesis, in a second experiment researchers allowed a sample of British women to digitally alter composite male faces along a feminized-masculinized spectrum, in order to create their ideal partner for either a long-term or short-term relationship. As expected, women’s preferences for faces of long-term partners were the same, regardless of their menstrual cycle phase. When asked to choose the most attractive face for a short-term partner, however, women preferred more masculinized faces when they were ovulating compared to when they were not.
With the Nature paper the floodgates had opened. Evolutionary psychologists quickly picked up the ball and started experimenting to discover other similar perceptual shifts. After nearly two decades, this line of research has yielded impressive results. [77] We now know that the changes in women’s preferences for masculine faces are not isolated but part of a finely-tuned and coordinated set of perceptual shifts. These coordinated shifts guide ovulating women to seek numerous indicators of masculinity, like masculine voices and masculine bodies. At the same time, ovulating women show an increased preference for male characteristics that signal genetic quality – independent of masculinity - like symmetry and attractiveness. Even women’s preferences for scents is affected by their ovulation status. When ovulating, women show a clear preference for odors of men with higher genetic quality. These concerted shifts in preferences are absent in women who take the pill or other hormonal contraceptives. It appears that artificially interfering with the menstrual cycle to prevent conception has unanticipated knock-on effects on women’s sexual psychology.
The cyclic changes in preferences are accompanied by cyclic shifts in behavior. Research has found that ovulating women are less interested in intimacy and more interested in sexual fantasies and casual sex. They feel less committed to their primary partner and report less satisfaction with their relationship. In line with these changes they attend places like social gatherings and nightclubs more frequently, often without their partner. Their attraction to other men grows, and they engage in EPCs at higher rates. As predicted, the magnitude of these changes is dependent on the genetic quality of women’s partners. Ovulating women whose primary partners are less attractive show a larger inclination towards extrapair sex. Women who are not maximally genetically compatible with their primary partner also show larger shifts. [78] As in the case of the perceptual shifts, the shifts in behavior are very subtle. If you hope to personally spot them on women you know, you will be disappointed. Researchers can only detect them by using large groups of women and sophisticated statistical tests.
My purpose in telling this scientific story is to provide a standard against which we can now compare lay theories of mating. The first thing to note is how unintuitive this research has been. There is nothing in our folk psychology that could ever lead us to expect women’s preferences for male faces to change every month and do so predictably, like clockwork. Throughout recorded history, romantic and sexual attraction have been among the most popular cultural themes. Thousands of philosophers, poets, authors, musicians, artists and – lately – seduction gurus and dating coaches have devoted their lives to this subject. Endless works have been written. Billions of women undergo these changes every month. Yet nobody even suspected the existence of these shifts.
There was something missing: sophisticated ideas and theories far removed from folk psychology but with vastly more explanatory power. To understand what makes a male face attractive a researcher needs to look beyond simple concepts like “attraction” and “desire.” He must resort to disciplines like immunology, zoology and genetics, disciplines which on the shallow surface served to us by our folk psychology would have absolutely no connection to why a woman should fancy a man. The researcher needs to carefully select the relevant theories and findings from these seemingly disconnected fields and use his finest analytical thinking in a way that often runs counter to his own folk intuitions. Then he can only hope that the results will turn out as expected - there are no guarantees.
But ideas and theories are not enough. Sophisticated research needs sophisticated methods. Human mating is very “noisy,” with numerous factors always at play. Individual differences between women - and men - are also great. For this reason, casual observations from a scientist’s personal experience would be useless. Instead, the scientist needs to compare large groups of otherwise randomly selected women on the basis of the variables that interest him. In this case he needs to compare groups of ovulating vs non-ovulating women. He also needs to carefully create the relevant stimuli that should similarly differ only on the variables of interest - in this case masculinized vs feminized male faces. Then statistical methods must be used to capture differences between the groups of women that the naked eye alone could not discern. Without these careful procedures the best theories in the world will not suffice.
While it has been a fascinating scientific advance, our emerging understanding of the cyclical nature of women’s perceptual and behavioral shifts in not yet what we would call applied or practical knowledge. For various reasons its day-to-day usefulness for a man wanting to improve his mating is zero. To begin with, these shifts are very subtle. Individual differences in mate choice preferences and behavior between women, whether genetic or environmental in origin, are massive compared to the shift that takes place within a woman’s cycle. Secondly, ovulation in women is concealed, meaning that unless a man were to begin administering ovulation tests he would have no way of knowing if his dates are ovulating. Thirdly, even if he somehow knew the timing of a woman’s ovulation, he could not know exactly where he stands on the genetic quality or masculinity/femininity continuums. For example, a man who considers himself very masculine and dominant might be surprised to find that if he were to have his face, body and personality evaluated and ranked among all the other men in his population he would turn out to be quite average or low on these dimensions. Fourth, even if he somehow did have a precise idea of where he stands, he would not know what to do about it, as psychologists have yet to develop tested systems that adapt male behavior to variations in female psychology.
The same or similar limitations apply for most advances psychologists have made in understanding women’s mating mechanisms. Due to the complexity of the subject, whenever psychologists want to study something that interests them, like ovulation-dependent perceptual shifts, they necessarily study it in isolation. If they did not isolate things, they would not be able to begin doing research. But this is only a necessary evil. Isolating something and studying it on its own works well in disciplines like physics and chemistry that deal with relatively simple things. But when it comes to the most complex object in the known universe, the human brain, this approach is bound to be slow, painful and full of error.
The big black box
We can usefully describe female mate choice as a big black box. Little is known, and even less is known with certainty. For the purposes of this book, a popular text aimed at men who want practical answers, I have deliberately painted a rosy picture of the research findings. In my simplified depiction there are cumulative and irreversible increments in knowledge, where new studies add additional pieces to an already solid foundation. This has been an oversimplification. Reading the technical literature evolutionary psychologists use to communicate you will be struck by the extent of their disagreements and the inconsistencies in many of their studies’ results. The same experiment, using very similar or even identical methods, will give different results when conducted a second time. This goes back to the problem we discussed previously of artificially trying to isolate and study one p arameter of a system where this can never be fully achieved. Even when you think you are faithfully following an experiment’s blueprint exactly as another psychologist has described it in a technical journal, you might be missing something that uniquely contributed to the earlier results. The previous psychologist might not have been aware of it or might have thought it too trivial to report. This could be anything from unique characteristics of the study population, the geographical location or time of year, all the way down to mundane details like the type of computer screen and software used in the experiment.
Returning to the black box analogy, we know, in broad outlines, some of the mate choice criteria women use to select a man, but these are just the inputs that are fed into a very complicated machine. When you type some search keywords into the Google search engine, the page immediately returns a list of results. Just because you know the keywords that led to the results on your screen you are under no illusion that you understand the inner workings of the search code. This is billions of lines long and runs on countless servers around the world. Similarly, women can effortlessly and instinctively feel “attracted” or “uninterested” in a man. It comes to them with the same apparent effortlessness the search results appear on your browser. But underlying these effortless and instantaneous evaluations is a massive computational apparatus concealed inside their cranial cavity, embedded in neural tissue. An evolutionary psychologist can give an interesting theoretical outline of women’s most important mate choice criteria, but he can’t yet say much with certainty about the complicated “code” they use to process the various inputs and come up with the evaluation. Perhaps our most solid advance over the last decades has been appreciating how long and sophisticated the code will ultimately turn out to be. What was once naively considered a simple “social learning” process is turning out to be incredible complex, multidimensional and variable. Let’s look at some of the parameters that will need to be included in any complete future description of the black box. These range from the molecular to the population-level.
Starting from the molecular, part of the variability in female mate choice stems from the fact that women are more attracted to men who are genetically different. [79] Similarity might be desirable when it comes to things like personalities and interests, but due to the way our genetic inheritance system is set up, similarity of certain genes is undesirable. In conditions of extreme genetic similarity, as in incest, the resulting child can be severely handicapped or deformed. In matings of more moderately similar persons, like two distant relatives, the child might simply be less intelligent, attractive or healthy than average. On the flipside the more different or dissimilar the genes of the parents, the healthier their children tend to be. [80] A woman assesses a man’s genetic suitability through her nose. The more dissimilar his DNA to hers, the more attractive she finds his scent. We know this much from laboratory studies that ask women to rate the attractiveness of men’s odors, but the implications for real-life relationships go beyond the nose. Genetically testing real-life couples reveals that the quality of their sex life is linked to the degree of the partners’ genetic similarity. The more genetically similar a woman is to her partner, the more her sexual desire and satisfaction levels drop, and the more likely she is to cheat on him. [81]
Another source of variation in women’s mate choice preferences are the unique experiences they receive during their early years. Childhood and adolescence are critical learning periods which will have persistent effects in various areas of a woman’s life, and mating is no exception. The girl’s father provides a very convenient and easily accessible template for a man’s appearance, and it is no coincidence that when they grow up women tend, statistically, to be attracted to men who resemble their fathers. Research finds that women like men of the same race and culture as their father, men with the same hair and eye color, as well as men with similar facial features. [82] Details like the amount of facial and body hair women like in a man or the strength of their preference for tall men are also linked to the hairiness and stature of their father, respectively. Even the degree to which a woman is attracted to older men is influenced by her father’s age at birth. [83] Women born to older fathers - and mothers – “tolerate” men who are much older substantially better than those born to younger fathers. This line of research is very recent and just beginning to scratch the surface of relevant childhood experiences. Factors like the personality of the parents, the nature of their relationship or the parenting the woman received as a child are certain to also play a role.
Other variation in mate preferences owes to the fact not all women have the same mate value. [84] What a woman would like from a man is not always what she can realistically attain, especially if she is not particularly desirable herself. Humans tend to mate assortatively, meaning that men and women are more likely to end up with someone of roughly similar mate value. It makes sense for women – and men – to be attuned to their personal mate value and set the bar for what they expect in a partner at the appropriate height. In the next chapter we will discuss how this affects men’s mating behavior, but a similar process takes place with women. The strength of women’s preferences for male characteristics like symmetrical faces and attractive skin are all moderated by their own self-perceived attractiveness: the more desirable the woman the stronger these preferences. [85] A woman’s perception of her own attractiveness, in turn, is strongly dependent on the social context, namely how she fares relative to other women in her immediate surroundings. [86]
In recent years we are beginning to realize just how adept women also are at tailoring their mating preferences to their local environment. In Chapter 1 we saw how men’s physical attractiveness is tied to their genetic quality, health, and ability to resist pathogens. Women who mate with men possessing these desirable genetic qualities pass them on, to some degree, to their children. Accordingly, women who live in environments where parasites and other pathogens are prevalent place a premium on a man’s physical attractiveness. [87] In contrast, women in poorer environments, where child-rearing is demanding and infant mortality high, place more importance on a man’s resource acquisition potential and his willingness to invest in the relationship. [88] These shifts in the relative weight of preferences ensure women’s mating is tailored to their social and ecological environment. Women also adjust their behavior to the local sex ratio (the percentage of men vs women in the population). When women are more scarce their selectivity increases, and they are less willing to engage in uncommitted sex. [89]
The differences discussed so far in this section are environmentally provoked. They arise from the human brain’s tremendous plasticity and ability to respond appropriately to different environmental circumstances. But other differences are almost certainly genetic, meaning that different genes women inherit from their parents lead to discrete and inflexible differences in mating preferences and behaviors. These genetic differences arise at least partly from what biologists call frequency-dependent selection , a process where genetic variants perform better the rarer they are. [90] There are no confirmed cases of frequency-dependent selection in women’s mate choice, and I won’t bore you with the complicated details. Suffice it to say we will first need a solid working hypothesis on the evolutionary process maintaining the different genetic variants and then a way of teasing apart the genetically induced behavioral differences from all the “noise” that arises from environmental differences (and from differences owing to other genetic processes). The final step will be to pinpoint these genetic variants at the molecular level, identifying the specific chromosomes and genes responsible. At present we are nowhere near this level of research sophistication.
***
Whether they know or care to phrase it in these terms, psychological methods claim to crack female mate choice. They explicitly or implicitly claim that through their use a man can systematically fool women into accepting him, women who would otherwise reject him. If the entire problem of female mate choice is reduced to a small group of internal psychological states like “attraction” and “seduction,” then cracking it doesn’t seem like too big a deal. The daunting black box we have just described does not even exist – out of sight, out mind. As far as the seduction industry is concerned, the mating process is made of simple folk psychological building blocks, and everything takes place through the straitjacket of the lay model. It is therefore to be expected that lay theorists and seduction coaches will always identify the reason the mating attempt failed in the poor execution of the method. There is no space for other factors in the model’s narrow worldview . The student delivered the opener too quickly, for example, or was standing too far away from the woman, or failed to respond properly to a signal of interest or disinterest. Alternatively, if the woman said yes this was because the method was executed correctly and more proof of the model’s validity. As the saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Once one reaches beyond his folk psychological understanding of the problem and starts to approach it from less accessible domains like biology and cognitive science, its enormity becomes apparent. Crucially, the extent of just how little we understand also becomes clear.
Why nothing is free
Assuming there was any merit in them to begin with, the creators of psychological methods don’t bother to even test if their teaching is done in an optimal or even feasible manner. It is simply assumed that verbally transmitting some instructions or ideas to the student will do the trick. Furthermore, the more content is transmitted the better. The industry leaders pride themselves on the comprehensiveness and breadth of their instructional content. They offer extensive, multi-volume book, audio and video sets that cover every aspect of pickup and seduction. The student is asked to study this mass of content at home and then apply it on real women. But this is an extremely unlikely idea of teaching efficacy.
If I give you one simple rule and instruct you to make a sincere, conscious effort to apply it in your everyday life, there is a good chance you will succeed. If I give you two rules it is still likely you will apply both, but your chances will be less. If I now give you hours of theoretical lecturing on top of ten or twenty complicated rules, it’s a safe bet that by the end you will have forgotten most of it. At best you will apply the rules in an inconsistent and disorganized manner before eventually giving up. [91] But this is exactly what most psychological methods do. An inexperienced student is given a lay theory and verbal script and asked to run with it. This would be bad enough if the students were trying to calmly learn something like a new sporting or musical ability in the privacy and comfort of their own home. In this case they are tasked with performing a stressful, emotionally debilitating public action in real time. They are expected to walk up to an unknown woman and run a script, without having done either before in their lives. Instructors of psychological methods don’t bother to test if this can be done or, much less, compare performance to a “control group” of students that are given just one simple rule - better yet, no rules at all. When one considers the additional burden these methods place on the cognitive and emotional capacities of the students, it is no surprise most will never be able to pull the trigger and approach even a single woman.
Opportunity cost is a concept from economics that refers to all the options you forego when choosing any single course of action. By choosing one action you automatically lose out on all the others. For example, the real cost of learning the guitar is not the cost of the instrument or the tutoring but the thousands of hours you will invest that could be spent doing something else, like learning to play the piano or learning backflips. Nothing comes for free, even when you don’t have to pay a penny for it. The cost is always what you could be doing instead - the opportunity cost. One of the things that impresses me the most about the seduction industry is how completely absent this concept is from its teaching methods. Here the only cost of things is their retail price, and for any given price more is better. Visit the website of any leading seduction company and try to count the bullet points with all the amazing techniques, tips and tricks the student will find in the company’s latest book or DVD set. [92] Whether the student will even be able to remember – much less apply – any of it is a problem that does not figure in the seduction industry’s universe. Considerations of what he could be doing instead of consuming all this content are also absent.
To get an idea of the opportunity cost inherent in various teaching methods is no easy task. One would need to systematically compare them and track the progress of students subjected to the various methods through time. Only then could teaching methods qualify as rational and decisions like adding a bonus fifth video or extending the workshop by one day be justified. But because the conceivable teaching methods are infinite, one would need to start from basics. Begin with minimal content and build from there, studying the opportunity cost in any new branch of added content. This is a long and arduous process, very different to the seduction industry’s favorite method of blindly throwing growing content against the wall and hoping it sticks.
Because its teaching methods are hopeless, the large majority of the seduction industry’s students will never manager to even take the first step. This will be regardless of which method they choose and regardless of whether they attempt to learn the method through books, videos, seminars or live instruction. The anxiety of approaching a woman and trying to learn a new method in real-time will work together to ensure the students abandon the effort before they have even begun. The specifics of the model and the method won’t really matter.
Having said that, many of the pickup artists and seduction instructors who teach these methods do lead astonishing mating lives. Marketing hype aside, these men genuinely have sex with extraordinary numbers of women, and these women are often of high mate value. These pickup artists have qualitatively different sex lives: they have sex on tap, whenever they want to. Because nothing in the seduction industry is tested and compared, the performance of these prominent front-men is usually all the potential student has to go by when choosing his psychological method. The problem, as we will see, is that the stunning mating success of these men is not because of their psychological method – it is in spite of it.
We have seen why the psychological methods on the market today are almost certainly not only ineffective but counterproductive. For most of this chapter’s remainder we will explore why any conceivable psychological method, even a sophisticated future method that avoids all the problems of existing ones, is unlikely to have anything but marginal effects. But the chapter has a happy ending, where we review data from research that strongly suggests you can discard psychological methods entirely and still have a lot of success with women. In the next chapter we will take this nugget of hope and turn it into a full-blown but very simple method which you can start using immediately to transform your mating life.
Evolved faculties and acquired skills
The marketing foundation of the seduction industry is the idea that interacting with women is a skill, and that this skill can be taught. There are levels of competency (like beginner, intermediate and advanced) and teaching material supposedly tailored to the student's level. Predictably, the industry likes to emphasize how similar picking up women is to learning other skills. Tom Torero, a London-based coach, discusses why the suggestion to just “be yourself” with women is folly:
[...] but for guys getting into this [picking up women] that is stupid advice. It's like a driving instructor on your first lesson, just opening the door and saying “good luck, just be yourself, just drive the car, just feel good man, just feel the vibe - all will be well.” You get into a Formula 1 car, see what happens. So, you have to learn those game techniques, you have to learn those structures, you have to learn those little gambits, one-liners, stories, you have to change your fashion, and your posture and your voice [...] [93]
On another occasion Torero discusses women with an ex-professional poker player. The discussion quickly focuses on the similarities between poker and women.
Torero: [...] as you know I'm against the “be yourself,” “be natural,” “give-it-a-go” model, and I guess, a guy walking into a pro [poker] tournament, and you just said to me, “Tom, yeah, just give it a go man, just feel the vibe of the room,” would be suicide, yeah?
Poker player: It'd be very expensive to learn poker by being yourself basically. [94]
The emphasis Torero places on the similarities between women on the one hand, and poker or driving cars on the other, is understandable from a marketing perspective. Biologically, however, the two could not be further apart. The problem with the analogy is that cars and poker have only been around for one or two centuries, whereas women have been a permanent fixture of our environment for as long we have. From our species’ point of view, they are as ancient as the sun and rocks.
Evolution is very slow. Depending on various parameters it can take many thousands or tens of thousands of years for a single brain-modifying - or anything-modifying - gene to spread in a human population. Evolution has not had enough time to prepare our brains specifically for driving cars or playing poker – they are environmental novelties. We must be taught, slowly and painstakingly, to do these things. In the beginning the task of driving a car, for example, can be so daunting that many of us are convinced we will never learn to drive. We must consciously plan and think through our every move, and the learning process is as easy as running through knee-high water with ankle weights. With poker things are less scary – it’s a relatively easy game, and we don’t have to worry about injuring ourselves or others. But as Torero points out, try playing for money in a competitive environment like a casino - unless you have years of experience and study to carry you through you will quickly lose your money. Cars and poker are just two examples of environmental novelties that did not exist until very recently, but modern life is full of them. Pianos, violins, motorcycles, chemistry textbooks, computer programming languages and chess are a few that just popped into my head out of thousands of examples.
Now let's contrast these environmental novelties with features of our world that have been with us forever, like the sun, rocks, and, of course, women. [95] When something has been around so long evolution is able to slowly “learn” about it and equip us with “innate” or “hardwired” knowledge. This way every new generation doesn’t have to start learning from scratch. This type of evolutionary learning is very different from the normal everyday learning that happens when you try to learn how to drive a car or play the piano. It takes place through brain-modifying genes substituting one another in geological time. Genes that modify the brain in line with the relevant feature of the environment spread in the population, replacing earlier genes that lacked this alignment. The end products of this very slow, genetic learning are called developmental programs. [96] These programs are hardwired into our brain and allow us to come into this world with innate knowledge, sparing us the trial-and-error type of learning that would otherwise be necessary. Such trial-and-error learning would not only take much longer and result in numerous - potentially fatal - errors but would often be impossible.
An excellent example of a developmental program is language acquisition, which is worth discussing in some detail. Language acquisition is accomplished through a dedicated developmental program called LAD ( Language Acquisition Device ), that is active in childhood. After the age of seven this developmental program gradually declines, before switching off completely in puberty. [97] While the LAD is active, in a few short years we all go from incompetent babblers to proficient speakers of our native language. All healthy children, regardless of their family’s socioeconomic status or their general intelligence, become proficient in their local language by the age of five or six. They do this effortlessly, mostly without even understanding what they're doing. I remember when I was a child growing up in Greece being asked by adults if I spoke English, because my mother is from the United States. And while I did speak both English and Greek fluently, the question made no sense to me. I didn’t understand what “English” was - or “Greek” for that matter. I could effortlessly speak both languages and switch from one to the other depending on who I was speaking to, without realizing what I was doing.
Contrast the ease, speed and perfection with which children learn a language through the LAD, with the laborious, miserable and sloppy process for adults who decide to learn a foreign language. By that time the LAD has switched off, and years of intensive and dedicated study will inevitably produce a language competency that is inferior to that of a native speaking child. The adult will almost always make at least some errors and will never master a native accent. The learning mode has now shifted from a fast, effortless and dedicated developmental program, to everyday learning of a novelty via trial and error.
The LAD illustrates two properties of developmental program that interest us. Firstly, different developmental programs operate at different ages. They can become active at a certain stage in our life and deactivate at another. Like teeth or breasts, just because they are not present at birth makes them no less innate. Secondly, just because they are innate doesn’t mean developmental programs don’t require environmental inputs to operate. In the case of language acquisition, the necessary environmental inputs are the sounds of the spoken language we are exposed to as children, be it English, Greek, or Chinese. A child who grows up without being exposed to a spoken language will not learn any language, LAD or no LAD. Even though developmental programs are ultimately genetic in nature, having been formed by brain-modifying genes substituting one another in geological time, they can still be very much reliant on the environment for their operation. Depending on the degree to which they require environmental inputs, developmental programs can be classified as open or closed . Open developmental programs are sensitive to environmental stimuli that are expected to vary in the organism's environment, while closed developmental programs require no such flexibility and therefore no environmental inputs, meaning that their end behavioral product tends to be much more inflexible. [98]
The LAD was an example of an open developmental program. Examples of closed developmental programs can be found in the domains of the sun and rocks mentioned earlier. Because these environmental features have been more stable and predictable during our species’ evolution compared to - for example – the variable sounds and grammars of human languages, environmental inputs are not necessary for the corresponding developmental programs to function. In response to the earth’s never-ending 24-hour rotation and day/night cycle we have evolved, like other animals, the so-called circadian rhythm . This is a 24-hour biological clock that regulates our sleep/wake cycle, body temperature, blood pressure, hormonal secretions and various other biological functions to match the never-ending succession of day and night. Even if you are locked away in a dark underground bunker your circadian rhythm will continue to oscillate once every 24 hours. You will still find yourself falling asleep late in the evening and waking up in the morning, even though you don’t consciously know the time. Through millions of years of evolution your genes and brain have learned that no matter how you are raised, where you are or what you’re doing, a solar day is 24 hours. Throughout our evolution, the solar day has been such a persistent and unchanging feature of the environment that we have internalized it – it has been practically built into our very brain.
Rocks have been central in the evolution of another closed developmental program, namely humans’ understanding of projectile motion and falling objects - part of our folk physics capabilities we discussed earlier. A projectile is an object that is initially acted upon by an external force and then continues its path through gravity alone. When someone throws a rock at you it is a projectile. Other more modern projectiles are a baseball that is hit by a bat, or a cannon ball that is fired out of a cannon. With today’s scientific knowledge and technology, it is easy to predict the trajectories of these projectiles. Easy, of course, because we now have Newton’s laws of motion, as well as the complicated mathematical tools to describe projectile motion. But even if you have never heard of Newton and have no mathematical training, you will have no trouble dodging a rock flying your way or - more impressively - catching a baseball in the air. Now make no mistake: unless you solve the mathematics involved in projectile motion there can be no “learning” the baseball’s path in order to catch it – that would simply be computationally impossible. The fact that you can predict where the projectile will be is proof that at some level your brain has worked out a very close approximation to the mathematics of projectile motion. [99] All healthy humans develop the ability to predict projectile motion at a young age. They do so effortlessly, without guidance or instruction and without even realizing that they are somehow solving a non-negligible mathematical problem. Like it did with the sun's perpetual motion around the sky, evolution had millions of years through which to learn about the unchanging laws of projectile motion. This happened via our ancestor's daily interaction with objects such as rocks or sticks that were thrown at them or that they threw at others, fruits that fell off trees, and any other heavy objects that were left to travel unsupported in the air.
Table 2 summarizes how developmental programs contrast to the acquisition of novel skills. Take a moment to study the table before deciding which column mating with women fits in.
|
|
Evolved developmental programs |
Everyday learning of evolutionarily novel skills |
|
Examples |
Projectile paths, language acquisition, circadian rhythm |
Cars, chess, piano, poker |
|
Effort level required |
Generally effortless |
Effort required |
|
Achieved by |
Everyone |
Only those who put in the effort |
|
Present during evolution |
Yes |
No |
|
Evolutionarily important |
Yes |
No |
|
Is instruction by a teacher possible? |
No |
Yes |
Table 2. Evolved faculties (developmental programs) compared to novel skills
The answer should be obvious. We learn about women through a dedicated, evolved developmental program. Like spoken languages, the sun and projectiles, women have been a permanent fixture of our species' environment and one of the most critical ones at that. Me, you and all the men alive today are descended from the ancestral men with the most successful reproductive careers, who had the most women and left the most children. We can be certain that evolution has endowed us with an elaborate, sophisticated developmental program that allows us to learn about women in the quickest and most efficient manner.
The developmental program dedicated to women is open, requiring inputs from the social environment to operate. And it is open because women are orders of magnitude more complex and unpredictable than entities like the sun or projectiles. A day will always last 24 hours, and once a rock is thrown into the air its path can be predicted with certainty, regardless of who threw it or who is observing it. Women behave in ways that a) are infinitely more complex, b) can be entirely unpredictable and erratic and c) are dynamically dependent on the person the woman is interacting with. For these reasons the corresponding developmental program must be open. It is a lifelong program that begins already in childhood, when little boys subconsciously look to their mother as a template for what a woman is supposed to look like. They engage in sexual play with little girls and compare their genitals with other little boys. The mating program then subsides somewhat during later childhood, before transitioning to the first full-blown sexual interactions in adolescence. It then continues through early adulthood and beyond, as sexual and romantic relationships come and go. In the next chapter we will go into more detail into how this program can unfold in adulthood.
Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, are illuminating in this regard. Chimpanzees have a very different mating system to ours. Females generally have sex only during certain days of their menstrual cycle. On these days their genitals will swell massively, signaling to the males of the group that they are near ovulation. For reasons that are not fully understood, when this happens the females are often happy to mate with all adult males in their group. Males will sometimes watch a female mate with several other males in succession and patiently wait until it is their turn. Going without sex is something that an adult male chimpanzee will not have to worry about. But setting aside the differences in our mating systems, owing to a very large brain and complicated social life, the chimpanzee shares with us a lifelong developmental program dedicated to mating. To be able to mate competently an adult male must have received certain social inputs during a critical period in his development. And all inputs are not equally useful, as studies with captive chimpanzees show. About one in three males who are raised by humans are able to mate with females as adults, compared to around one in two of those who are raised with other chimpanzees of a similar age, and nearly 90% of those who are raised with at least one adult chimpanzee. [100] Being raised by humans is so inappropriate to these animals’ developmental programs that scientists have suggested it is better to raise a captive chimpanzee in solitary confinement than have him raised by humans. [101]
Even if raised in ideal circumstances in the wild, it will take years for the male chimpanzee to get it right. In the beginning he will struggle with his technique during copulation, being unable to even insert his penis inside the female. It will take him even longer to develop and refine the courtship signals that immediately precede copulation. Later in life he will have the opportunity to develop more complex mating relationships with females, so-called “consortships,” where he and a female disappear from the rest of their group for a few days to mate in peace. As in humans, chimpanzee mating is also tied to social status. As he climbs through the male dominance hierarchy and becomes an alpha male – if he does – the male will have the opportunity to block other males from mating with a female while he sexually monopolizes her for a period of time. This type of possessive behavior is one of the most effective ways of inseminating females, but because it can only be exercised by high-ranking males - and young males are low-ranking - it must happen later in life. [102]
If we were in the habit of keeping chimpanzees as pets we would quickly realize how ridiculous it is to compare our sexual development to cats, dogs, or hamsters. These animals always seem to know what to do when it’s time to mate. They always get it right the first time, and everything then stays the same in subsequent matings. Their apparent ease and instantaneously perfect form can easily trick us into thinking that something is wrong with us, that we are unique in the animal kingdom for needing to be taught how to mate. But these are the wrong animals to compare ourselves to. The chimpanzee is nearest to us and the more appropriate comparison. Yet as sophisticated as its social and mating life are, they pale in comparison to ours, meaning that our corresponding developmental program is almost certainly even more open-ended and extensive.
Some elements of our mating program will also be conscious: we will have to plan and think through some things. Given that we are conscious social animals who use language as the primary means of exchanging information this is unsurprising. But for every conscious element there is a mountain of work that has already happened and is happening in the background that we are not aware of. Like the chimpanzee, our observations on how other males of our species go about dealing with females are undoubtedly useful, as is the occasional piece of advice from our male relatives and friends – chimpanzees can’t talk after all. But we should not miss the forest for the trees. The inputs that our mating program has evolved to receive are not books about females, audio series about females, lectures about females or courses about females. They are interactions with real live females. Trying to feed this program the wrong kind of input can have devastating consequences, just like it does with the chimpanzee. It will set you back, and the longer you persist in it the further it can set you back.
Honest signals and cheap talk
If we had to find a common thread to most seduction theories, this would probably be the emphasis on “value.” The student is supposed to behave as a “high value” male and “demonstrate” or “show” this high value. The term is used loosely and with different meanings in different seduction schools, but what is generally meant is mate value or some intuitive approximation of it. The goal is deception, to convince the woman that the student is of higher mate value than he really is. The means to this deception are primarily verbal - and to a lesser extent behavioral - scripts. Without looking at the specifics of these various scripts, theoretical biology tells us they will all fall far short of their goal.
The problem is that if there conceivably existed any sort of verbal or behavioral manipulation that could allow men to deceive women about their mate value, then a) it would have evolved long ago, and b) women would have evolved resistance to it. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that at some point in human evolution such a verbal or behavioral manipulation was possible. The type of evolutionary learning that allowed men to manipulate projectiles and internalize the motion of the sun would have also enabled them to slowly but surely work out this verbal manipulation. The men who first used it would gain a powerful reproductive advantage, and in a few generations all men would be performing the manipulation. This would leave women at a disadvantage, and there would be strong evolutionary pressures for them to evolve defenses against men’s newfound manipulation skills. The first women to evolve these counter-defenses would enjoy a reproductive advantage compared to the rest of the female population as they could reject the manipulative low mate value men and select, instead, the genuinely high value ones. Due to this reproductive advantage, in a few generations all ancestral women would be immune to the manipulation. For better or for worse, the female population on the planet today would be descended from those manipulation-resistant women.
By looking at men and women today we can tell that they have indeed gone through this evolutionary arms race of deception and counter-deception, of attempted manipulation and resistance to manipulation. Men today naturally exaggerate qualities that women find desirable and downplay or hide undesirable ones. [103] They exaggerate, for example, about their resourcefulness, masculinity, dominance and trustworthiness, while downplaying or concealing their weaknesses, like how broke, insecure or desperate for sex they might be. When around the company of other men, they exaggerate qualities that other men find desirable, like their sexual success and promiscuity. This kind of low-level verbal manipulation is so ubiquitous that it has many names: bragging, boasting, vaunting, blowing one’s horn and so on. They all have negative connotations. They refer to behaviors used in mating and non-mating contexts that have been around for so long they are well understood by everyone and met with a solid wall of defenses whenever they are employed: indifference, caution, suspicion, disregard, cynicism and even contempt.
At a fundamental level, the problem with attempting to verbally manipulate women is that one is using the weakest, least forceful mating signal possible: talk. In biology a signal is any form of communication between two animals that provides information. The communication originates from the sender and is directed to the receiver of the signal. The purpose of the signal is to reduce uncertainty in the receiver. Signals are employed in a variety of contexts, such as prey-predator, mating and agonistic interactions, [104] and can be transmitted both within (intra-) and between (inter-) species. In order for a signal to evolve it must provide benefits to both the sender and the receiver. An example of interspecies signals are the very bright coloration patterns of certain inedible insects, like the monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus . This butterfly’s conspicuous orange and black colors serve as a signal to birds that camouflage is not necessary since the butterfly is toxic, and any bird that attempts to eat it will poison itself. Accordingly, birds recognize the monarch butterfly’s signal and will not eat it. Both the sender and the receiver benefit here - the butterfly gets to live, and the bird avoids a nasty poisoning. [105]
Intraspecies (within species) signals have primarily been studied in the context of mating and particularly female mate choice. The problem females face is finding those signals that reliably convey information about a male’s quality, while males have every motivation to exaggerate or deceive the female. The gridlock is often resolved by the fact that it is not in the interest of all males to deceive. [106] The high-quality males will seek reliable, unfakeable, signals that the females can confidently use so that they can select them over the lower quality males. This confluence of interests between the selecting females and the high-quality males can lead to the evolution of so called honest signals . These are signals that simply cannot be faked by lower quality males and which females can reliably use to assess male quality. We know today that women take advantage of numerous honest signals. For example, women’s preference for symmetrical faces in men, which we discussed in the first chapter, is easily explained by the fact that a symmetrical face is an honest signal of genetic and phenotypic (e.g. health and nutrition status) quality. Because bilateral facial structures - the two ears, or cheeks, or the left and right side of the nose - are coded by the same genes, deviations from perfect symmetry inadvertently signal that the man was not able to perfectly execute his genetic “blueprint” during development. Symmetrical faces simply cannot be faked by men of lesser quality and are therefore an honest signal.
Certain mating signals derive their honesty from the fact that they impose a cost on the sender - by transmitting the signal the male is actively damaging himself. This counterintuitive idea was first suggested by Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975. [107] The idea is that only males who are of genuinely high quality will be able to afford the costly signal’s self-imposed handicap. Lower quality males will not be able to cope with the burden of the handicap, so they will not signal it. One of the most studied handicaps in human mate choice has to do with the masculinizing effects of testosterone. We saw earlier that testosterone is an immunosuppressant, a hormone that suppresses immune functioning, leaving a man more vulnerable to attack by pathogens. Masculine facial features like a large lower face indicate high testosterone levels during development, levels which only males of a genuinely high functioning immune level (immunocompetent males) could afford. Non-immunocompetent males could not possibly express these masculinized facial features without jeopardizing their health, so they don’t.
Remember we got into this discussion to explain why talk is a hopelessly weak signal for the purposes of deceiving women. We will return to talk shortly but first a clarification. The discussion so far may have left you with the impression that, barring the long and arduous path of raising your mate value, there is nothing you can do to improve your success with women. This has not been my intention – as a matter of fact nothing could be further from the truth. Shortcuts do exist, and I can give you a straightforward trick which will immediately and dramatically increase your appeal to women.
Get behind the wheel of a new Ferrari and start driving around town. Take the most central roads and drive very slowly. You will notice how, perhaps for the first time in your life, women will pay attention to you. Park the Ferrari and slowly step outside – passing women won’t be able to resist the temptation to look at you twice. For once you won’t be invisible. You won’t even have to try very hard. Starting conversations and getting phone numbers will be child’s play. Everything will suddenly flow - you’ll feel and act like a million dollars and women will treat you accordingly. [108]
If you don’t have a Ferrari, there is another way. This is low tech but will work at least as well as the Ferrari. Get a stunning fashion model to be your girlfriend. She should be tall, slim, with a gorgeous face, ideally in her mid to late twenties. [109] All you have to do is be seen in public with her. Take her out to a few bars and clubs, the highest visibility ones. Make sure you introduce her to everyone. You will soon find that women who previously wouldn’t give you the time of day are suddenly very interested. [110]
What Ferraris and fashion models have in common, and the reason they’re so effective with women, is that they cannot be faked. If you’re not the man you simply can’t have them. The Ferrari is the ultimate in self-imposed handicaps, one of the costliest social signals on the planet. It’s criminally overpriced, costs a fortune to service and is about as fuel inefficient as they come. At the same time its incredible performance capabilities are useless given the low speed limits on public roads and highways. It’s the equivalent of setting your money alight on four wheels, the epitome of what social scientists call conspicuous consumption. [111] If you can’t afford to throw your money away on this car, you simply won’t. The fashion model isn’t necessarily costly as such, but if she’s with you it means she has put you through the meat grinder of her own – very stringent – mate choice process and you have made it to the other side. [112] This is exceptionally unlikely to happen if you are not a genuinely high mate value male. Because the Ferrari and the fashion model are honest signals of your mate value, they are tremendously powerful with women.
Now contrast the honest signals we have discussed, like symmetrical and masculine faces or Ferraris and fashion models, to the verbal scripts of psychological methods. Talk is cheap. There is simply nothing to stop lower quality males from talking themselves up and no way for the genuinely higher quality males to talk themselves apart. For these reasons women will heavily discount talk. Psychological methods can appeal to a wide audience by correctly emphasizing that a man’s mate value is not as heavily dependent on physical attractiveness as a woman’s. Women do place less emphasis on men’s attractiveness than men place on theirs, which means they must place greater emphasis on non-physical characteristics. But what the seduction industry doesn’t’ advertise is that women won’t take your word for these non-physical characteristics, and it won’t even matter if do your boasting subtly and indirectly. All your verbal output will be heavily discounted in favor of more reliable signals: the way other men and women behave towards you, your education and occupation, your house and car, the money you can spend or the time you can invest in the woman are examples of such reliable signals.
This is not to say that women will discount everything you say. If you tell your date you’ve been divorced three times and have a criminal record she will take your word for it. Similarly, if you tell her you love her after the first date she will believe you’re desperate. Women will gladly take damning verbal information at face value – they are just hardwired to heavily discount positive self-advertisement in all its forms. If there’s one piece of advice the seduction industry could realistically offer novice customers, it is to not say too much. This would lower the probability of committing a catastrophic blunder and – as we will see in the next section – coming across as fake. But this would be uncommercial advice.
All you have to do is show up
In the first chapter we visited Clark and Hatfield’s classic 1989 experiment on unsolicited sexual offers from strangers. We saw that if you approach random strangers on a university campus and ask them to have sex with you, you will get wildly different responses based on your sex. If you are a man you can expect practically every woman to say no. But if you are a woman, fully half to three quarters of men will take you up on the offer. Those numbers will have come as no surprise to you. The surprising results involve the other part of the study. Here researchers approached male and female students on the same campus and asked them out on a date. Exactly 50% of women agreed to this request. For men the percentage was nearly identical, with 53% agreeing to a date. To get a better idea of the method used, it is worth quoting from Clark and Hatfield’s paper:
[…] five college women and four college men from an experimental social psychology class served as experimenters. All had volunteered to approach subjects who were alone at five different locations on campus. The confederates were approximately 22 years of age and were neatly dressed in casual attire. The physical attractiveness of both the female and male confederates varied from slightly unattractive to moderately attractive. [...] The confederates [...] approached members of the opposite sex, who were total strangers [...]. [They] were instructed to approach only subjects who were attractive enough that they would be willing to actually sleep with them, if given the opportunity [...]. Once a subject was selected, the requestor approached him/her and said: “ I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive.” The confederate then asked subjects one of three questions; “Would you go out with me tonight ?” “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” [...] The requestor carried a notebook which had one of the three requests written on a separate page. The type of request was randomly determined for each requestor. After the selection of a subject, each requestor flipped a page in the notebook to see what type of request was to be made. [113]
To summarize, in the experimental condition that interests us here, a group of mostly average-looking young men walked up to women they were at least minimally attracted to and said the following: “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive. Would you go out with me tonight?” One out of every two women agreed to the request. If this weren’t an experiment the men would have been awash with dates.
Psychologists have since replicated this experiment, under very similar conditions, in the United States, Denmark and Germany. In all studies the male confederates approached unknown women and said the same or very similar lines. These men had no training in psychological methods and did not attempt to impress the women in any way. They simply expressed their interest in a direct, unambiguous and polite manner, using the simplest language. Table 3 summarizes these studies’ findings. The percentage of women who agreed to a date with a stranger ranged from a high of 50% in the original Clark and Hatfield study to a low of 20% in Denmark. Combining the data from all four studies yields a combined acceptance rate of 29%, or between one out of every three and one out of every four women.
|
Country |
Location women were approached |
Attractiveness of male confederates |
Percentage of women who agreed to a date |
|
United States [114] |
University campus |
Average |
50% |
|
United States [115] |
University campus |
Average |
44% |
|
Denmark [116] |
University campus, urban pedestrian and park areas |
Average |
20% |
|
Germany [117] |
University campus, bars and clubs |
Average |
27% |
|
Combined [118] percentage |
|
|
29% |
Table 3. Women's willingness to go on a date with a complete stranger. References in the notes.
Unsurprisingly, the most significant factor in predicting a woman’s reply is whether she is in a relationship. The Danish study found that 43% of single women agreed to a date, compared to 8% for those who were in a relationship. The German study had very similar results, with 42% of single and 15% of partnered women agreeing to a date, respectively. This very predictable finding is the 800-pound gorilla in the room that the seduction industry refuses to acknowledge: success in an unsolicited mating attempt will depend before anything else - in humans as in all primates - on the female’s receptivity to mating offers. [119] For women, the biggest determinant of mating receptivity will be her relationship status. To a single woman, a stranger who approaches with an unsolicited mating advance can, under some circumstances, be a welcome potential resource. If he satisfies some minimum criteria - like minimally acceptable levels of attractiveness and eloquence - she might be open to a date and the opportunity to collect more information on this possible resource. For a partnered woman the same man would not generally be a resource - not even in principle. Aside from the entertainment value and ego boost he provides, if he persists after her initial expression of disinterest he risks falling into the category of perceived sexual and violent threat.
In all these studies all or some of the women were students who were approached on a university campus. It could be argued that this setting, where even a stranger is likely to be a fellow student, had some effect on the high percentage of women who agreed to the date. But the data don’t support this idea. The Danish study found no difference in the responses of women approached on campuses versus public pedestrian and park areas, while the German study found that slightly more women agreed to a date when approached in a bar or club environment compared to a campus. It is certain that some of the women who initially said yes would have no-showed or cancelled the date, but this is always going to happen, regardless of how the date is agreed. There will always be some women who lack the confidence to say no on the spot or will change their mind along the way, regardless of whether you ask them out on the street, on a dating site, or at a mutual friend’s party.
A pickup guru or dating coach could also argue that sure, just asking a single woman out will work nearly half the time, but what do you do with her when she shows up on the date? How will you know what to say or do without some coaching? This is a very weak argument, if for no other reason than that the focus of the seduction community has historically been on the very first seconds or minutes of the interaction, which eventually lead to the telephone number or the date. This is understandable. At their core psychological methods are taught scripts, and it is much easier to run a script for a few seconds or minutes in the hope that she “hooks.” To attempt to carry this on for hours, days or longer is nearly impossible – it would be hopeless trying to coach someone to do this. If psychological methods are useless – at best – at the first few seconds of the interaction, they are going to be equally useless at subsequent stages of the courtship process.
But let’s stay with the first few seconds a bit. Despite the countless man-hours it has devoted to openers, the seduction industry has not taken the trouble to collect any objective data on their relative efficacy. It can only offer subjective and contradictory opinions and claims by decree, with no data to back them up. Fortunately, a handful of psychologists have published some basic research on openers. While modest in number and scope, these studies are consistent in their results. Like the Clark and Hatfield-type studies we just reviewed, they strongly suggest that all you have to do is show up.
A rational, objective way to study openers is to first create a large dataset – a substantial number of different openers. The easiest way is to have a group of untrained men and women list all the openers they can come up with. Each opener in this dataset is then evaluated for effectiveness by another group of untrained raters. Because the number and variations of possible openers are infinite, to start testing the various openers in more depth you need a method that allows you to go beyond the noise, reducing the openers you test to a manageable number. For example, “You seem very interesting, I wanted to say hi” and “You seem very sophisticated, I wanted to say hi” can probably be treated as the same effective opener. But what about “You seem very interesting, I wanted to say hi” and “Hey, you caught my eye, what’s your name?” – do we treat these as equivalent? To answer this, we can apply a statistical technique called cluster analysis . Based on the effectiveness ratings our raters gave to each opener in the dataset, cluster analysis will reveal if the various openers in the dataset tend to coalesce in statistically distinct subgroups, or clusters . Though there are no guarantees that this statistical technique will lead to meaningful or useful clusters, it is an obvious first step, and the results in this case suggest it is also a very good one: cluster analysis has consistently revealed three meaningful clusters of openers. [120] The first consists of the “innocuous” or indirect openers. These are banal conversation starters that don’t directly betray sexual interest, for example “Are you a student?” or “Where are you from?” The second category involves direct openers consisting of overt statements of interest – for example, “I’m sort of shy, but I’d like to get to know you.” No attempt to embellish the opening line is made here. The opener used in the Clark and Hatfield studies would belong in this category. The third and final category is what psychologists call “cute-flippant.” These openers convey sexual interest but in a funny or cocky manner, such as “You remind me of someone I used to date” or “Bet I can outdrink you.” These are the type of prepared openers that would be used by men who want to convey interest but also want to look smart, witty and humorous in the process: men who feel they must do something more than just show up.
All studies in this area arrive at the same result: direct and innocuous openers give the best results while cute-flippant ones by far the worse ones. Women tend to rate direct and indirect openers as “good” or “excellent,” whereas they tend to rate cute-flippant ones as “poor” or “terrible.” When presented on paper with the various openers and asked if they would likely talk to the man or not, most women say they would talk to a man who approached them with a direct or indirect opener but not with someone who used a cute-flippant opener. [121] One study put the various types of openers to the test in a bar environment and found that the ratings women give on paper match their real-life behavior. When approached by a man who used a direct or innocuous opener, female bar patrons tended to respond positively: they generally answered the man, smiled, and maintained a friendly demeanor. Cute-flippant openers tended to elicit the most negative responses: women would avert their head, walk away or reply with a nasty or negative comment. A possible explanation of the negative reactions to cute-flippant openers lies in how women perceive men who use these openers. Contrary to what the man probably intends, a woman is more likely to view him as less intelligent and, unsurprisingly, less trustworthy. [122]
On the whole, while the research we have reviewed is limited in scope, it leaves little doubt that your best bet is to just show up and directly express your interest. The simpler you talk and the less effort you put into it, the more likely you are to get good results. It’s so easy, yet nobody does it. In the following chapters we will see why nobody shows up, and what your life can look like if you decide to separate yourself from the crowd.
Ecology
noun: the relations of animals and plants to each other and to their environment
The evolutionary logic of your social life
A puzzling feature of primates has historically been the large size of their brains relative to their body mass. Older theories that tried to explain these large brains fell into two categories. The first sought the answer in their foraging and feeding habits. These theories emphasized primates’ need to develop large mental maps of their foraging ranges, as well as sophisticated methods for extracting often inaccessible and patchy foods like fruits, bulbs and insects. [123] The other group of theories held that primates’ large brains didn’t evolve for some particular function but were merely the side effect of quirks in metabolism and physiology. All these theories were set aside in the 1990s, when primatologist Robin Dunbar - who I studied under at the University of Liverpool - showed that the relative size of the neocortex (that part of the brain involved in higher functions like reasoning, planning and language) was a direct function of primate species’ social complexity. [124] The larger a primate species’ group size (and consequently the more complex its social life), the larger its neocortex. The primate neocortex is so large relative to the rest of the brain that its growth is ultimately responsible for primates’ large overall brains. The power of this statistical relation is so strong that, given humans’ relative neocortex size and extrapolating from the other primate species, it can be calculated we have evolved in groups of approximately 150 persons. This figure of 150 has now seeped from the academic circles of primatologists and evolutionary psychologists into the popular domain, where it is known as “Dunbar’s number.” Its popularity is such that is has even been used to inform the configuration of office buildings or the size of corporate departments. [125] Though humans are exceptional among primates for the plasticity of their social arrangements, Dunbar’s number of 150 - or something very close to it - shows up repeatedly in the size of human groups vastly separated in space and time: from Neolithic villages that archaeologists have dug up in the Middle East to contemporary hunter-gatherer societies living in Africa and South America. [126]
Though we usually think of social life in terms of the pleasant or unpleasant feelings we derive from interacting with others, biologically it is first and foremost a cognitive or computational problem. To survive and function to any degree in a complicated social environment, a person must perform a massive number of mental acts. To begin with, he must identify every individual in his group. He must also develop and maintain an internal database that stores biographical information on past interactions with every single individual. He will also require the folk psychology to understand his peers’ internal psychological states - happy, content, angry, jealous etc. - and predict their behavior – will they attack, or mate, or cooperate - as well as know how to manipulate these psychological states to elicit desired responses. Crucially, because everything that happens between the other group members will impact him in some way - through the creation or dissolution of coalitions and the modification of dominance hierarchies, for example - he must create and maintain internal representations of their relationships. The computational demands of this task increase very quickly with group size. For a group with three people A, B and C there are three possible pairs that need to be mentally tracked: A-B, A-C and B-C. With four people the possible pairs rise to six, with ten to 45 and with 150 people they shoot to 11,175.
Because our brains have evolved to facilitate certain types of social groups, individual humans alive today naturally tend to recreate them in their own lives. The average modern human, even when living in a mega-city of millions, tends to have a social circle of around 150 people. Aside from its typical size, one of the most salient characteristics of this circle is that it is layered. [127] The two innermost layers are the support group, typically consisting of 4-5 people, and the sympathy group, made of 12-15 people. These layers are made up of our closest relatives and friends. The relationships in the support group are so entrenched and enduring that we don’t subject them to the normal reciprocity calculations of human relations (e.g. “I’ve been helping out X quite a bit recently, but he hasn’t done any favors for me in ages”). After the support and sympathy group we find the affinity group. This includes around 50 people and consists mostly of extended family and friends. The final layer of around 150 encompasses the person’s entire social group. These are the people one is familiar with and whose social circumstances he understands. The relationships in the various layers have different characteristics. For example, a significant difference relates to how much they are “neglect-proof”: relationships with genetic relatives are remarkably resistant to extended periods of non-contact compared to those with non-relatives.
Aside from cognitive limitations hardwired into our brains, another reason why social circles cannot extend indefinitely beyond 150 people is the so-called social time budget . There is only so much time one can devote to maintaining existing social connections, let alone developing new ones, before other necessities of life – like finding food and shelter - begin to suffer. Furthermore, most of the limited social time budget one has in the first place is disproportionately allocated to the innermost layers of the social group.
Given that we spend our lives in this kind of small social group, it is not surprising that we usually meet our romantic partners through it. In the United States two extensive surveys have asked people how they met their partners, and their results confirm that their social circle is the main route. [128] , [129] When asked who had introduced them to their cohabiting partner, 40% of survey respondents in 1992 said they had been introduced by friends, 16% by their parents, 7% by classmates, 6% by co-workers and 1% by neighbors. [130] Only 32% said they or their partners had introduced themselves. [131] When asked the same question in 2009, 35% of respondents said they were introduced by friends, 12% by their family, 8% by colleagues, 5% by classmates and 2% by neighbors. The percentage of respondents meeting their partner through self-introduction had risen to 36%, but this increase was largely due to the rise of online dating, where self-introduction is the norm.
The above data is about serious long-term relationships: cohabiting partners. You might think the importance of one’s social circle would diminish when it comes to meeting a casual or short-term sexual partner, and you’d be right. Given the potential damage to the reputation of all involved, you’d be far less likely to pursue a short-term adventure with someone a close friend - or much less your mother - introduced you to. When asked in 1992 how they were introduced to their short-term sexual partner, 37% of respondents stated they had been introduced by friends, 4% by classmates, 3% by a family member, 3% by a colleague and 2% by a neighbor, while the percentage meeting through self-introduction was a heftier 47%.
So there is a percentage of “non-brokered” introductions that take place without an intermediary. These range from approximately one third for long-term partners to just under half for short-term partners. These figures can be misleading, however, in that they do not reflect individuals who are freely reaching out of their social circle to appeal to people they are interested in. Many of these non-brokered introductions take place in schools, colleges, churches and other social establishments where one explicitly or implicitly enrolls and where the same - more or less - group of people turn up every time. The pool of potential mates in these places remains limited. Then there are the fortuitous encounters that are bound to take place in a large, modern, division-of-labor society where millions of men and women cooperate and exchange goods and services daily. The cute cashier from your local supermarket is bound to sit next to you on the bus one day, and if it’s not her then it will be your sexy gym instructor. But something like this is eventually going to happen. If we exclude these fortuitous scenarios and the recent phenomenon of online dating, most people alive today, most of the time, are passively dependent upon their social circle for finding mates, just as they have been for millions of years.
Meet your mate value sociometer
Faced with this limited pool of potential mates, men and women have evolved psychological mechanisms that are dedicated to identifying, acquiring and - where desirable - retaining the partner(s) of the highest possible mate value. There are two sides to this. Firstly, as we saw earlier, both sexes must constantly evaluate potential partners across their range of mate choice criteria and discriminate strongly in favor of those with higher mate value. Just as importantly, individuals must also be highly attuned to their own mate value. This will allow them to calibrate their mating aspirations accordingly: set the bar to just the appropriate height. The problem is that without a realistic assessment of your worth you could end up pursuing individuals of very high mate value that are outside your league. The result is you end up without a partner, a disastrous outcome in evolutionary terms. But if you underestimate your mate value you can end up settling for someone less desirable than you could actually attain. Historically, individuals who consistently under or over-estimated their own mate value wouldn't have fared as well reproductively as those who made more accurate estimates and optimized their aspirations in a mate. The men and women alive today are descended from those individuals who in ancestral environments managed to make more or less accurate self-assessments, adjust their aspirations accordingly, and secure a partner of optimal mate value given the social circumstances of those ancestral environments . We will return to this crucial last point shortly.
Evolutionary psychologists have given a name to the dedicated information-processing circuit that tracks people’s own mate value. It is called the mate value sociometer. [132] , [133] Starting from adolescence, the mate value sociometer keeps track of a person’s direct successes and failures with the opposite sex. It also monitors more subtle indicators of interest like how much the person is flirted with or the degree to which members of the opposite sex compete over him or her. The mate value sociometer integrates all these inputs to provide an internal representation of mate value. Depending on this it then modulates the person’s self-esteem and particularly self-esteem as it relates to one’s desirability as a partner. Low self-esteem is a signal that mating is suffering, remedial action must be taken, and aspirations lowered. High self-esteem signals that all is going well, the person is doing things right and can afford to maintain high standards.
A woman of high mate value with a well-functioning mate value sociometer can be daunting, especially to a man not used to courting these women. Her mate value sociometer will be tirelessly feeding her accurate estimates of her high worth and in ways that seem to be designed with one goal in mind: make life difficult for him. The woman may appear disinterested and aloof and give the impression she’s not putting a lot of effort into the whole thing. He might find himself walking on eggshells, wondering if she likes him even after they’ve been dating for a while. The reason she’s not trying hard is precisely because she doesn't have to. On the flipside, a well-functioning mate value sociometer can make a man’s life very easy if the woman is less desirable. Here she is keen, eager and willing to take initiative. She doesn't care to hide how much she likes him - he'll probably immediately know this is the case and things will go smoothly all the way.
A similar internal calibration and attitude adjustment process takes place in men, which is why there are few things that can turn off a woman so quickly and dramatically as an overly keen man, especially in the early stages of courtship. The poor soul may have the best intentions in the world, but he is inadvertently signaling low mate value. He will come across as desperate and needy, and the woman will lose interest, especially if she is of higher mate value.
I mentioned earlier that the mate value sociometer evolved to get things right in the context of a specific social environment. We saw that this social environment consisted of approximately 150 people, give or take. Crucially, the genes that make our brain – which in turn controls our behavior – have not changed in any significant way during the population explosion of the last ten thousand years. [134] As a result, the mate value sociometer we have today is the same one that gave optimal results in those prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups of 150 people. Let's examine the relevant features of those prehistoric social environments and how they affected the mate value sociometer’s evolution.
To begin with, there was a very limited pool of potential mates. At best, a man of reproductive age would usually be faced with a few dozen sexually available women of a suitable age. At worst, there might have been a handful of potential mates or none at all. Every rejection meant one less prospective mate out of an already tiny set. But there was another cost to each rejection, even more serious than the loss of a potential mate. Studies today find that fully two thirds of naturally occurring conversations are devoted to discussion of social issues, or a more broadly defined gossip: what the interlocutors did, when, where, and how they did it as well as all the details of what they know others did and with whom. [135] If gossip dominates people’s conversations in a technologically wondrous world of endless novelties and distractions, we can imagine how it dominated them in small ancestral groups. Every rejection a man suffered was likely to become widely disseminated and common knowledge in a short time. This would cause a loss of prestige among the other women in the group, lowering his probability of future success even further. Rejections were potentially very costly events, and there were only so many a man could take before becoming the group’s laughing stock. To minimize the probability of this disastrous outcome, the mate value sociometer and associated aspiration mechanism would tend to err on the side of caution. If unsure, it would tend to give very conservative estimates of one’s mate value. This in turn made it more likely a man would end up with a suboptimal mate rather than no mate at all, since the latter is a vastly more negative outcome in reproductive terms.
Another potential problem arose from male competitors. Because all men lived in the same small group and had the same limited options, there was a good chance any given woman could be involved with another man or at the very least be his sexual target. Attempting to mate with her could lead to friction with the competitor(s), which could take any form from a concealed grudge to outright hostility. The probability of friction would increase with the woman’s desirability, as more desirable women would tend to attract more competitors and of a generally higher status. If the mating attempt became public knowledge the social costs from male competitors would often have to be paid regardless of outcome. But rejection would mean that a man would then have to bear these costs without enjoying any benefits.
To recap, you had a) a set of ancestral social conditions which specified b) a certain cost to each rejection, leading to c) an optimal mate value sociometer mode. The following table summarizes this.
|
ANCESTRAL ENVIRONMENTS |
||
|
Optimal sociometer mode |
Rejection cost |
Ancestral social conditions |
|
Be very conservative and err on the side of caution |
Substantial |
Limited selection of mates |
|
Everyone knew each other |
||
|
Most rejections became common knowledge |
||
|
Limited number of possible rejections |
||
|
Every rejection led to diminished status |
||
|
Friction with male competitors |
||
Table 4. The mate value sociometer in ancestral environments
Now here's the really important part. Due to the very slow pace of genetic evolution, you are still carrying around the same mate value sociometer that evolved in response - and formed the optimal solution - to the ancestral social environments described in the left column of Table 4. Meanwhile, after successive waves of technological, demographic and societal revolutions the world today is an unrecognizably different place. Is your mate value sociometer still up to task? Far from it. Not only is your mate value sociometer inadequate, but it is actively working against you and undermining your mating life. We discuss why next.
The root of your mating problems
The rational path to sexual abundance starts with identifying that single first step which can improve your mating more than any other. After you have taken this step and started to enjoy the benefits it brings to your life, you can turn your attention to other, secondary steps. These secondary steps will yield lesser benefits that will be added to the larger ones gained earlier in a cumulative manner. But to first focus your attention on the secondary steps rather than the single most important one is not rational, especially when the first step will yield many times the benefits of all the other steps combined.
Right now, your biggest problem is not that you don’t feel good about yourself, or that you don’t have any friends, or that your teeth are crooked, or your belly not flat. Nor is it that you’re not tall enough, or smart enough, or fun enough. Many of these problems can be corrected in due time, and you will have to live with the rest. But even if you could somehow correct all these secondary problems today, you would still not see much difference in your mating life. The reason is that you would have ignored the single most important problem and omitted the corresponding single most important first step. Right now, your single most important problem and root of nearly all your mating frustrations is this:
Your mating behavior follows a set of restrictive ancestral conditions which no longer apply. As a result, you have self-imposed a series of unnecessary constraints which are vastly and unnecessarily limiting your mating life.
Following from this, the first step you should take, and the one which will transform your mating life more profoundly than all other conceivable actions combined, is the following:
Align your mating behavior with the present world rather than the ancestral one your brain evolved in. Today’s world has practically no mating constraints - to achieve an optimal mating life your behavior should reflect this absence of constraints.
Let’s take these ancestral constraints, one at a time, and see why they don’t apply anymore. To begin with, your pool of potential mates is orders of magnitude greater than it was ancestrally. It is for all practical purposes infinite. If you live in an even average-sized city, with a moderate rate of population renewal, you will never have enough time to go through all the available women. But to enjoy this unlimited pool of potential mates you will need to abandon your reliance on your social network and your good fortune and tap it directly. You will need to initiate unsolicited mating attempts: you will need to cold-approach women.
Another ancestral constraint that is long gone is lack of anonymity. The massive populations of today ensure people remain anonymous. Outside the small set of people one encounters daily - colleagues, neighbors, staff at the local grocery store etc. - one is practically a stranger living among other strangers. Any rejections you incur, rather than becoming the object of gossip and eventually common knowledge as they would ancestrally, will remain unknown. You will be a stranger to every woman who rejects you, and her rejection will never become public knowledge. Nobody will have any way of knowing, but even if they did they wouldn’t care because you are irrelevant to them.
Gone also is the problem of friction with male competitors. Her social circle and your social circle no longer overlap as they did for millions of years. You won’t know any of the lovers or admirers in her life, and they won’t know you. You will never have to interact with them in the future, which means your social welfare won’t depend on them. This is the case even if you attempt to mate with a woman of very high mate value and many admirers.
Under these favorable conditions, each new rejection does not leave you in a deeper hole as it did in the past. It could even be argued that each rejection leaves you a bit better off, as you increase your experience and can take corrective action for future mating attempts. The cost of rejection in modern environments is, at worse, zero - there is simply no cost to rejection. It is cost-free.
How should your mate value sociometer operate if it were in tune with the present world, given that a) the function of the mate value sociometer is to calibrate your mating aspirations given the costs of rejection and b) there are no costs to rejection in modern environments? It follows that the ideal mate value sociometer in today's world should be a very simple and inflexible device. It should simply motivate you to attempt mating with the women you most desire, irrespective of how desirable you feel. It should sever the link between your self-esteem and mating aspirations because this link no longer serves a purpose. Irrespective of how low your self-esteem is, you should still aim for the mate you want (Table 5).
|
MODERN ENVIRONMENTS |
||
|
Optimal sociometer mode |
Rejection cost |
Modern social conditions |
|
Shoot for the stars |
Zero |
Practically infinite selection of mates |
|
Practically unlimited number of possible rejections |
||
|
Almost all rejections stay private |
||
|
Complete anonymity |
||
|
Status unaffected by every rejection |
||
|
No male competitors |
||
Table 5. The optimal mate value sociometer of today.
Now the problem is that regardless of how neatly we have described the ideal modern mate value sociometer on paper, you are still carrying around in your brain the old, “outdated” version and will do so till you die. The good news is that starting today you can make a conscious decision to ignore its mostly subconscious and automated operation and start shooting for the stars, or attempting to mate with the women you genuinely desire. This will set in motion a cascade of events which will, over time, cause your brain to function closer to the ideal mode we have described. We will discuss this process later in this chapter, but for now I want to clarify exactly what the shoot for the stars strategy involves.
In short, to shoot for the stars is to attempt to mate with the women you are attracted to, without worrying if you are good enough for them and regardless of how good you feel about yourself. If you are like most men, there is a good chance these are not the kind of women you have had so far. You have been trusting an outdated, woefully inadequate mate value sociometer. This has led you towards safer choices with lower rejection risk, but you were probably not very happy with these choices, even when the women said yes. Now the women you are genuinely attracted to might not always be the ones your friends find attractive or those you see in beauty magazines. Then again, they might be. Though there is significant agreement among men as to what makes an attractive woman, there are also significant differences, and I would strongly suggest you trust your own taste when it comes to women. [136] This is not a competition, and you are not out to prove anything. Don’t let your ego get in the way of your happiness.
Sequential mate choice and mating probabilities
In the first chapter we sketched the broad outlines of women’s most important mate choice criteria. Consciously and - mostly - unconsciously, women evaluate prospective mates against these criteria, integrate the available information and reach a decision. It is not fully understood how this integration takes place. Clearly some criteria matter more, and the subscore men receive on these criteria is given greater weighting when it comes to tallying the total score. Resource acquisition potential, social status and attractiveness are among the big ones, so women must assign greater weight to these compared to, say, a sense of humor. At the same time there must be minimum requirements for each criterion. A man who falls below any one of these will be rejected, regardless of how well he fares in the rest. For example, most women will reject even the richest, most intelligent and caring man if he is over a certain age or weight. The most attractive and intelligent man will also be a relationship non-starter if he has violent tendencies, and the woman senses risk of abuse to herself and her children.
For our discussion the crucial point is how this assessment process unfolds over time and when the decision to accept or reject is reached. The problem is that information relating to the various mate choice criteria is collected in different ways and has different assessment times. Some criteria, most notably physical attractiveness, can be assessed in seconds. Women simply take a good look at a man and get a decent estimate of his genetic endowment and how well he's been looking after himself. [137] Others, like resource acquisition potential, usually take longer to assess, in the order of hours, days or even weeks. Then there are criteria, particularly those relating to personality and interpersonal behaviors, that will take even longer to evaluate fully, even years. For this reason, it makes sense for women to use what is called a sequential mate choice process, where they set a series of hurdles and men try to jump over each one in succession. [138] Women start assessing from the most easily evaluable criteria and gradually progress to more logistically demanding ones. At every step of the way they set a minimum value for each criterion, the so-called threshold value . Whenever a man fails to reach this threshold value he is rejected. If he passes, the assessment process continues. This strategy allows women to collect information in the most cost-efficient and time-saving manner.
The first stage is passing the looks threshold. You come into her line of sight and she must quickly decide whether to give you another look or smile. [139] You start a conversation, the second assessment stage. Here she begins to get an idea of who you are, where you belong in society and what you want from her. She will also get the first glimpses into your personality. If you pass this stage she agrees to go on a date, where your conversation style, interests, personality and mating history are further assessed. If you pass this threshold she might agree to a second date or to sex. Let’s say she has sex with you. Here she gets to fill in most of the missing bits with regards to your physical attractiveness, particularly in relation to your body attractiveness and your odor, as well as any signs of disease or poor health. [140] Sex is also an opportunity for her to collect new information on your personality and intentions: are you a selfish lover, cold, do you care about giving her an orgasm and so on. At this point, and especially by agreeing to have sex with you, she has made a non-negligible investment and things are starting to look up for you, but the assessment process is far from over. She will continue to assess you until she is satisfied that you are long-term relationship material, but even then, she won’t stop the assessment. It will continue for the rest of your time together, and if at any point she satisfies herself that any new negative information outweighs her ever-increasing investment in you, she will terminate the relationship.
A widespread myth in the seduction industry holds that to get a woman in bed is substantially more difficult than getting her in a committed relationship. This myth is based on the correct premise that women much more prefer to be in committed relationships than to have casual sex. It therefore incorrectly assumes that if you are willing to give her what she wants, namely a relationship, things will be easier. The problem with this reasoning is that, in most cases at least, sex comes in the earlier stages of courtship, before commitment and exclusivity. The period in time where your interaction with the woman starts to resemble a committed relationship will be further down the assessment stream from the moment of first intercourse, and due to the sequential nature of the process there is a good chance you will get cut in the interim. Imagine, as a thought experiment, the likelihood of your having sex with an extremely attractive woman from your social circle. While unlikely, it is not out of the realm of possibility. Anything can happen after some happy hour cocktails, during a group trip to a mountain cabin, or when she is feeling lonely and wants to speak to someone late at night. A long shot but possible. Now imagine how difficult it will be, after you have somehow managed to have sex with her, to also get her to stick around, even if you have every intention in the world of being in an exclusive relationship and are more than happy to play the boyfriend. To maintain her interest day after day without screwing things up, while your weaknesses become more glaring with time. Becoming the boyfriend is no easier than simply getting her in bed - if anything it is much harder.
***
Let’s see what all this practically means for you. The aim is to illustrate how you can explode your mating life by simply breaking free from your tiny social group and outdated mate value sociometer. The basic concept we will use is mating probability, an idea often used by biologists who study mating. We’ve seen how complicated women’s mate choice is and how little we understand of it. We can therefore never predict with certainty if a given woman will accept or reject a given man. In the absence of certainty, the best we can do is use probabilities.
To begin applying this probabilistic approach to your everyday life we must break down the female population into decile groups . A decile group is a subset of a given population that makes up 10% of that population, meaning there are ten such groups in each population. Decile groups are arranged according to some variable from the top decile group to the last (or first) decile group. For example, let's say we want to arrange the male residents of Wichita, Kansas, in decile groups according to their height. Assuming there are 190,000 males living in Wichita, the tallest 19,000 of these would belong to the top decile group. The tallest 19,000 of the remaining 171,000 males would go into the ninth decile group and so on, until we reached the shortest 19,000 males, which would fall into the bottom decile group, the first.
We can use decile groups to break down the women in your geographical location and target age group in terms of their mate value. Say you are a 30-year-old man who is interested in meeting the 1,000 women in your small town who are 20 to 35 years old. The 100 most desirable of these women will make up the top decile group. The ninth decile group will consist of the 100 most desirable women out of the remaining 900. The eighth decile group will have the 100 most attractive ones out of the remaining 800 and so forth, until we reach the bottom or first decile group, made up of the 100 least attractive women. To simplify our discussion, it would be convenient to assign short labels to the women in each decile group, so we don’t keep on referring, for example, to “women in the 7th decile group.” In line with common male usage, we will label women in the top decile group - the most desirable women - as 10 s, the women in the ninth decile group as 9 s, those in the eighth decile group as 8 s and so forth, all the way down to the least attractive women who we will label as 1 s.
Let's further assume, for our purposes, that you are an average 30-year-old male, of average appearance, with an average job and social life. You are, in other words, a 5 or 6 in the corresponding scale of male mate value. Let's be generous and say you're a 6 , which is a little above average but barely. Let's also assume your aspirations are modest, and you just want to go on a date. We can plot your probability of securing a date with women of different mate value onto a graph, like in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Probability of a date with women of different mate values
Your chances of a date with a 1 are quite high, but you probably wouldn't be interested in dating these women. For the 2 s your chances would be a bit lower but still high. Your chances keep on dropping, decile group after decile group, until you reach the top group, the 10 s. These very desirable women would be unlikely to go out with you. Most of them will probably be already taken, and even if they’re not they will probably be looking to date someone more desirable than you. But the key word here is probably - even with these women your chances will always be something more than zero. There might be the odd 10 who just broke up and will welcome the opportunity to go out with any normal guy, just to take her mind off her ex for a while. Or there will be the odd 10 who likes men that look like her father, and you happen to bear a remarkable resemblance to him. Or she might be new in town and looking for company or feeling bored. Remember these are women who, like most people, rely on a very small and inefficient social circle for meeting mates. But most commonly the woman in this group who will say yes will have a poorly calibrated mate value sociometer. She might be inexperienced, without enough opportunities to receive sufficient feedback on her attractiveness. Or she might have dated bad boys who damaged her self-esteem and left her with a negative self-image that does not match how other people see her.
Now let's say you are interested in more than a date, namely sex. Your chances of having sex with a 10 will be even lower, because sex is one or two stages further down the assessment pathway than a date. Here you are looking at a fraction of the already small subset of 10s who would agree to a date. But for many of the reasons described above - and perhaps some additional ones - there will be some small percentage of 10 s who after agreeing to a date will also sleep with you.
What if you wanted to make one of these women your girlfriend? Here your chances are even slimmer, as we have gone a long way down the meat grinder of sequential mate choice. Now you’re looking at a fraction of the already small subset of 10 s who would agree to date you and have sex with you. These women are so few and far between that if you live the rest of your life like most men, without taking the action described here, you will almost certainly never meet one of them. Figure 5 shows your three sets of probabilities – for a date, or sex, or a relationship - with women of various desirability levels.
Figure 5. Probabilities of various outcomes as a function of female mate value
How cold approach will change your life
With the material covered in the previous section we can now start to see a) where you stand in your mating life, b) how you got there, and c) how you can change things. Remember from the previous section that you are an average 30-year-old male, a 6 in decimal desirability terms. You probably had a handful of lovers in your life, and they were probably nothing to write home about. You met most of these women though your social circle, through shared attendance of institutions like schools and colleges, or through fortuitous chance encounters. Importantly, you also have a well-calibrated mate value sociometer. It runs like a clock. You understand very well you will likely get blown out if you try to mate with the 8 s or 9s, let alone the 10 s. You probably get very nervous around these women and wouldn't dream of asking them out. When you are around women in your league - the 5 s and 6 s - you feel more comfortable, and looking back at the times you managed to ask them out you are surprised with how smoothly things went.
For the discussion that follows we will need to work with specific probabilities of success. I want to clarify that the actual numbers - like 40%, 36% and so on – which I use below are just educated guesses. They are not derived from actual studies. The mathematically rigorous way to make my point would be to use abstract algebraic symbols like x , ( x - a ), f ( x ) and so forth. For our purposes I have used specific numbers to make the argument understandable to people who don’t care for algebra. But the precise numbers don’t matter. What’s important is that for every mating attempt there is a given probability of success, which decreases with women of increasing mate value.
So let's say you’re primarily interested in having sex with as many women as possible, a mating strategy biologists call promiscuous. To keep things simple, we will assume your probability of success decreases linearly with women of increasing mate value – as in figures 4 and 5 above. A linear decrease means that for every increasing decile group of female mate value your probability of having sex drops by a steady percentage. Starting at the bottom, let's say your probability of sex with any given 1 is 40%, dropping with every higher decile group by a steady 4%. With 2 s your probability is 36%, with 3 s 32% and so on, all the way to the top groups. Here your chances are 8% for the 9 s and 4% for the 10 s.
What is your sex life like now? Let's be generous and, setting aside what we know about the average man’s lifetime number of sexual partners, [141] assume you are having sex with roughly one woman a year. If you started your sexual career at 18 that would mean you have had sex with 12 different women. Assuming also you are attempting sex in equal measure with 4 s, 5 s and 6 s, we can work out you are trying it on with 4.2 women a year: 1.4 4 s, 1.4 5 s and 1.4 6 s. 28% of the 4s will sleep with you on any given year, compared to 24% of the 5s and 20% of the 6s. It all works out to an average of one different woman a year. Table 6 summarizes these numbers.
|
Number of different women you have sex with |
Number of annual mating attempts |
Probability of success |
Female mate value |
|
0.28 |
1.4 |
20% |
6 |
|
0.34 |
1.4 |
24% |
5 |
|
0.39 |
1.4 |
28% |
4 |
|
Total number of sexual partners: approx. 1 |
|
||
Table 6. Your current yearly sexual output
When you hack your mating, you take your probabilities of mating success and leverage two factors. Firstly, you attempt to mate with women at a frequency that is orders of magnitude higher. Secondly, you jettison your mate value sociometer and direct your attempts to women of higher mate value. These two factors combined will lead to dramatically more women and of dramatically higher mate value.
Ten attractive women on a busy high street can easily be approached within three to four hours. The mating attempts that would normally be spread out over more than two years of your life can now be compressed into one afternoon. Assuming you are willing to put this time in every weekend, you can easily approach 500 or so women in one year. But let's be conservative and allow for some “off” weeks where you are too busy, out of town, or just not motivated, dropping the total number of yearly approaches to 400. By bypassing your mate value sociometer, you direct these 400 approaches to the most desirable women. You can see your new mating output in Table 7 below.
|
Number of different women you have sex with |
Number of annual mating attempts |
Probability of success |
Female mate value |
|
4 |
100 |
4% |
10 |
|
8 |
100 |
8% |
9 |
|
12 |
100 |
12% |
8 |
|
16 |
100 |
16% |
7 |
|
Total number of sexual partners: 40 |
|
||
Table 7. What your sexual output can look like with cold approach
You should, in principle, be able to have sex with 40 women a year, four of which will be in the top desirability group. The least attractive of these women will be 7s, who were not only few and far between in your previous sex life, but also its pinnacle. The interaction of maximum quantity with maximum quality will lead to an unrecognizable mating pattern. Figure 6 shows the before and after.
Figure 6. Your sex life before and after cold approach
Before you get too excited we need to discuss some important caveats. Firstly, a reminder that I made these figures up, and though they seem to be reasonable ballpark estimates they might still be way off the mark. I also used a simplistic linear model to estimate how your probabilities of success decline with women of increasing quality, but a more nuanced non-linear model of decline might be more accurate. In such a model, starting at the bottom, the probability of success would fall slowly for women of lower mate value, but the decline would pick up steam with women of average to above average mate value. By the time we reach the 9 s and 10 s the probability of success would plummet dramatically. [142] This more nuanced model would mean that if you are an average male your chances of sex with women in the top decile would be lower than 4%. Even if they were as low as 1% - very likely an underestimate - you could still expect to have sex with one such woman a year. Figure 7 contrasts the two different models.
Figure 7. Contrasting a linear and non-linear model of mating probability
You may have noticed I also made another important assumption: that your mating probabilities with cold approach will be the same as when meeting women through your social circle. That you will have the same chances with a woman whether you cold-approach her or meet her at work, for example. Is this a fair assumption?
There is one clear advantage to cold approach. We saw in the previous chapter that women are not impressed by talk. It is a cheap signal that can easily be faked. When you walk up to a woman who does not know you, you are sending her a very honest signal that cannot be faked: you approached her. You, among all the countless men who have walked past her, were the first to step up to the plate, to walk up to her with mating intentions. This cannot be faked - you can either do it or you can’t. You are probably the first man she has met to give this signal of confidence and dominance. It is no wonder this can be a mind-blowing experience for women. I once walked up to an attractive woman in the center of Oxford. She was a tall, blonde, successful professional in her early thirties who - it became apparent very quickly - was actively looking for a mate herself. We exchanged numbers and after only a couple of minutes she messaged me: “That was quite an upgrade from online dating!” No other man had ever approached her like this. All her past lovers had relied on introductions brokered by third parties, on luck, or on online dating to meet her. Nothing to set them apart from any other man.
The advantage conveyed by this signal of dominance will be offset, to some degree, by the fact that you are a stranger to the woman. As much as she will enjoy the strong, unprecedented dominance signal that you give her, she will also enjoy the safety and comfort of being introduced to a potential mate through someone she knows and trusts. This third person, the intermediator, acts as guarantor of the potential mate’s trustworthiness. When asked by psychologists to rate the effectiveness and appropriateness of the various ways a man can approach them, women rate third-party introduction as slightly more effective and substantially more appropriate that a direct, unbrokered introduction. [143] Bearing this in mind, you can take practical steps to minimize the perceived threat you represent to any woman you approach. The most important is to limit your approaches to public and crowded places, ideally during the daytime. We will expand on this in the last chapter.
The extent to which the disadvantage of being a stranger negates the advantage of perceived dominance can only be determined empirically. We would need large-scale studies in which men either approached women directly or were introduced to them and to then compare the outcomes - in terms of telephone numbers or dates - between the two groups. In the absence of solid empirical data, we can only speculate. After a few thousand unbrokered mating attempts, my best guess is that the two opposing factors largely cancel each other out. You will lose some otherwise available women who will be too afraid to stop and give you a few seconds of their time, but you will win others who will be blown away by your perceived dominance. But even with these latter women, the initial impressions will only help you get your foot in the door. You will still be subject to the merciless meat grinder of sequential mate choice, and if you don’t clear the hurdles at every stage you will get cut.
A world without mating constraints
Is all this a numbers game? In a limited sense, one could argue the case. I have, after all, devoted the last few pages to playing with numbers. But to reduce this to a numbers game misses the point entirely. Think of a leaky faucet. Every few minutes a drop comes out. It's been doing this for years, drop after drop. Then one day somebody comes along and does something very simple. He turns the tap, and water starts gushing out. When the person doesn't want any more water he simply turns the tap the other way and the flow dies out. Have I just described a number game in terms of the volume of water coming out of the faucet? Sure. Where you had milliliters you now have gallons. But to view things like this would be a bizarre choice of perspective: they are now decidedly and qualitatively different. Focus your attention not on counting drops, but on the act of turning the tap, allowing the trapped water to gush out. The hand is you. The tap is your mating constraints.
When they use the term mating constraints biologists refer to any circumstances that prevent an animal from reaching its optimal mating state. An inescapable source of mating constraints for any animal, including humans, are physiological limitations. A good example of these relates to age. Men only reach sexual maturity in adolescence and are frequently incapable of intercourse in the later years of their life, meaning that their sexual activity is confined to the middle part of their life. Another example of physiological constraints is the frequency with which men can ejaculate. If you are lucky enough to have unlimited sexual access to one or more women, there is a physiological limit to how many times you can have sex in a day - after you have ejaculated a few times in short succession you simply won’t be able to get an erection. Now because we come into existence with these species-typical physiological mating constraints, we don’t tend to view them as limitations. Like gravity, they just come as part of being a man, and we don’t give them a second thought. [144]
Another source of mating constraints arises because there is only so much time and energy a man - or any animal for that matter - can devote to mating before the necessities of biology and life come crashing down. No matter how large your mating time budget, it will always be limited by other demands of life. Competing time budgets will need to be allocated to sleeping, working, nourishing yourself, socializing, leisure time etc., and there are absolute lower limits below which many of these cannot drop. This is another reason why most men are unlikely to achieve the neat 40x increase in sexual partners we calculated earlier. Again, as with physiological constraints, when we think of bottlenecks to our mating these practical time, money and energy limitations are not what comes to mind. Few of us have ever achieved a mating life productive enough to hit this bottleneck. Quite the contrary, we can safely say this kind of “problem” would be welcome by most men, just like most lottery winners would welcome the problem of where to store their newfound riches.
The constraints that do come to mind when we ponder our unsatisfactory mating life are social constraints. These arise from the aims and desires of other people that conflict with ours, stopping us from having the kind of mating life we desire. These social constraints, in man as in most other male mammals, are twofold. Firstly, there is female choice. Most women, most of the time, want nothing to do with us. We belong to the sex with lower parental investment, female selection is intense, standards are high, and rejection is the norm. Secondly, and perhaps less obviously in today’s world, there is competition from other males. Because women are the sex with higher parental investment and the limiting factor in reproduction, men must compete amongst themselves for sexual access to them. Let’s see how these two fundamental mating constraints, female choice and male competition, will be largely irrelevant in your new mating life.
There is no escaping female choice and rejection - they will always be a part of life. But after you have hacked your mating, being rejected will be reduced from an emotionally salient and intensely unpleasant experience to a fleeting inconvenience. The sheer volume of women you can attempt to mate with will render rejections inconsequential and psychologically harmless. You won’t care to give them a second thought. You won’t have the time, because you will always have access to an unending supply of potential mates. Think of it like picking wallets off the ground. You walk around town and there are wallets all over the ground, just waiting to be picked up. Nobody else is bothering to pick them up. All you need to do is reach down, pick up each wallet and open it to see what’s inside. Most of the wallets will be empty, in which case you just put the empty wallet back on the ground and go on your way. Eventually you come across one that is filled with cash, and it’s all yours. You only need to take the money out and stuff it in your pockets. This is what your mating life will feel like after you have hacked it. It will be, to borrow a quote from a famous investor, like picking up money off the floor. Aside from the psychological level, there is the very practical aspect; rejection will cease to be a constraint to your mating life because it will no longer be a limiting factor. If your goal is to have sex with the largest number of women - far more than most men can dream of - then you will be able to do so, simply by leveraging your mating probabilities to massive numbers of mating attempts. If your goal is to find a very desirable long-term partner or wife, again female mate choice will not be able to stop you. All you need in this case is to successfully pass through the sequential mate choice hurdles of a single woman. Though the bars will be set high and the process protracted you will almost certainly manage to succeed once, because you will have stacked the odds on your side.
The other major social constraint is competition from other men. We are lucky to live in the age of egalitarian societies, where all men are equal against the law and forbidden from exercising violence against others. This is an unusual state of affairs. For most of recorded human history men of high rank have exploited their position and used brute force to restrict other men’s sexual access to women. This violence was carried out with impunity or, in many cases, institutionalized. Even to this day, the penalties in some surviving primitive societies against men who make sexual advances on the women of powerful local leaders or kings are severe, including ritualized forms of slow and agonizing death. [145] For reasons that are not well understood, nowadays powerful men in most societies no longer do this. If you live in a secular society anywhere in the Western world, there is nothing stopping you from hitting on any woman you desire. Assuming you can gain access to her and don’t violate any laws in the process, you can even attempt to mate with the wife of your country’s president or prime minister. Competition among men today is indirect, with men competing against each other to gain sexual access, and preferably exclusive sexual access, to freely consenting females. But even this indirect, non-violent competition is not as strong as it once was, since polygamy, the marrying of multiple women, is outlawed in all Western countries. [146] This means that highly desirable men are legally prohibited from sexually monopolizing multiple women at the same time, which would have the effect of distorting the sex ratio of eligible bachelors to bachelorettes, leaving the former with fewer options.
On paper then, things have never looked better for the ordinary man. The world is at his fingertips. But if you are stuck in the unenviable position most men spend their lives in, perpetually recreating ancestral social conditions, then the indirect male competition you experience will still be immense. In the first chapter we discussed the tremendous male appetite for sexual variety and contrasted it to the tiny sliver of female sexual availability. We found that women’s interest in sexual variety is around eighty times smaller than men’s. It is hopeless trying to compete equally with other men in this kind of game, all trying to squeeze into the same tiny sliver at the same time. Statistically, you’re just not going to do well. The odds are also dismal if it’s not sexual variety you’re after, but a desirable long-term partner - especially if you are not a high mate value male. Here you are looking for a woman who is not in an exclusive relationship with another man and will not reject you at any stage of her sequential mate choice. What’s more you are trying to find this woman through the pitifully small number of opportunities your social circle affords and with a mate value sociometer that is undermining you from the outset. It is no wonder most men are unhappy with their mating life.
If you want to fare well, you simply cannot afford to compete on a level playing field. You will need to cheat, give yourself an unfair advantage that will set you apart from the pack. The advantage needs to be immense. We just described how your new mating life will feel like picking wallets from the ground. Now here’s the kicker: other men see these wallets all around them too, every day of their lives. They just never once stop to pick one up. They are afraid something terrible will might happen if the first wallet turns out empty. Meanwhile you’re collecting them left and right, stuffing your pockets with cash. Take a few seconds to think how rich your mating life will be at the end of this compared to theirs. It won’t even be close. Once you’ve started, you’ll look at other men in wonder: all playing on the same level playing field you used to play, with the odds so massively stacked against them, held back by imaginary boundaries. Hoping that their new sexy outfit will make a difference. Or the work promotion, or the car. That they ever have sex will seem remarkable. That you used to be one of them insane.
There is no other animal in its natural habitat that can rid itself of its mating constraints like you can. Starting now, all you have to do is trade some of your time and effort for a large volume of mating attempts. This will effectively bypass the filter of female choice. At the same time, you won’t be competing with other males in the sexual marketplace: you’ll be cheating in plain sight.
The best partner and womanizer
Hacking your mating will generally involve no change to your mate value. If you’re broke or overweight, for example, you won’t suddenly see your bank account growing or your waistline shrinking. There can, of course, be improvements to your psychological well-being, brought about by your newfound success with women. These can make a big difference. If you are in a low mood and feeling sorry for yourself because you are single and lonely, women are likely to pick up on your negativity and be repelled. On the other hand, there’s nothing to boost your mood like sorting out your mating, at least in the short term. Women will be attracted to your good spirits and positivity. But these are contextual and relatively circumscribed effects that are unlikely to have persistent, long-term effects on your personality and mate value.
The true benefits of hacking your mating will depend on your goals. If your intention is to find a long-term partner the benefits will be largely psychological. For the first time in your life, perhaps, you will be approaching your relationship from a place of abundance. You can focus your energies on building the best possible relationship without fear, from a place of confidence and strength. You will know that if things don’t work out for any reason, you will not struggle to find another girlfriend. Paradoxically, this will make you a better partner. You might notice you are less jealous, less needy, and less demanding, even if your partner is of higher mate value. Your partner, if she is psychologically healthy at least, will be attracted to this. If over time you realize this is not the relationship you should be in, your self-confidence will allow you to put an end to it sooner, saving both of you precious time and energy while sparing the frustration and animosity. Even if your partner terminates the relationship against your wishes, you will likely be surprised by how less bitter, resentful and negative your reaction is compared to how you would have reacted in the past.
If you want to pursue promiscuous mating, having sex with the largest number of women, the changes in your life will take place on multiple levels, well beyond the psychological. To understand this, we need to revisit the massive difference in the two sexes’ desire for sexual variety. Men want to mate, a lot , with many different women. Women are not as interested in sex as they are in finding a long-term partner and then getting on with the business of raising children. In line with these differences, biologists view the task of reproduction as a split between two distinct but complementary components: mating and parenting. [147] The more of its time and energy an animal devotes to mating the less will be left for parenting and vice versa. As predicted by parental investment theory, men as a group are heavily biased toward mating, while women are heavily biased toward parenting. Within each sex, however, there is substantial – indeed massive - individual variation. Many men are happy with a parenting-heavy reproductive strategy that involves settling down with one partner and raising children. Other men are not like this at all. Their mating-heavy reproduction is oriented towards uncommitted sexual relationships with the largest possible number of women, and children are of little interest to them. Society has long recognized their mating-heavy reproductive strategy and given these men several less than flattering names: womanizer, player, philanderer, Casanova, Don Juan, Lothario etc. For simplicity we will keep to calling them womanizers.
Psychological research suggests that a large part of what makes a womanizer is genetically determined. [148] , [149] These men tend to have various traits that point to good genetics. They are often attractive, strong, with masculinized facial features and lower levels of asymmetry. [150] , [151] , [152] As we discussed in the previous chapter, these physical features are thought to be honest indicators of genetic quality. Since it is easier for these men to exchange their high-quality genes for casual sex, evolution has naturally made them more interested in mating rather than parenting.
Does that mean there is no hope for an aspiring womanizer who lacks the appropriate genes? Far from it. While some womanizers are born, others are created in response to information they receive from their social environment. We can call these latter types “opportunistic womanizers.” These opportunists develop a womanizing personality and behavior after they start receiving signals of numerous opportunities for short-term or uncommitted mating, where there were previously none. Based on this new information the opportunistic womanizer will cut down on the parenting part of his reproductive efforts and shift his energies to mating. Though the inputs to initiate the process are social in nature, the process itself is biological and pre-programmed, even if most men will never get the opportunity to activate it. These triggered, opportunistic changes have evolved because throughout our species’ history, dramatic social changes and upheavals were frequent. These could have been brought about through tribal warfare, disease, or migration, to name a few. Men who evolved the ability to flexibly respond to these changes and take advantage of new mating opportunities were able to out-compete their peers, and men alive today have inherited their ancestors’ flexibility.
Biology provides us with many examples of socially-induced, opportunistic changes to animals’ reproductive strategies. The ultimate such change is an animal’s decision to change its sex. This is common in worms, fishes and various invertebrate sea creatures. [153] For example, in species where one male sexually monopolizes a harem of females, the largest female in the harem will frequently change sex upon the male’s death and assume the deceased male’s duties. Its reproductive budget allocation has now shifted from almost all-parenting to all-mating. If animals as simple as fish and worms can undergo these dramatic transformations based on social stimuli, what are more complicated animals like men capable of?
It has been known for some time that male hormonal levels in various mammalian species, and in particular the levels of testosterone circulating in the blood, are directly linked to the animal’s social interactions and especially its interactions with females. [154] Following copulation or even mere exposure to a female, males in various mammalian species show a spike in testosterone and gonadotropins, which are the hormones that stimulate the testes. This effect can even be triggered in the absence of the female, by mere exposure to her odors. [155] These hormonal surges typically last a few minutes or hours. Interestingly, males that undergo these female-induced hormonal surges repeatedly, also show more long-lasting changes. The weight of the sexual tissue that is activated by these hormones is increased relative to control animals, and the concentration of testosterone in these tissues increases. These changes, in turn, modify an animal’s subsequent behavior. Scientists already in the 1970s were floating the idea of a positive feedback loop between social experience and hormones:
[…] initially small differences in experience between animals may be amplified with repeated social stimulation. Slight differences in experience may cause small differences in hormonal response between animals upon initial exposure to particular social stimuli. These small differences in response to the initial exposure may further modify the animal's responsivity, causing larger differences in both behavioral and hormonal measures on subsequent exposures to similar stimuli. [156]
These animal studies are usually carried out in species like rats or hamsters, where scientists have complete freedom to manipulate the animals and isolate the parameters they wish to study. They are free to move the males around, place them in the company of females as desired, inject them with hormones and even castrate them. Humans are more complicated and there are obvious ethical restrictions to what scientists can do. But using increasingly sophisticated methods and ingenuity scientists in recent years have begun to paint a similar picture of a dynamic relationship between the social stimuli a man receives, his hormonal profile and his behavior. In line with other mammalian research, we now know that one of the most important social influences on a man’s hormonal profile is the women around him. Merely being in the presence of a young woman increases a man’s circulating testosterone levels, and this increase is directly responsible for various aspects of his courtship behavior, like increased extraversion. [157] Being in the presence of attractive women also brings increased risk-taking behavior, an effect that is also likely related to the increase in circulating testosterone. [158] These changes typically last only a few minutes, but - as with other animals – testosterone fluctuations also operate in longer time frames. There is very strong evidence that the function of this longer-term testosterone variation is to guide men to the optimal allocation of their mating vs. parenting budgets. Men who are in committed romantic relationships have lower testosterone levels than their single counterparts, in accordance with a mating strategy that has shifted decidedly towards parenting. [159] After the dissolution of a long-term relationship, as in divorce, men’s testosterone levels increase again. The men who have the highest testosterone levels, more than any other group, are those who have multiple sexual relations at the same time. [160] , [161] Apart from women, another social signal that modulates a man’s hormonal profile is children. As expected, studies find that testosterone is significantly lower in men who are fathers compared to non-fathers, presumably to bias their reproductive effort towards parenting at the expense of mating. [162] , [163] As a rule, the younger his children and the more he is involved in their care, the lower a father’s testosterone levels. The brains of fathers and non-fathers also react differently to images of social stimuli: brains of fathers are more activated in response to images of children while those of non-fathers in response to sexual images of women. The extent to which these neural changes are mediated by testosterone or other hormones is not yet known, but it is a very strong possibility. [164]
In addition to testosterone, various other hormones like oxytocin, vasopressin and prolactin are likely involved in directing a man’s reproductive effort at the appropriate point on the mating vs. parenting spectrum. [165] This nuanced, multi-level action of testosterone and other hormones is not surprising. Endocrine systems are essentially internal communication devices. Hormones act throughout the body, so that a hormone released in one part of the body can have far-reaching and coordinated effects in many distant systems. This coordinated action of multiple biological systems allows a finely-tuned and dynamic allocation of energy to a strategy that is a) all-mating, b) all-parenting or c) anything in between the two extremes. [166]
Having said this, let’s see what happens when you start having sexual relations with several women at the same time. In a very short period you trigger a cascade of physiological events, chief of which are the hormonal changes just described. Your chemical receptors will be inundated with chemical signals from multiple women. You will be exposed to chemicals in their saliva and odors from their vaginal discharge and sweat. We know that men can unconsciously identify these chemical signals and immediately adjust their levels of circulating testosterone and cortisol, but there are almost certainly numerous other physiological processes happening that we have yet to identify. [167] In a longer timeframe, having sex with multiple women will result in a more stable increase in your testosterone levels. Again, there will be numerous other processes we cannot yet begin to describe, but it is nearly certain that these will lead to long-lasting, permanent changes in how your brain processes mating information. Your threshold for identifying what counts as a mating opportunity will lower: where other men see nothing, you will see great and obvious potential. Your stress levels during a mating attempt will be lower, as will your stress response upon being rejected. You just won’t care when you get turned down, and your body will react accordingly. At the same time, you will behave more dominantly, assertively and outgoing in the presence of women. You will feel and act like an alpha male. Increased sexual activity with different partners will also lead to improvements in your sexual competency. The more women you have sex with, the more profound, long-lasting and potentially irreversible some of these changes will be. Success will breed more success and make future success all the easier.
At the same time several strictly cognitive processes will be taking place. Your mate value sociometer, to the degree that it functions independently of your hormones, will be updated with information on the numerous attractive women now in your life. Your autobiographical database of social and mating interactions with women will swell. Some of this new information will be consciously retained by you while the rest will carry on its work in the background, influencing your mating behavior in ways you don’t even realize. All the positive emotional benefits we identified earlier for men who wish to pursue monogamous lifestyles will also apply here. You will be less jealous, less possessive, less bitter and approach all women in your life from a place of abundance.
If you refrain from a promiscuous mating pattern for a few weeks or months, either by being alone or by becoming seriously involved with one woman, some of your hormonal and neuronal parameters will reset. When you attempt to go back to your womanizing ways you might find it difficult at first. You might feel on edge, uneasy, or rusty. Things might not flow as they used to. Due to the experiences you have accumulated, however, and the fact that some of the earlier changes are probably irreversible, it should only be a short time before you are back to your old womanizing self.
The only way to undergo this transformative process is to deliberately and forcefully set it in motion by initiating multiple mating attempts. There is no other way. Marginal improvements to your mate value or social circle won’t do the trick, nor will study of any psychological method. You can spend a lifetime studying psychological methods, but that won’t move your body’s physiological needle one bit towards the desired direction. Paradoxically, successful PUAs and seduction coaches - to the extent their advertised achievements are genuine - are living examples of the profound effects of this transformative process. Former shy geeks have become prolific womanizers by exploiting the positive feedback loop set in motion by large numbers of mating attempts and the resulting sexual experiences. These well-publicized transformations of fumbling virgins to Casanovas are then attributed by the PUAs to the development and mastery of “proven seduction systems” that will work for anyone who tries them. But the seduction system is nothing but the conscious rationalization of a largely subconscious biological process. The PUA cannot know this process even exists, much less articulate it.
A recipe for misery
The benefits of hacking your mating are numerous and life-changing. Before closing this chapter, I would like to review one that is close to my heart and will touch a chord among many readers. This is freedom from the passion of channeling your attention, time and efforts to a woman who does not want you.
Persisting until an uninterested woman’s resistance is overcome has undoubtedly been a useful mating strategy in our species’ history. If it hadn’t worked in the past, on at least some occasions, evolution would have weeded it out of our species’ behavioral repertoire. But we need to consider the social context in which it – very occasionally – worked. The pool of potential mates available to a man was tiny, and there might have often been no suitable alternative mates available. For a man in those circumstances, persisting in the face of low odds of eventual success might have been a better strategy than to back off and be left with no mating prospects whatsoever. But it was only better compared to the worst possible outcome of having no prospects whatsoever. It was the second worse strategy, one click above absolute bottom. In today’s sexual landscape, where men are surrounded by an endless pool of available women, what was once the second from bottom strategy is an almost guaranteed recipe for misery.
If this evolutionary logic alone does not convince you, consider the psychological research on the topic. [168] , [169] One of the most striking findings is the vast difference in the perceptions of the uninterested person being pursued - be it woman or man - and the person who is pursuing. Though the psychological effects are in many respects similar regardless of which sex is doing the pursuing, to simplify the discussion we will assume that a persistent man is chasing an uninterested woman who has already rejected him. Contrary to what one might expect, on balance the experience will usually be substantially more negative for the woman than the man. The longer he keeps up the pursuit, the more unpleasant the experience becomes for her. Initially she might feel anything from flattery to awkwardness. She might be unsure how to respond or feel guilty for having to reject someone. The longer the unwelcome pursuit lasts however, the more uniformly and intensely negative the experience becomes for her, until in the end the pursuer is simply a nuisance, a source of distress. What might once have been a valued friend or acquaintance has now become a pest. While the man must endure the pain of the ongoing rejection, he can at least cling on to some hope, no matter how irrational, that the woman will eventually change her mind. But for the woman there is no upside. There is only an unexpected and uninvited problem that will only get worse if the man doesn’t back off. Unsurprisingly, when recalling experiences like this a woman will often express the wish the whole thing had never happened.
Another key finding is the difference in the two parties’ perceptions of just how clearly the rejection was communicated. Men will frequently misinterpret what is simply a polite way of communicating disinterest for a genuine window of possibility. Women, on the other hand, will perceive the same communication as an unequivocal rejection that left no room for doubt. For example, a woman might say “I am not interested in a relationship right now ” and feel confident that she communicated her disinterest as clear as day. The man, on the other hand, might focus his attention on the “right now ” bit of her statement and sincerely convince himself that the woman has not entirely ruled out the possibility of something happening in the future.
To summarize, the two main takeaways from the research that social psychologists have so kindly carried out for us are: a) the more you persist, the less attractive you become. Your mating opportunity – if there was one to begin with - is gone, but now you also risk losing your friendship, inadvertently shrinking your social circle and damaging your reputation in the process. b) If you are picking up any signals that can be interpreted as leaving open the possibility of something happening in the future, chances are it is your desperation playing tricks on you.
But there is another reason to quickly back off a woman who has rejected you, regardless if she explicitly said “no ” or just showed you in her own way that’s she not interested. This is subtler that what we just discussed. We saw that a woman’s mate choice process is essentially an information gathering exercise. The more information she collects, and the more reliable this information is, the more confident she can be in continuing or terminating the courtship process. A substantial part of this exercise involves gathering social information, including information about your interactions with women. These interactions are gold mines of biological information to which women have evolved to be very sensitive. When the woman you want rejects you, this rejection becomes another piece of social information that is added to her internal bank of knowledge about you: you were assessed and rejected by a female. Furthermore, for her purposes, this damning piece of information is about as reliable as it gets. It has come straight from the horse’s mouth - her mouth. If she was on the fence just before she rejected you, this new negative information will now be enough to place you firmly in the “no” category. This self-reinforcing loop of her initial rejection becoming feedback and further negatively influencing how she views you could partly account for the hopelessness of your situation once she has rejected you the first time. It is something most men are intimately familiar with: that moment she said no, and you just knew in your gut there was no coming back from that. [170]
What should you do at this point? This should all come naturally to you with experience, but if you are in doubt the advice I can give you - and yes, I am giving advise here for a change - is to cut off the chase as soon as she has said no, either explicitly or through her actions. The latter can be things like her being indifferent, snappy or downright aggressive, but usually she will just ignore you. At that point forget about her and politely move on. Or don’t forget about her if you find this impossible but do move on. If there is any chance she will change her mind this will only be after you can signal fresh information that will make her overturn her initial assessment. And what better information than to be successful with another woman, preferably one more attractive than her.
But let’s take a step back, before you were even rejected. We have seen how low the probability is of any single woman being interested in you. To become emotionally invested in one before you have clear evidence that she is at least as interested as you is about as irrational a mating strategy as can be. It is actually the most rational path if your goals are failure, frustration and misery. Avoiding premature emotional investment will also prevent your coming across as heavy and suffocating the woman emotionally and will make it more likely she will stay with you.
Recap: the rational path to sexual abundance
Mating can be very passionate, but to reverse a failing mating life you need to set passion aside and approach the problem rationally. This is what this book is about, mating rationality. Finding the rational path to sexual abundance, or the rational path to anything for that matter, involves five steps. Firstly, acknowledge the present undesirable situation. Secondly, describe the ideal end state, how you would like things to be. Thirdly, like the pieces on a chessboard or jigsaw puzzle, take stock as of many relevant elements in your task's landscape as possible. This also involves identifying what is known, what is not known and why it matters. Fourth, given what you have identified in previous steps, lay out the various alternative courses of action. The fifth and final step is to select the course of action which is likely to deliver the best results: move you closest to your ideal end state in the shortest amount of time. Let's take these steps in turn.
1. Your mating life as it stands today . If you are like most men, there is a good chance you are not happy with your mating. You might be in a state of scarcity with women, often single, and not through choice. Alternatively, you might have a mate but not be too thrilled with her. You would rather be with someone else but are afraid to take action in case you end up with nothing. In this latter case you have traded in your mating aspirations and life satisfaction for access to sex and companionship.
2. Your mating life as you would like it to be. This will be different for different men, but will usually be along the lines of a) an increased number of sexual partners, or b) a more desirable long-term partner, or c) a substantial period of time in condition a , followed by the rest of your life in b . In short, you want a high-quality, abundant relationship with women .
3. Take stock of the problem's landscape, and identify the crucial pieces.
These pieces are:
a) The inescapable biological reality of being cheap. You belong to the sex with lesser parental investment, and rejection is your biological destiny. Regardless of what you do next, you need to accept this.
b) The black box of female mate choice. Good luck cracking this.
c) A plethora of contradictory psychological methods that claim - explicitly or implicitly - to crack the black box of female mate choice via taught verbal and behavioral scripts.
d) Your mate value. All else being equal , higher levels of this will lead to more success with women. You know what you need to do to improve your mate value, but it is a slow and limited process.
e) The ancestral world in which your mating brain operates. This is where our ancestors lived, a place that today exists only in your brain. A world with substantial and ever-increasing rejection costs, where the optimal strategy is to lower your aspirations to avoid the disastrous outcome of ending up without a mate.
f) The world in which you live. This is a world with no rejection cost, where the probability of ending up without a mate is very low, regardless of how bad and how often you mess things up. Here there is only upside to each mating attempt.
g) A very attainable future without mating constraints. This involves nothing more than aligning your mating behavior with the present world. In this future all you do is pick up women off the floor, unhindered by the imaginary constraints that hold back the rest of the male population. This is not some future far off in the distance. You can start living in this condition today, right now.
h) Your fear of approaching women. The seduction community calls this approach anxiety . We haven’t discussed this yet, but it is the only thing separating you from a world without mating constraints. Approach anxiety is so important that we will devote the next part of the book to understanding it.
4. Lay out the alternative paths before you.
You can, of course, do nothing. Just persist in your present course and pray for the best. Your parents or friends might favor this approach: “give it time, it will come.” But if you've made it this far in the book it's a safe bet you want to take some action.
This action could be what most men spend most of their lives doing, whether they realize it or not: strive to increase mate value. In the first chapter we saw various ways you can do this, but in reality most men, at least those with a modicum of motivation, devote a large part of their younger lives to this task. When you go the extra mile at work to secure that promotion, you are working on your mate value. Likewise when you work on your health and appearance by cleaning up your diet and exercising, or when you try to expand your social circle, or develop new skills and interests. Improving your mate value is a laudable goal which make you a better person, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. But because it is a slow and incremental process, you won't see overnight results. It would be best to combine this approach with a method that can deliver quick results. I have described the two main types of methods that claim to do this: the psychological methods of the seduction industry and the “method” I have developed in this chapter. I put it in quotation marks because it is more of a lifestyle choice than a systematic method, but for convenience we can stick to calling it a method. To further distinguish it we could loosely call it the social ecological method , but for brevity we will simply call it the ecological method .
The ecological method marries the perspectives of the psychologist and the economist. It is based on a rational analysis of the modern social landscape, one that is unrecognizable to the ancestral social landscapes that shaped our mating emotions and behaviors. Our mating brain operates according to costs and benefits which no longer apply. The ecological method is the choice to adopt a lifestyle that is in line with existing - rather than obsolete – mating costs and benefits.
Table 8 summarizes and contrasts these two approaches.
|
Ecological method |
Psychological methods |
|
Bypasses the black box of female mate choice |
Claim to crack the black box of female mate choice |
|
Relies on innate developmental programs created by millions of years of evolution |
Rely on learned scripts |
|
Attributes improvement in mating ability to triggered innate cognitive, hormonal, and physiological processes |
Attribute improvement in mating performance to mastery of learned scripts |
|
Based on simple and inarguable principles from evolutionary psychology, anthropology and probability |
Based on untested lay psychological theory |
|
Focused on hacking the man |
Focused on hacking the woman |
|
Compatible with evolutionary principles |
Biologically and psychologically implausible
|
|
No scripts or gimmicks |
Differing and wildly contradictory scripts and gimmicks |
|
Nothing to consciously learn |
Require teaching and learning |
Table 8. Comparing the ecological and psychological approach
I’m a psychologist by training. There is nothing I would like more than to lay before you a psychological method, backed by a fully validated scientific theory, that would reliably produce success with any given woman. Failing that, I’d love to give you a method that would at least produce success most of the time. Actually, I would happily settle for a psychological method that produced just noticeably more success than you’re currently enjoying. Something in the order of an average 10-15% increase in your mating probabilities would make me the happiest man. But I can’t give you a method like this. Nobody can. Looking at the left-hand column of Table 8 the reasons are clear. The scientific study of women’s mating mechanisms is simply not at that level. The commercial psychological methods on the market today are intuitive folk psychological creations that are uninformed by science and bound by nothing but their creators’ imagination. There are no external - and objective - theoretical constraints to which they must abide. This leads to the endless proliferation of contradictory methods available on the market today. The probability that any one of these methods will work is close to zero.
Maybe in a few hundred years, given sufficient advances in psychology and neuroscience, and with the help of currently unavailable technology, a psychological method of sorts will be possible. But due to the magnitude of the problem it is unlikely that you will be able to study this method off a book or video course. It will probably look like a quantum-computing microchip embedded under your skin. This will link to numerous microscopic sensors that pick up an array of inputs from the woman and will electrically manipulate your central nervous system to produce the optimal reply to her every verbal and non-verbal behavior. But even then, given what we know, it is unlikely this science-fiction technology will give you anything more than a handful of percentage points’ increase in mating probabilities. Until this hypothetical day arrives, the psychological method will remain a pipe dream.
The ecological method, on the other hand, is simple and low-tech. It acknowledges the insurmountable problem of female mate choice and makes no attempt to solve it. It does not violate any principles from evolutionary biology and psychology. It requires no preparation or learning of any kind and can be applied immediately, giving results from the first day. For all its simplicity, the method delivers life-changing results.
5. Select the optimal path.
Carefully review Table 8 one last time. If you are not sure about any point revisit the relevant part of the book where it was discussed. You stand before a junction with two paths.
One path leads to psychological methods. Down this path you will find an endless supply of pickup and dating material, many lifetimes’ worth. Stacks of contradictory books, audio courses and videos await, each instructing you differently to the rest. You will soon forget most of what you learned, but you will keep on reading nevertheless. There is also the occasional overpriced coaching session with your favorite seduction guru. But one thing conspicuously missing is substantial experience pulling the trigger - talking to women. There's a lot of approach anxiety down this path, very little rejection and even less sex. You will still be living in a modern incarnation of ancestral mating conditions.
The other path leads to the ecological method. Here there is no seduction theory or pickup training of any sort. Other than what you’re holding in your hands, there are no books, or videos, or material of any sort. There is nothing you need to be taught, no coaches or gurus that have the answers. Millions of years of evolution will naturally be working on your side; you won’t be actively blocking them by trying to fit your mating into the straightjacket of a lay theory. There's also no approach anxiety here. There is a lot of rejection, but you use the term “rejection” merely to communicate a factual description of a woman who said no. There is no feeling attached to “rejection” - it evokes no negative emotions. It has about the same pop to it as the words “umbrella” or “pen.” You have actually had some good laughs out of these so-called rejections, and the word, if anything, has a playful, prankish ring to it. It's all a game, and you’re allowed to cheat in plain sight. You are picking money off the floor here. There is also nothing to learn here, no reason to delay initiation of cost-free mating attempts. There is a woman waiting for you as soon as you finish this book - the first woman you ever cold-approach. You will never forget her. Shortly thereafter another one and another one, woman upon woman without end if that is what you want. If you think this path makes more sense, then please read on. The next chapter, equally as important as this one, is devoted to approach anxiety.
Fear
noun: an intensely unpleasant emotion caused by impending danger
A vast disconnect , and a not so low hanging fruit
When you start to apply the ecological method one of the first things to impress you is how alone you are. You won’t see anyone else doing it. Over the course of thousands of approaches, I have personally seen two men - who did not accompany me - approaching other women with mating intent. And I have been keeping my eyes open all the time - if there were more I would have noticed.
Even more illuminating than what you don't see is what you can get straight from the horse's mouth. I soon made it a habit to ask the women I dated if anyone else had ever come up to them during the daytime. I asked some very attractive women, women nestled at the higher echelons of the top decile group of female mate value. Most of them told me I was the first. A small minority could recall one or two occasions this had happened to them before, usually in London. [171] But given how many women a man who employs something like the ecological method can walk up to, easily in the many hundreds or even thousands, these men are obviously very rare - I would hazard a guess that they are fewer than one in one thousand.
The reason for this conspicuous absence is surely not a lack of interest. The size and profitability of the seduction industry leave no doubt that men are very interested in trying it on with strangers. Nowhere is this insatiable male appetite as apparent as on YouTube, with endless “daygame” [172] videos that have millions of views and tens of thousands of channel subscribers. Far more interesting than what the videos show - for me at least - are the viewer comments. The pervading theme is men who would like to do this but can't. Some are honest about this. Others try to rationalize it: he's making a fool of himself, he’s chasing women on the street, he’s being pathetic and so on.
Why this vast disconnect between the millions of seduction industry consumers on the one hand and the handful of men who actually walk up to women on the other? We saw previously it has nothing to do with the amount of training in psychological methods men receive, the number of books, audio and video courses they consume or how many boot camps [173] they attend. It is because out of all the men with the desire to improve their mating, only a small minority succeeded in overcoming their approach anxiety. Most either never tried, preferring instead the comfort of trying to master a psychological method, or tried and failed.
An instructor in psychological methods is unlikely to explain the situation to his students in this way. The industry is built on the fiction that there is something to be taught before the student can talk to women and that his success will be proportional to how well he masters the method. Remove this fiction and there is nothing to sell. We can imagine what kind of people an inherently deceptive field will attract and the tricks they will resort to in competition against each other. Organically the entire industry will evolve towards increasingly outlandish claims and promises, and desperate customers will always be willing to pay outrageous money for useless products.
But deception is probably only part of the reason approach anxiety is not given center stage. Many pickup instructors will have significant approach anxiety issues of their own, resorting to less stressful - but useless - indirect methods as a result. Since these are the only methods their approach anxiety allows, these are the methods they teach. Another factor is that many lay theorists will eventually convince themselves that their methods work. Recall that a fair portion of PUAs are initially awkward and socially challenged men who struggle to even speak to women. Through great willpower and using all sorts of pickup material and gimmicks, they are eventually able to push through their approach anxiety and start talking to large numbers of women. Regardless of - or in spite of - their useless pickup routines, they accumulate tremendous experience and set in motion evolved physiological processes that transform their mating profile and relationship with women. The ego is very powerful, and it is not difficult for a man to then convince himself that his seduction model is at the root of success.
That the seduction industry has largely ignored approach anxiety is to be expected. More surprising is that behavioral scientists, and particularly evolutionary psychologists, have not bothered with the topic. We saw earlier that overcoming approach anxiety is all most men will need to reverse a failing mating life. By creating methods for overcoming approach anxiety, evolutionary psychologists could change the lives of millions of men for the better. But there are larger benefits. The societal burden that results from men who struggle to mate is immense, transcending psychological well-being. Some time ago, a story about a suspected voyeur in the front page of the local Oxford newspaper caught my attention. Police had discovered concealed cameras in the changing rooms of a local fashion retailer and had released a CCTV image of a “person of interest” they wanted to speak to in relation to the finding. Normally I wouldn’t care for a story like this, but on this occasion I was struck by the man’s irrationality. Breaking the law, risking his freedom and ruining his life while psychologically scarring innocent women, all for no good reason. While many men who commit sex crimes are psychiatrically disturbed, it is possible some – like this man - are simply frustrated and resentful at not being able to find a consenting mate. [174] Men with a long-term mate, and especially those who are married, also enjoy numerous health, psychological and financial advantages over their single counterparts. They are happier, healthier, live longer, have higher incomes and savings, and lower rates of psychiatric disorders and drug abuse. [175] , [176]
In part science’s lack of interest in approach anxiety is attributable to what we discussed in the introduction: evolutionary psychologists, like all scientists, naturally gravitate towards the lowest hanging fruit. This is what is easiest to study and assimilate into the discipline’s existing research at any given time. Approach anxiety is a research fruit whose time has probably not yet come. But I suspect a more important reason is what evolutionary psychologists themselves call “instinct blindness.” [177] This refers to the fact that we are constructed by evolution to think, feel and behave a certain way. Because we spend our lives like this it is difficult to see how arbitrary our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are and the different ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that could exist in parallel worlds. Like all our emotions, approach anxiety is hardwired into us. To explain it, one must first realize that it exists. To realize that it exists, it would help if one experienced or at least conceived of an alternate reality in which he freely walks up to women and expresses his interest. But precisely because their perception of reality is tainted through the distorting lenses of approach anxiety, this option does not generally occur to evolutionary psychologists. In the same way it did not occur to the Oxford voyeur that, instead of secretly filming women in the changing rooms, he could simply wait for them by the store exit and politely introduce himself as they walked out.
The brute force method
The default approach of most seduction coaches is telling their students to just go out and do it. In Mystery's famous formula for newbies:
Go out gaming four nights per week for four hours each night. Make an average of three approaches per hour. This schedule allows for a good twenty minutes per approach. This adds up to twelve approaches per night - which is forty-eight per week and close to two hundred per month. […] Within a year, you will have approached more than two thousand women. [178]
You will have then transitioned from novice to expert. The problem is that without some way of dealing with your approach anxiety you won't be able to do even the first approach, let alone thousands of them.
Now while this “just do it” attitude won’t work well coming to you across the pages of a book, it can work in person, especially if delivered by men you look up to and admire. This is where the pickup boot camps derive much of their enduring allure. You have, on one hand, the crushing, debilitating fear of approach anxiety, that would normally stop you dead in your tracks. On the other hand you have the overbearing pressure to conform to the instructor’s teachings and the peer pressure of a group of aspiring PUAs who are waiting for you to approach that blonde. It is your turn, after all - everyone else has done their approach. Caught between a rock and a hard place you will probably do it. Stumbling, stuttering, trembling, you will go up to her and say anything to just get it out of the way, never mind that your words had nothing to do with the instructor’s script. After a while it is your turn to do a second approach, and with some luck you will even do a third one by the time the boot camp is over.
A friend of Mystery, London-based seduction coach “Beckster,” has an old-school method for dealing with students who aren't so keen to follow instructions.
Yeah, so there’s many ways of doing it. One is flooding the sets, [179] so you literally send them in [the students] until they’re numb, or they keep, literally, pushing through trauma, break down and rebuild. So you can't get - as soon as you get to the lowest point of your pain body, and then the only way is up [...] [180]
The problem with using brute force and pain, apart from its unpleasantness, is what happens when the student returns home. Now the spotlights are off him, and away from the social pressure of his master and peers, it is unlikely he will subject himself to the ordeal again. He still does not understand approach anxiety and what it’s doing to him, and the unpleasantness of the boot camp experience will ensure he stays away from unknown women in the future.
To add insult to injury, the attitude of his seduction instructors is counterproductive. Without understanding it they have the worst possible attitude, demanding from the student in various ways that he “be a man” and suck it up, or tough it out, or grow a pair. The only thing this accomplishes is feed the fear and make the task at hand appear more formidable. Think back to the last time someone told you to be a man and do something you didn't want. How much less appealing did the already unpleasant task appear?
But the truth is you’re no man for doing this. A man loves and provides for his wife and children. A man looks after his elderly parents. He goes to the front to defend his country and risks his life for his fellow men. He donates an organ. He gives an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. He helps his friends. He doesn’t steal or lie. What you want to do is not brave, or honorable, or altruistic, or costly in any objective sense. It is commendable and life changing, and shows you have more motivation than the typical man who is content to waste his life on pornography, videogames, cable sports and social media – I’ll give you that. But it’s as dangerous or risky as shopping for groceries or washing the dishes and will take about the same time and effort as asking a stranger for the time or for directions. Rather than a man, think of yourself as a lottery winner. You’re setting yourself up to reap massive benefits, and you’re doing this risk-free and cost-free. You’re picking money off the floor.
The remainder of the chapter will elaborate this point. Rather than rely on brute force, our goal is to understand approach anxiety, building on what has already been discussed. We will go into detail on the evolution and biological function of these approach anxiety-related thoughts and emotions: why and how they evolved and why they are so powerful. We will see what, if anything, is going on inside you while you stand like a deer frozen in the headlights, hating yourself for being a coward. There is nothing wrong with you for feeling like you do. You are a perfectly functioning man, operating exactly like nature intended. But the key is understanding when and where nature designed you, when and where she intended for you to operate like this, and how removed those times are from present day circumstances.
Ingroups and outgroups
Violence towards members of the same species – conspecifics - is common among mammals. Approximately 40% of studied mammalian species engage in lethal violence against conspecifics, and 0.3% of all mammalian deaths are the result of violence from conspecifics. But some mammalian families, like primates, are more violent than most. And within the primate family some species, like chimpanzees and humans, are exceptionally violent. An estimated 2% of all historical human deaths have been the result of violence from other humans. [181] But behind this unusually large figure lies an even more sinister qualitative difference. In almost all mammals, violent death by conspecifics is the unintended consequence of contests for access to resources or mates. The animals fight and one is mortally injured, but its opponent’s goal is to simply win the contest, not kill the adversary. At any point in the contest all the weaker animal needs to do to avoid death is back away and concede defeat. But many human deaths at the hands of other humans are deliberate, happening when members of one group attack another with the primary intention of killings its members. Violence between different groups is called intergroup violence , to distinguish it from the generally less destructive violence that takes place among members of the same group – intragroup violence . Until the 1970s it was thought that humans are the only primates to deliberately kill their own, but observations of wild chimpanzees revealed that they also engage in lethal intergroup violence. [182]
The case of the chimpanzee is fascinating for its similarities to humans. Chimpanzees live in social groups - called communities - that range in size from 20 to 110 individuals of both sexes and all ages. It is very rare to see all members of the community at the same place and time. Rather they form temporary foraging subgroups of 1 to 20 animals, with a typical size of 4-6. These subgroups separate from the rest of the community for days at a time to forage and hunt for food. Communities occupy territories that are called ranges . These generally have mutually understood borders that communities will defend fiercely. Chance encounters at the border zones between foraging bands from opposing communities are aggressive and chaotic affairs, with the opposing animals screaming, barking and posturing but generally keeping a distance until one or both parties retreat. [183] Even if one group is substantially larger it will generally not directly attack, as long as there are at least two adult males in the opposing party. But under certain circumstances chimpanzees will attack. On these occasions male-only “border patrols” venture into the area overlapping the two communities’ ranges, with the sole purpose of finding and killing the other community’s members. Their behavior during the patrol changes: they travel in formation, are unusually quiet, cautious, and stop frequently to listen for enemy sounds. If the patrol finds no one or finds groups of two or more adult males, they retreat towards the center of their range. But if they encounter an isolated male or a mating pair they will attack, overwhelming their victims through surprise and superior numbers. While some of them pin the victim down, the rest bite and beat it to death. Due to their overwhelming numerical superiority, the attackers generally come out of these encounters unscathed, with hardly a scratch. Chimpanzees are opportunistic killers – they will only kill when they can be certain they won’t pay for their aggression and avoid violence in all other intergroup encounters. When they do kill, they often use the resulting shift in the balance of power to their advantage, enlarging their territory at the expense of the other community.
Humans are, sadly, much of the same. Like chimpanzees, we are a strongly territorial species with an elaborate social structure that facilitates the formation of all-male aggressive coalitions. Most hunter-gatherer societies in recorded history have engaged in intergroup aggression against neighboring groups. Among surviving primitive groups, strangers are feared and avoided, and when isolated strangers encroach on the group’s territory they are often executed on sight. Organized killing excursions into enemy territory usually exploit the element of surprise, with the attackers ambushing the enemy camps at night or, more frequently, picking off isolated individuals near the border. When they succeed in driving away their opponents they predictably take over the abandoned territory. These similarities have led some researchers to suggest that chimpanzee and human intergroup aggression might stem from our shared evolutionary past.
But for all our similarities, there is a dramatic difference between the two species. Intergroup hostility is a permanent fixture of chimpanzee life – though the levels of violence can vary, neighboring groups are never on friendly terms. Humans groups, on the other hand, can be friendly and even cooperate as easily as they can be aggressive. It is possible that a contributing factor to the evolution of peaceful – and ultimately cooperative – intergroup relations was the evolution of projectile weapons that can efficiently kill opponents at a distance. [184] The earliest discovered projectile spears date about 400,000 years ago, but it is possible that their use goes back a million or so years. The projectile weapon significantly nullifies the attackers’ advantages: regardless of the attacking group’s numerical superiority, no single attacker is safe. The defenders also enjoy a great advantage in knowledge of the terrain and concealed positions and will spend long stretches of time hiding and waiting to kill large prey from a distance. Intruders can never be sure they will not be ambushed by concealed hunters, with spears and arrows suddenly flying their way. The appearance of projectile weapons made intergroup aggression significantly costlier and was likely a major factor in the evolution of peaceful intergroup cooperation. [185]
Peaceful coexistence and cooperation, in turn, allow for the full utilization of a community’s range. The unrelenting hostility of chimpanzee groups forces them to avoid the periphery of their ranges, spending around three quarters of their time in the center. This leads to underutilization of the food sources at the periphery and an effectively smaller territory. But humans’ capacity for intergroup peace allows them to utilize their entire territory, and neighboring groups can even cooperate to extract resources along the shared border areas when this is practical. Ritualized interactions have historically solidified and regulated this mutually beneficial peaceful co-existence: groups hold joint festivities and exchange tools and other gifts. These festive rituals also serve as occasions for intermarriage between the communities or intergroup adoption, where a child is sent to live with friends or relatives of the parents in the neighboring community.
Living in groups for millions of years has left a deep mark on the human mind. One of the most studied topics in social psychology is the human readiness to differentiate between ingroup and outgroup members. [186] Ingroup members are treated preferentially, outgroup members less favorably. While ingroup members are afforded trust, cooperation and empathy, attitudes towards outgroup members can range from suspicion and subtle discrimination to derogation and even dehumanization – the viewing of outgroup members as animals that can simply be killed off. The fault lines that run the ingroup/outgroup boundaries are often racial, linguistic or cultural differences but can be as trivial as sports team affiliation or musical preferences. Artificially splitting a group of complete strangers into, say, green and yellow team and asking them to compete on a trivial task of no importance is enough to elicit typical ingroup/outgroup behavior.
But underneath the universal readiness to distinguish between ingroup and outgroup members lie biologically predictable sex differences. [187] Because men have historically been both the perpetrators and the victims of lethal intergroup violence, their intergroup biases are characteristically aggressive. For example, they are more likely than women to dehumanize outgroup members or endorse pre-emptive aggressive measures, particularly if the outgroup targets are male. But women have not historically perpetrated lethal violence against outgroup members, nor were they as likely as men to have been its recipients. Historically, the most common cost of intergroup aggression for women has been sexual coercion, in the form of rape or abduction by outgroup males. [188] From a woman’s perspective sexual coercion is potentially disastrous, depriving her from the ability to exercise mate choice and lowering the probability any resulting offspring will receive paternal care. [189] Accordingly, women’s outgroup biases serve to minimize the dangers of sexual coercion from outgroup males - they have a distinctively avoidant flavor. The strength of women’s avoidance biases is moderated by their perceived vulnerability: everything else being equal, a woman who feels vulnerable will be more biased against outgroup males. But a woman’s perception of her vulnerability need not be conscious. Research has recently uncovered that women’s outgroup bias increases during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. This is the time when conception is possible and the costs of sexual coercion highest, making it biologically sensible for women to be most biased and avoidant of outgroup males.
From the existence of subtle psychological mechanisms like bias towards outgroup men that is mediated by menstrual cycle phase - and from a mountain of other biological, historical and anthropological evidence – we can be confident that one of men’s historically preferred methods of interaction with outgroup women has been sexual coercion. But for our discussion the crucial question is: has our history of group living shaped men’s attitudes and behavior toward outgroup women in other ways? We explore this in the following section.
Approach anxiety and mating anxiety
In Chapter 3 we developed the ecological method and, in the process, examined the costs of rejection in ancestral environments. If you recall these were the limited number of available mates, the wide verbal dissemination of every rejection within the group, the lowering of status and straining of relations with male competitors. These costs meant each rejection would usually lead to a deterioration of a man’s mating prospects. Though everything in that analysis was accurate, our discussion was incomplete. It focused on a) the substantial rejection costs tied to attempted matings with ancestral ingroup females and b) the - zero - rejection costs of the ecological method. But the ecological method involves mass mating attempts with unknown women, from beyond your social circle. Attempting to mate with these women would be equivalent to an ancestral male trying to mate with outgroup females. Our comparison was not fair – we were comparing apples and oranges.
The essence of the ecological method lies in moving beyond what all other men are doing, which is to needlessly recreate ancestral mating constraints. But trying mass mating attempts within your social circle would be a hopeless strategy. You would soon find that many of the ancestral constraints still apply, as you would run out of eligible mates and in the process acquire a bad reputation among your relatives, colleagues, classmates, and friends. Not only your mating prospects but your interpersonal relations would suffer. A fair comparison in the previous chapter would have been to compare the rejection costs of the ecological method with the rejection costs ancestral men faced when attempting to mate with outgroup females. The problem is such a comparison is impossible. Rejection costs from - non-coercive - mating attempts with outgroup women would have been prohibitively high and the benefits close to zero, meaning these mating attempts would have been very rare. In evolutionary terms attempting to initiate courtship and consensual mating with outgroup women would have been a non-starter, an inviable mating strategy. As a result, ancestral males did not exercise it. We know this much from two independent but mutually reinforcing sources. Firstly, from a theoretical analysis of the mating constraints that would have been involved. Secondly, from the emotional response that the prospect of initiating a mating attempt with an unknown woman generates in men today.
Let’s start with the theory. The first thing to note is the protracted nature of the human courtship process. Before a woman consents to sex – the minimum evolutionary requirement for a mating attempt to count as successful - she must satisfy herself that the man fulfils some criteria. These take time to assess. At a minimum the assessment will take place over several days and will involve courtship interactions on several separate occasions. Simply walking up to a woman and expecting to have sex is not realistic. But with an ancestral outgroup woman these courtship meetings would have had to take place either in her group’s territory or at a border area. Both would have been very dangerous places for an ancestral male. A deadly projectile could come flying his way at any time, or he could be discovered by an outgroup male band who would likely beat him to death. Succeeding in courtship in enemy territory is one thing - getting an outgroup female to even enter the courtship process is another. As we saw one of the primary psychological marks our ancestral past has left on modern women is avoidance behavior of outgroup males. It is very unlikely ancestral women would frequently entertain courtship with outgroup males, as the risk of sexual coercion – per unit of time – would be orders of magnitude higher compared to consorting with ingroup males.
The above costs are primarily in the context of hostile intergroup relations. But peaceful relations would still present difficulties. One of the main difficulties the outgroup male would face would be the lack of information on the woman’s situation. Is she taken? Is another man courting her? Has her family promised her to someone? Does she even have a family? With an ingroup female the man has already collected and carefully evaluated all this information before initiating a still risky mating attempt. But an unknown outgroup woman would be a stab in the dark. And due to the chance nature and unpredictability of encounters with her no preparation would even be possible.
Peaceful co-existence and especially economic collaboration do not just fortuitously come about. [190] They require the evolution of specialized cognitive abilities, and above all they require rules. If everybody just does what they want cooperation is impossible. Part of the rules of the game is that members of one group don’t just help themselves to the other group’s resources. Females are the ultimate resource, so it is only natural that strict rules will govern the exchange of females between groups and that these rules will often serve as the basis for other economic exchanges. Sometimes females will be gifted to another group as a goodwill gesture, other times they will be exchanged for other females and on other occasions they will simply be exchanged for commodities. Collectively these practices are referred to as regulated mate exchange , and they have probably been a fixture of human groups deep into our evolutionary past – they are certainly found in the large majority of hunter-gatherer societies around the world today. [191] To initiate an unauthorized, unregulated mating attempt with an outgroup female would have often constituted a serious deviation, with implications well beyond the man who tried it. The entire group’s external political relations could suffer, and the offender would have likely had to pay a price for his transgression.
On their own these theoretical considerations make a compelling case for the prohibitively high costs of attempting to mate with outgroup females. But they pale in comparison to the second piece of evidence: the fear that the prospect of courting an unknown woman generates in men today. Fear, like all emotions of modern humans, are relics of past environments: by studying their function in today’s environments we can “reverse-engineer” the ancestral environments in which they evolved. [192] As discussed earlier, academic psychology has ignored approach anxiety, and in the absence of formal research much of what follows is hypothesis based on my own experiences and observations of other men.
The word “approach” in “approach anxiety” describes the feeling well. This unpleasant feeling is all about not approaching, about physically keeping the distance from an unknown woman. But the second part of the term, “anxiety,” has been a historically unsuccessful choice of word. The purpose of social anxiety is to alert a person that he or she is in an unusual or challenging social situation that could potentially result in large benefits or large costs, often in the form of gain or loss of status. The anxiety serves to bring to the person’s attention the high likelihood of committing a social blunder and heighten his sensitivity to potentially damaging actions. It also brings to the fore the assessment of the various alternative courses of action, out of which the person can select the best. Its purpose, in short, is to improve social performance. But the purpose of approach anxiety is not to improve performance: it is to prevent it entirely. Its core feature is paralysis, the freezing of a man in his tracks. The man literally cannot go near the woman, let alone start a conversation. This is very similar to the fear of predators like spiders or snakes. The purpose of these predator-related fears is to direct all focus towards the animal and keep us at a safe distance. If we are already close when the animal is spotted, the fear will either freeze us to avoid detection or make us quickly create a safe distance. Approach anxiety shares some, but not all, of these features of predator-related fears. Pondering a mating attempt triggers the distance-maintaining fear, but without this mating intent the fear is not triggered, regardless of how close the woman is. But when triggered, though qualitatively different, the intensity of the fear is not that far off from the fear of predators. “Approach fear” would have been a much more appropriate term, but because “approach anxiety” has become so entrenched in popular culture we will stick to this name.
But we also need a name for the unpleasant feelings provoked when one is attempting or considering mating with a known woman, the equivalent of the ancestral ingroup woman. We can call this distinct feeling mating anxiety . Mating anxiety has all the hallmarks of a properly functioning social anxiety. [193] It serves, before anything else, to focus attention on the woman, but in a positive way: what signals is she sending, how is she interacting with others, what are others saying about her and so on. Mating anxiety is associated with an increase in the interest and effort one puts towards the woman. It motivates the man to carefully evaluate the alternative courses of action available at all moments and select the best, the one most likely to bring about success. The other distinguishing feature of mating anxiety is that it is very sensitive to context. It is intimately tied to the mate value sociometer, which directly regulates its intensity. All else being equal, a man’s mating anxiety levels are determined by a) his self-perceived mate value, b) the woman’s mate value and, ultimately, c) the discrepancy between the two. The higher the mate value discrepancy ( MVD ) in favor of the woman – the higher her mate value relative to the man’s – the stronger the mating anxiety. The anxiety increases with MVD, until, at some sufficiently high level of MVD, the mating anxiety becomes so intense as to avert the mating attempt entirely. This ensures the man directs his matting attempts only to those women where success is sufficiently probable to justify the potential rejection costs.
Approach anxiety shares none of the fine tuning and context-sensitivity we see in mating anxiety. It is not moderated by anything. The man’s mate value, or the woman’s, or the discrepancy between the two simply do not affect its intensity. Nothing does for that matter. Approach anxiety is a blanket avoidance response to a type of situation that in ancestral environments would have involved prohibitively high costs, regardless of specifics.
Table 9 summarizes and compares the main features of approach anxiety and mating anxiety.
|
Mating anxiety |
Approach anxiety |
|
|
Emotional response |
Anxiety |
Immobilizing fear |
|
Rumination over past interactions for clues |
|
|
|
Mental preparation & evaluation of alternatives courses of action |
|
|
|
Emotional response moderated by MVD |
Yes |
No |
|
Purpose |
Optimize (or avoid) mating attempt |
Avert mating attempt |
|
Ancestral context |
Ingroup women |
Outgroup women |
Table 9. Approach anxiety and mating anxiety
A dramatic mutation
The human body is an incredibly complex chemical environment where everything is ultimately linked and in equilibrium to everything else. Even a single chemical change will often have knock-on effects which can ripple throughout the entire system. As a result, most genetic mutations can have harmful effects ranging from reduced vigor and mild impairment to serious deformity or premature death.
But genes don’t work in isolation. They have evolved to interact with specific aspects of the environment that were stable during the genes’ evolution. Our genes have “learned” to depend on the presence of these stable environmental features, sometimes consistently throughout a person’s life and sometimes only at specific timepoints. In contrast our genes have learned to “ignore” other aspects of the environment that have been unstable or unreliable during our evolution – these can vary freely without adversely affecting us. [194] For example, our genes have evolved in environments where vitamin C, ingested through citrus fruits and other plant foods, was always available in abundance. After millions of years of vitamin C availability our genes nowadays take its presence for granted. Sailors up to the late 18 th century who lived on impoverished diets would often suffer scurvy, a potentially fatal disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. This could easily be reversed if the sick sailors were fed oranges, lemons or any other fruit rich in vitamin C. It is the same with other vitamins. They have been abundantly available in food throughout our species’ evolution, and our genes have evolved to take their presence for granted. When for whatever reason any of these vitamins is absent from the food supply for some time, disease ensues.
We can think of scurvy and other similar vitamin deficiencies as resulting from “environmental mutations”: evolutionarily novel changes to some aspect of the environment which our genes do not anticipate. Just like our strictly physical environment can mutate, our “psychological environment” can also mutate. [195] The psychological environment can be thought of as the totality of the environmental aspects our psychological mechanisms (constructed by our genes) have evolved to interact with. While mutations to this psychological environment won’t usually kills us, they can sometimes undermine our psychological functioning and ultimately our wellbeing. For example, we saw in Chapter 2 that if the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) encounters no sounds of adults speaking a language during a person’s childhood, the person will never learn to speak properly. Our LAD, built by genes that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, “expects” to encounter adult speech during childhood – it has always done so in the past and has no back up plan in the event these sounds are absent, just like there are no backup plans for a vitamin C deficiency.
Contraception is another example of a mutation to our psychological environment. [196] Men alive today are descended from ancestral males who left the most surviving descendants, but for millions of years each sexual act was reliably related to a certain non-zero probability of conception. It was enough for the most reproductively successful men in the past to simply desire sexual intercourse with women, without worrying or even thinking about children. Our genes responded to this environmental stability by instilling in the male brain the desire for intercourse, and children were not even an afterthought. For a very long time this worked well: the most powerful and attractive men had sex with the most women and left the most children. But in today’s mutated environment of oral contraceptives, condoms, coils and vasectomies, men’s desire for sexual intercourse is woefully inadequate to the task of maximizing their number of offspring. [197] Indeed, the most powerful and sexually successful men often leave no children, while men of lower mate value who never bother with contraception usually have more.
An interesting category of mutations to our psychological environment involves what psychologists call cues . Cues are important environmental signals that the human mind has evolved to be especially sensitive to because of their links to evolutionary recurring and stable properties of the environment. These signals modify behavior or organize learning and are often processed unconsciously. Cues are so important to understanding human behavior that a large part of evolutionary psychology is dedicated to their study. The Westermarck effect , named after the 19 th century anthropologist who first suggested it, is a textbook example of a cue. Westermarck hypothesized that children raised together will not be sexually attracted to each other as adults. We saw in Chapter 2 that mating with siblings (incest) has genetically disastrous results, and siblings have historically been raised together. Modern research has confirmed and refined Westermarck’s original observation. The relevant cue to genetic relatedness is Maternal Perinatal Association (MPA) : witnessing one’s mother care for another baby (principally through breastfeeding) will kill any future sexual interest – the thought of sex with that person will instead trigger strong disgust. [198] For younger siblings who cannot possibly witness their mother breastfeeding their older siblings, the cue that triggers sexual disgust is sharing the same residence during childhood.
MPA and shared childhood residence were cues reliably associated with siblings during our species’ evolution and still are to this day. But the environment linked to other cues has in some cases changed dramatically. For example, the ultimate reason for the obesity epidemic of the Western world lies in the radically mutated modern dietary environment. Ancestral humans evolved in environments of food scarcity, where starvation was a leading cause of death. As a result, taste and texture cues linked to high caloric density (the number of calories per unit of food) are highly valued. Given a choice between a cauliflower and an apple you will almost certainly choose the apple. But between an apple and a steak you will choose the steak. The steak has a higher caloric density than the apple, which has a higher caloric density than the cauliflower. In ancestral environments meat was generally the most calorically dense food. Big game was highly valued, and a man’s hunting ability was linked to his social status. But the agricultural revolution of the past ten thousand years, and especially the mass-manufacture of processed foods over the past century, have dramatically altered the link between a food’s caloric density and its survival value. [199] A pound of green vegetables has about 100 calories, a pound of apples 240 calories and a pound of steak 1200 calories. But steak is expensive, while a pound of an evolutionarily novel food like bread that costs practically nothing also has 1200 calories. Meanwhile a pound of potato chips has 2400 calories and a pound of chocolate 2500 calories. [200] The ancestral relationship between cues to caloric density and survival has not only been severed but very often reversed.
Our psychological environment can mutate to various degrees at different times and places. An example of this is our evolved fear of snakes and spiders that we mentioned earlier. Snakes have been a predator of mammals for the past hundred million years, so humans pick up a fear of snakes – and to a lesser degree spiders - very quickly. [201] In contrast, evolutionarily novel dangers like automobiles and handguns, which today kill vastly more people than snakes, are more difficult to pick up – they are not given preferential treatment by our fear learning systems. This hardwired predator fear can often morph into pathological phobias, where people go to extreme lengths to avoid real or imaginary contact with snakes and spiders. But the degree to which snakes pose a danger nowadays varies dramatically from place to place. If you live in a country like India, where venomous snakes kill tens of thousands of people annually, a healthy fear or even phobia of snakes is useful. But the readiness to develop snake phobia is hardwired into all modern humans, including those living in places where venomous snakes practically do not exist. An Austrian or Icelander, for example, will never encounter a venomous snake in his lifetime but will unfortunately display the same readiness to fear snakes, and the same propensity to develop a pathological snake phobia, as an Indian.
Which brings us to the evolved fear that interests us: approach anxiety. Ancestral cues reliably linked to outgroup women should have evolved to provoke approach anxiety, but what could these cues be? The primary cue is almost certainly an absence of previous social interaction with the woman. If the man has interacted with the woman on earlier occasions his brain treats her like an ingroup member and approach anxiety is not triggered. The courtship process is then managed through mating anxiety. But if there is no prior interaction the woman is classed as outgroup member and approach anxiety is triggered. Aside from this cue, two additional cues that can potentially avert the activation of approach anxiety – and I am speculating here - are a) prior interaction between the woman and other people in the man’s social circle and b) knowledge of her social situation. Ancestrally both these cues would have been associated with ingroup women, and there is some anecdotal evidence for the importance of both. A man who will flat out refuse to approach a woman will often have no trouble doing so as soon as she has begun to converse with his friend or acquaintance. At the same time, knowledge of social information about the woman, like her name, origins, occupation and social situation, might also be sufficient to avert the activation of approach anxiety. Any celebrity will testify to the large number of people stopping her in public places and starting a conversation as though the two were best friends. Ancestrally it would have been very difficult to obtain detailed biographical information about a woman without her belonging to the same group, and it is possible this cue also plays a role in inhibiting approach anxiety.
Aside from approach anxiety, the idea that unknown women in public places are today implicitly treated by men as if they were outgroup members is supported by another phenomenon: street harassment. [202] This is very fluid and can take different forms: wolf-whistling, catcalling, gesturing, staring, jeering, shouting, swearing, groping, or stalking, all the way to spitting or throwing objects. But regardless of its variability it is a universal phenomenon, commonplace in the large cities of all countries. In the United States, for example, almost one in three women report being catcalled or whistled at every few days, while one in three report hearing crude sexual comments on a monthly basis. [203] Street harassment is common even in religiously conservative regions like the Middle East. [204] It is described by different names in different cultures: in Spanish speaking countries, for example, it is called “ piropo,” in German “ anmache” and in Arabic “ taltish. ” But these names can refer to (or emphasize) different aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon. Even the term “street harassment” is not always useful: it is unlikely that a complimentary wolf-whistle, for example, won’t often cheer a woman up. But the problem with pinning down street harassment is that it’s not always intended to be positive, and it’s not always intended to be negative. As a matter of fact, it is usually impossible to assign any sort of coherent intention to the man – he will often not be able to articulate one himself. In Greece where I am from, for example, the most common forms of name-calling on the street would be to call a woman “ munara mu ” or “ kavla mu. ” Translated literally these mean “my big pussy” - not in the zoological sense – and “my erection,” respectively. Except in the case of a cruel joke, a Greek man would never say this to a woman he doesn’t find sexually desirable. But the words are so vulgar than a woman is unlikely to be flattered – she will feel like she is being viewed as a piece of meat and will find the comment disgusting. What could possibly be the man’s intention in calling her this? Why say it at all when it is guaranteed to repel her? I doubt any man who used these calls would be able to give a rational answer. Without him realizing it, his brain has classified her as an attractive but unattainable outgroup woman.
Some time ago I was walking in central Athens when I noticed a very attractive brunette. She was a typical head-turner: tall and athletic, with a striking chiseled face. She was 27 years old but looked younger. Unsurprisingly, it turned out she was a fashion model. I caught up with her as she was walking and told her a Greek idiom to the effect that she was very attractive - translated literally it means “What beauties are these!” It was complementary, polite, and expressed in a cheerful, non-aggressive way. She exclaimed in pleasant surprise and we started talking, eventually exchanging numbers and arranging a date. When she turned up to the date a couple of days later she told me how surprised she had been that I went up to speak to her. She had been subjected to vulgar comments most of her life, but I was the first man to approach her and speak to her like a normal human being. Nobody had tried to even start a regular conversation with her – all her other street admirers had stuck to shouting profanities and making noises from a distance.
Predictably, the two critical factors in street harassment are numbers and distance. Academic research confirms common wisdom, in that men are more likely to harass on the street when in the company of other men. [205] This is not, as sociologists would suggest, down to “anonymity” or “peer-pressure.” A stranger on the street is just that, a stranger, and he continues to be so whether in the company of other men or not. And the concept of peer-pressure doesn’t explain why men in all-male groups should feel specifically pressured to sexually harass strange women instead of feeling pressured into doing something else. From an evolutionary perspective the male tendency to harass in groups makes sense in that numbers, apart from the element of surprise, are the single most important determinant of power in intergroup encounters. Strength lies in numbers, and when in the company of his fellows a man will simply feel safer in semi-aggressively communicating his presence to what his brain instinctively classifies as an outgroup woman. The other crucial factor is distance: barring harassment that involves touching and must necessarily happen in close proximity (like in a crowded bus or train), all other forms of street harassment will usually take place at a distance. Stereotypical popular images like the construction workers whistling from four floors up or drunken college boys shouting obscenities through the window of a speeding car, speak to men’s need to have a safe distance from the outgroup woman they harass.
Ancestral cues to outgroup women continue to drive male avoidant and semi-aggressive behavior, even though the relevant part of the psychological environment has mutated. Outgroup women don’t exist anymore and neither do ingroup women. For the large majority of humans alive today there are actually no ingroups and outgroups at all, period. If we had to identify the single most important factor for the destruction of small human groups, this would be the emergence of agriculture. [206] Beginning around 10,000 years ago in the Mesopotamian region between the rivers Tigres and Euphrates (in modern-day Iraq), humans, for the first time in our species’ history, abandoned their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Permanent settlements in the form of villages appeared, made possible by the domestication of wild crops of cereals like wheat and barley as well as roots and legumes. The storage of non-perishable surplus grains buffered the settled populations from environmental disturbances and famine, and the world population soared from 10 million people around 8,000 BC to 50 million in 3,000 BC. To put these numbers in context, as late as 70,000 years ago the total world population was a few thousand people, maybe even as low as 2,000. [207] The expansion of farmland and the domestication of beasts of burden like oxen and horses further increased food output, and by 800 AD the world population had soared to 250 million. But the golden age of agriculture came very recently, in the 19 th and 20 th centuries: mechanization, advances in the science of fertilizers and pesticides, and finally the “Green Revolution” which saw the introduction, in the 1960s, of high-yielding semi-dwarf varieties of wheat and rice, combined to swell the world population to 5 billion people by 1990. Today the world’s population is 7 billion and is expected to plateau around 10 billion later in this century.
An inevitable outcome of this population explosion has been urbanization, the migration of the population to cities and towns, though for a long time this lagged behind population growth. As late as the 16 th century, the typical Western city had between 2,000 and 20,000 residents, and most of the population lived in primitive villages that weren’t that different from their Neolithic counterparts. Approach anxiety was probably still useful for most men at that point. But the 20 th century was the turning point for urbanization, as cities started to dramatically grow, and more and more people started to live in them. By 1900 less than 15% of the world’s population lived in urban areas, but by 1950 this figure had increased to 30% and today it stands at 54%. [208] The trend toward urbanization continues, and by 2050 an estimated 66% of the world’s population will be urban. At the same time megacities of 10 million or more inhabitants are increasing. In 1990 there were 10 megacities worldwide, but in the few years since they have increased to 28, with close to half a billion people living in them. Modern men living in these anonymous concrete jungles continue to live according to hardwired cues that signal outgroup women and activate approach anxiety, just like they continue to eat high-calorie junk food and be petrified of tiny spiders dangling in the window sill. These outdated ancestral cues are now not only useless but actively undermining human wellbeing.
Before concluding this section, I should acknowledge a rather puzzling asymmetry. The puzzle is this: while modern men continue to obediently follow the cues that elicit approach anxiety and stay away from unknown women, women that are approached don’t show a corresponding blanket avoidance. Depending on their mating status they can be very open to unsolicited mating attempts from complete strangers, the equivalent of ancestral outgroup men. This is something that is not only borne out of mine and other men’s anecdotal experience, but by the academic studies we reviewed in Chapter 2 that find anywhere between 20 to 50% of women agreeing to a date with a stranger. For single women these percentages are consistently above 40%, and I argued earlier that these figures are probably not far off from how women respond to date requests from known men of their social circle. Women’s unusual openness to unsolicited mating attempts is what makes the ecological method possible, but it flies in the face of our evolutionary past and abundant research documenting female biases against outgroup men. For one reason or another evolution has not endowed women with emotionally overwhelming cues and an instinctive need to create a safe distance from unknown strangers that approach with mating intent. Modern women, for the most part, make a conscious and rational estimate of the situation: they instantly understand they are dealing with an unknown but probably harmless guy who, like them, lives in a big city, stays in a flat, goes to work in the morning and watches television in the evening. Why women behave so rationally – and conveniently for us – is beyond the scope of this book and something that future research will need to address.
“Fear of rejection”
While writing this book I informally interviewed several men about their approach anxiety. They were in their twenties or thirties, without obvious physical or psychological problems – they were all ordinary, normal men. My rather tricky line of questioning involved, firstly, asking them how frequently they saw attractive women in public places. Almost all of them acknowledged that this had happened hundreds or thousands of times, and many admitted it was a daily occurrence. I would then ask them how often they had gone up to one of these women. The usual answer was that excluding drunken nights out and in places like bars or clubs, they had hardly ever done this. Others would point to fortuitous circumstances that had allowed them to introduce themselves, like offering to help a young lady whose bike had broken down. I would then ask the men to describe the downside to a hypothetical approach: what was the worst thing that could possibly happen? Most knew the correct answer: the worst outcome was to be completely ignored by the woman, for her to pretend like they didn’t exist. I then asked the men to describe the potential upside: what was the best possible outcome? They knew the answer to that as well: a date, sex or a relationship – the upside was uncapped. By this point I had my interview subjects where I wanted them. They had admitted that this was a common occurrence, that the downside was trivial and the upside potentially life-changing. The big question was: why on Earth didn’t they talk to the women? I heard a variety of excuses. Some men told me it’s not socially acceptable. Others told me they had female friends who had told them they didn’t like being approached by strangers. But by far the most common answer was “fear of rejection.” They didn’t speak to all these women because they feared they would be rejected.
Martin (not his real name) was a 30-year-old German living in London who agreed to be interviewed for the book. He was an attractive, tall and clean-cut marketing professional. In the short time I spent with him he gave the impression of an intelligent and confident young man. After some biographical questions I jumped straight into it, asking him if he was happy with his love life.
“It’s OK, could be better,” he replied without hesitation.
I followed this up with an obviously loaded question: “You’re in London, surrounded by so many women. Is London a convenient place to meet women?”
“It depends if you’re looking for a Londoner or a tourist.”
“OK, let’s say you’re looking for a Londoner.”
“Challenging, you need to know where to go, you need to get out of the typical tourist spots.”
I then asked him if he often saw women that he was attracted to. After some back and forth he agreed that it happened to him many times, but he only rarely approached. I pressed on.
“OK. So you did it (approached) a limited number of times, but there were many more times when you didn’t do it.”
“Yes.”
“So what was the reason you didn’t do it?”
“I didn’t have the balls in that moment I would say, right?” he asked me, as if seeking my approval.
“Why didn’t you have the balls?”
“Erm…afraid to be rejected. Not knowing how to start the conversation.”
“You were afraid to be rejected?”
“Yeah of course.”
“So, like, what would be the worst possible outcome that could come out of it?”
“Oh, just a ‘no’, which in that moment it’s actually not bad, but, just, like, I don’t know. It can come across as quite creepy if you don’t know how to do it the right way, so then sometimes when the occasion is not there, when the moment doesn’t seem right, you just let it pass.”
I turned the conversation to the upside. Martin’s reproductive profile was obviously near the parenting end of the spectrum, and he resisted any suggestion that he would be motivated to approach for sex. After some back and forth we eventually agreed that the best possible outcome of an approach would be to “build a relationship.” I then asked him to compare the rejection downside with the relationship-building upside.
“Erm, if you compare those, basically, the risk that you take is not that high if you get rejected, compared to what you could get out of it,” he admitted.
“So why don’t you do it?” I asked again.
“Good question. Good question! Psychology, right? I don’t know.”
Explanations like those offered by Martin were so common that I eventually gave up on interviewing further men. And it’s wasn’t just men; fear of rejection was the usual reason offered by women themselves for why men don’t approach them. Men “can’t handle rejection well” or it would be a “hit to their ego” or something along those lines is what I would generally hear from women. But fear of rejection is not a satisfying explanation. Most of the men who use it as an excuse have probably been rejected hundreds of times in their lives. A typical man will put in dozens or hundreds of job applications in the years after high school or university. He will be rejected outright in almost all of them, and when he does get an interview he will usually be rejected there as well. And the job interview is hardly the impersonal rejection that is communicated through an email or letter. It involves travelling and sitting face to face with a group of strangers to answer difficult questions, with rejection being the most likely outcome. Yet nearly all men do it. Other men are in sales roles that involve knocking on people’s doors uninvited and unexpected. Then there are the salesmen who stop people on pedestrian high streets to sell charity subscription packages or the beggars who panhandle thousands of people a day. Rejection is the nearly universal outcome of these low-probability, face-to-face interactions, and men go ahead with them anyway. But the same men would never dream of going up to an unknown woman to express their interest, and when you ask them they will usually tell you it’s for fear of being rejected.
Fear of being rejected from an unknown woman you will never see again in your life is not a defensible answer. It’s a rationalization. It’s the explanation a man gives to a spontaneous fear he can’t understand, one he could not possibly understand. Evolution does not care to give you the answers – it’s your actions that count, and whether you understand their biological significance or not is irrelevant. In Chapter 2 we saw that to anticipate the trajectory of a projectile one must perform mental calculations equivalent to solving an advanced mathematical problem. People don’t appreciate, much less understand, this mathematical complexity – they don’t have to. All that matters is that they accurately predict where the projectile will be in a few moments, and people are exceptionally good at that. But if we asked them to explain how they can so accurately predict projectile trajectories, we would get a variety of useless answers. The most common would probably be “I learned it” or “I’ve done this so many times it comes natural to me” or something along those lines. This would be the common-sense but hopelessly simplistic explanation of a process that is beyond conscious reach.
It is the same with approach anxiety. A man contemplates approaching and the fear is activated. It’s just that: a feeling of fear. Our body or mind offers no explanation beyond that - there is no need. The man can’t make sense of the fear, but he wants to explain it nevertheless. Fear of rejection is the easiest, most palatable generic answer, but there can be more specific answers depending on the situation. She didn’t seem very friendly, the time wasn’t right, I was in a hurry, she probably had a boyfriend, she would never want to date me anyway or she wasn’t really my type after all. The key is understanding these explanations for what they are: made-up stories. The more you take them at face value the more credence you give them, and the more plausible they appear. Accept that they are bogus and dismiss them. Then you will be left with the feeling but without any of the accompanying logical sauce. Now because this is a reflexive feeling beyond conscious control, nothing you can read or hear can magically stop it from activating. It’s something that you need to work on, as we will see in the next section. But as much as the fear is a psychological reality, it is also a fiction. It was created in response to ancestral conditions which no longer hold. There are no more ingroups and outgroups, no territories to defend, no deadly projectiles to dodge. There is just you, the girl and a 21 st century concrete jungle where nobody knows or cares for anyone else.
Last year I was abroad on holiday and went to a 5D cinema. I had never been to one before, and it turned out to be a remarkable experience. Me and a handful of spectators were given 3D glasses and seated along two rows of seats, no more than five meters’ distance from the massive screen. The movie was a five-minute first-person perspective of a subway journey through underground rail stations and tracks infested with zombies. The three-dimensional zombies were highly detailed and convincing. Our seats would rotate with the movement of the train to create a hyper-realistic feeling of accelerated motion. The zombies screamed and howled, their sounds mixing with the deafening roar of the train, coming to us from speakers at all sides of the room. As we hacked the zombies to bits with digital machetes liquid was sprayed onto us from overhead hoses, simulating the splattered blood of the zombies. Everything looked and felt real. We covered our faces, we squirmed in our seats and screamed throughout. My heart was racing – I was genuinely scared. But I stayed in my seat until the end of the movie. Though it was very real to the senses, I knew it was a fake. Smoke and mirrors at its technological finest. The zombies couldn’t do anything to me. I could remove my 3D glasses and start playing with my phone if I wanted to. Or get out of my chair and start dancing. I could do anything I wanted - I was completely safe. Nothing could hurt me; it was all make-believe.
Like a 5D cinema, approach anxiety feels real but it’s a fake. Fear is meant to signal danger. Approach anxiety signals danger that is no longer there, a non-existent threat. As long as you stay polite and respectful you can say anything you want to a woman – any woman. Nothing can happen to you. The psychological environment has long mutated, and none of the ancestral mating constraints hold. You are completely safe and can laugh at the make-believe zombies that terrify other men their entire lives. Realizing this will allow you to do anything you want.
Your road map
The human mind is incredible. It evolved in nomadic groups of ancestral hunter-gatherers who lived freely in nature – until a few years ago we would call them “savages” - and was designed to carry out a limited set of tasks related to basic survival and reproduction. These were basically mating, parenting, foraging, avoiding predators, and navigating the challenges of social life. Modern humans have taken this stone-age biological machine and put it to use in creating things that would have been unimaginable even a few centuries ago: musical symphonies, refrigerators, airplanes, nuclear power plants, not to mention more recent arrivals like smartphones and 5D cinemas. At the same time, as we saw in Chapter 2, the evolutionarily novel skills that modern humans can learn is endless: driving cars and motorcycles, playing poker, chess, pianos and violins, solving advanced mathematical equations and so on.
But the human’s mind plasticity does not end there. Another class of novel “abilities” are not challenging because they involve mastering complex skills, but because they directly contradict the way evolution “intended” for us to function: how to think, feel and behave. We saw an example of this in polyandry, practiced to this day in certain areas of the Himalayas. Evolution certainly did not design men to share a wife with other men, even if these other men are their brothers. Sexual jealousy has historically been a very useful way of preventing cuckoldry (the raising of another man’s children), which is why it is a universal emotion among modern men. But the harsh economic realities of this particular region force brothers to deal with their sexual jealousy and live under this unusual mating arrangement, as each would be unable to support his own wife. Some Western men practice their own “lite” version of polyandry: “swinging,” the temporary swapping of partners with other men. While they get to have sex with other men’s wives, they must also share their own wife with many other strangers, but as the practice’s popularity shows, they – and their wives – can do this without sexual jealousy destroying the relationship.
A recent popular movement in interpersonal relations is “radical honesty,” the practice of telling your partner and other close people in your life everything that comes to your mind at any given moment. [209] If you feel sexually attracted to your wife’s sister you tell your wife, and you tell her sister. Similarly, if your wife wants to have sex with her boss or is put off by your balding head, she tells you. People have been keeping their thoughts to themselves, and relationships surviving as a result, for hundreds of thousands of years – it’s how mother nature wanted things. But radical honesty practitioners somehow manage to share all the embarrassing and incriminating details with their partners, and their partners manage to somehow “swallow” all this information – and vice versa. Their relationships not only survive but, as many radical honesty practitioners attest, thrive under this novel communication mode.
Like sexual jealousy or conventional communication, you are not supposed to get over your approach anxiety. It is intended to be an inflexible emotional response. But you can get over it and relatively easily at that. Unlike swinging or a relationship of radical honesty this is all down to you - there are no other people involved, and you are only dependent on yourself for the outcome. The intensity of approach anxiety and the ease with which it is overcome will vary from person to person. I have met men who overcame it on the spot and could approach with ease from the first day. I have also met others who will never overcome their approach anxiety unless they make some serious changes. Much of this variation is almost certainly down to individual personality differences. Some men are naturally more outgoing, with lower levels of general social anxiety, while others are shyer. But individual differences pale in comparison to the single most important factor: belief in psychological methods. Men with no prior exposure to psychological methods will have it infinitely easier compared to veteran customers of the seduction community, and it will often take no more than seeing another man do it for them to follow. Because their brain is free from useless theory they can’t trick themselves into seeing anything more than what is right before their eyes: a boy talking to a girl. There is nothing more to learn. The other main problem with psychological methods is that they offer a convenient distraction from the goal. In the seduction industry’s bizarre universe speaking to women is progress but so are reading book after book or watching video after video. Rather than face his approach anxiety, the student of psychological methods will naturally find it easier to keep on consuming seduction material, convincing himself he is progressing all the same.
Discarding psychological methods is half the game. The other half is understanding what’s inside: a very real but very fake feeling – a fear that signals a bogus danger. All the accompanying thoughts are also bogus rationalizations to explain a fear you can’t understand. Rather than trying to manage them you should just ignore them. There is no point trying to argue with a crazy person – you will end up losing your mind. Your only thought should be that you are invincible and can say or do whatever you want, the only requirement being that you always stay polite and respectful.
As with any ability, killing approach anxiety is something that will come with practice. The more you approach, the more the approach anxiety will die, until there is nothing left. At that point you will find it more natural and less stressful asking a woman for her number than for the time. The first handful of approaches are key: they will give the largest benefits but might also be the most difficult. Depending on your personality and experience you might find you are able to approach straight after you have finished reading this book. But you might try and find it impossible. In that case you should do anything in your power to get the first few approaches out of the way, whatever it takes .
The most obvious way to deal with the first few approaches is to approach in the company of friends. You can take the psychological dynamics that drive men to harass in groups and channel them in a positive, constructive manner. Having one friend by your side will be easier than being alone. Two will be better than one and three better than two, but I wouldn’t recommend any more, as the appearance of a mob might understandably scare the girl. If you find that you still can’t pull the trigger, you can combine the presence of friends with the tried and tested method that men have been using for centuries: have a drink. Better yet, have a couple of drinks if it makes you feel better (but no more than that). I don’t need to start citing all the academic studies that show how alcohol removes social inhibitions and numbs social anxiety and fear – you know all this very well.
To repeat, the first few approaches are critical. After you have them under your belt, talking to women will no longer look like magic. You will have added the experiential bit to the theory we covered in this chapter, and the entire thing will suddenly lose its mystique and seem very real, even ordinary. You will feel like you jumped off a ledge that separates your old from your new life. While you haven’t found a very solid footing on the other side yet, you will feel like the past is now solidly behind you and that there is no going back. Remember this is not a competition and you are not out to prove anything. Reversing a failing or unsatisfactory mating life is what you want, and to do this you must initiate the first few approaches, whatever it takes. Be rational, not emotional, and watch your life change before your eyes.
To show up
verb (informal): to appear or turn up, often unexpectedly
Welcome to the final and smallest chapter of this book. What you have read up to this point, in combination with that most magnificent product of millions of years of evolution that you carry around in your cranial cavity, are all that you need to begin transforming your mating. If you decided to put the book down and read no further, I would say you probably already “get it.” But you might feel you still need something extra, a few practical tips to get started. This is fine. Just bear in mind there is some opportunity cost going forth. Following any of the suggestions in this chapter will be at the expense of something you could be doing instead – something perhaps better suited to you as a person. I have tried my best to keep these opportunity costs to a minimum.
For the purposes of illustrating my points, throughout the chapter you will find transcripts from real conversations I had with women. Resembling life, most of these transcripts are from mating attempts that ended in early rejection.
Principles
Some important rules and a suggestion before we get into the actual nuts and bolts of the cold approach. They will not only make your mating experience more pleasant but benefit you as a person.
The most important rule is to not allow negativity to take over when you don't get what you want. Since rejection is the most common outcome, to become negative when you get rejected is foolish. You will end up being a very negative person. And since this is only a matter of choice, what rational man would choose to be negative? Rather than complaining and feeling bitter, focus instead on your incredible luck. You live in a time where you can easily have a better mating life than all your ancestors and can achieve this without any of the very dangerous, life-threatening conditions they faced every day of their short, brutish lives. Viewed from this rational perspective of gratitude, rejection is not only inconsequential but even amusing, especially if you do this with friends. I strongly recommend you make fun of each other when you get blown out. Your manhood is not at stake here. You're only playing a safe game where you get to cheat in plain sight, so don't take yourself too seriously.
But what about negative women - how do you react to negativity when it comes your way? Again, it is a matter of choice. You can, of course, choose to be negative back. If she makes a sarcastic comment you can retaliate in kind. The same for a dirty look. But again, why allow negativity to take hold? If you are polite and respectful the negative reactions will be exceedingly few and far between to begin with, as women will mirror your good manners. When you do come across one of the negative exceptions don't allow yourself to fall to their level. If you must feel something for them try pity instead of anger or bitterness. You have laid yourself bare in front of her in the most vulnerable way, and she has shown no empathy - something is probably very wrong in that unhappy woman's life. Remember that if you went up to her you have hacked your mating. You have already won.
Another important rule from our schooldays: keep your hands to yourself. Other than a handshake when introducing yourself I suggest you refrain from touching the woman again during the initial interaction. If she likes you there will be all the time in the world to touch her later. There is a lot of emphasis in certain pickup schools on aggressively trying to establish physical contact with the woman after a few seconds, with the dual goal of signaling dominance and ascertaining her sexual availability. The logic behind this is sound, and undoubtedly early touching will often achieve both objectives. If a girl is comfortable with you holding her hand after a few seconds, stroking her arm, or spinning her around, she is also likely to be up for relatively quick sex. On the flipside, if she’s not interested she might react in a nasty way, and frankly I wouldn't blame her. I have personally witnessed these - admittedly rare - reactions towards friends who didn't keep their hands to themselves. Judging by how uncomfortable they made me I can only imagine how my friends felt. So be respectful, keep your hands to yourself and always bear in mind that you are engaging in an unsolicited interaction with a stranger.
One last thing to warn against is what I call approach acrobatics. As your confidence grows, you might be tempted to engage in increasingly challenging situations, just for the fun of it. This is natural. Once you have spoken to, say, three hundred women on their own, you understandably might want to approach groups of two or three friends. After that, you might find yourself approaching a mother-daughter pair, an entire family, or a woman who is part of a guided tourist group. And what about that sexy jogger running by, or that cyclist on her bike - what would happen if you went in front of her and tried to stop her? While all this can seem like a lot of fun I would personally stay away from it, as it can feed an unwarranted sense of self-esteem and even arrogance. Stay humble - remember you are just a well-motivated and fortunate cheat who is picking money off the floor.
Cold approach logistics
Before getting into the how, let's briefly discuss the where. From a psychological perspective, the street is unbeatable. The table below compares the street against the bar or nightclub on the extent to which they nullify the perception of the various mating constraints our male ancestors faced. A tick on every row indicates the superior venue. The street fares better across the board.
|
Bar/nightclub |
Street |
Favorable condition |
|
|
✓ |
No competition from males |
|
|
✓ |
Large pool of potential mates |
|
|
✓ |
Anonymity |
|
|
✓ |
Easy transition from one female to the next |
|
|
✓ |
No nosy neighbors |
|
|
✓ |
Easy self-extraction from awkward situations |
A limitation of any bar or nightclub is that many of the men in attendance will be there with the exact same goal as you. Whether they will have any success is irrelevant - what matters is that you are placing yourself in a confined space with a group of motivated competitors. Why put yourself in this situation when you can just walk to the street and be without competition? Added to that there simply won’t be that many women at any bar or club. Regardless of the venue’s size, the number of female patrons will be very small compared to the endless, constantly refreshing supply of women walking down a busy city street. When you do approach a woman in a bar there might be nosy or bored patrons standing by with nothing better to do than watch. The knowledge that you are being scrutinized is unpleasant. On the street you can also approach as often as you want, confident that nobody is paying attention, and nobody cares. After a street rejection you can just turn around and approach the next attractive woman that comes by, and the one after that, and so on. Try doing that in a bar and see how far you can get away with it before people take notice.
This is not to say the bar or nightclub offer no advantages. They certainly do, and we will cover them later. But if you are just starting out, and especially if you are on your own, there is simply no better venue than a bustling sidewalk or pedestrian street.
The opening line
As we saw in Chapter 2, the specifics of the opening line don’t matter. The only requirements are that it be direct, succinct and polite. That's it. We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel or blow her away with our intelligence and creativity – this would probably only backfire. The words that naturally came out of my mouth the first time I ever approached a stranger were:
“I just saw you passing by, and I had to say hi.”
That's all you need to get your foot in the door. You can smile or be serious, it doesn't matter. A shorter variant which I have increasingly used:
“I just had to say hi.”
Any woman with a functioning brain will know why you’re so keen to say hi. A very small minority, probably under 1%, might ask you why you wanted to say hi. In this case just tell her the truth, that you found her very attractive. But most women who say anything at all will simply say “Oh, hi!” If you then reply with “How’s it going?” you have a conversation on your hands.
A common opening line that I never tried but heard other guys use is:
“Hey, I know this is kind of random, but I thought you looked cute and I wanted to say hi.”
Then of course there is the classic Clark and Hatfield opener, with a proven track record of 29% across four countries:
“ I have been noticing you around. I find you to be very attractive. Would you go out with me tonight ?”
Depending on my mood I have also used, at one point or another, the following lines:
“Hi.”
“Hey, how's it going?”
“Wow.”
And many more - I'm sure you get the point. After the opening line, if she seems interested, you engage in normal small talk, like men and women have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Small talk is asking her name, what she does for work, what brought her to town that day and so on. You’ve done small talk every day of your adult life, and you don’t need me to tell you how it’s done. After you've chatted for a few minutes you can ask for her number or skip that part entirely and start arranging a date. Alternatively, if she’s keen and not otherwise occupied you can take her for a coffee or drink on the spot. It's as simple as that.
The angle from which you approach does not matter - I have seen successful approaches from all angles. I tend to approach from the side, but this is just my personal preference. Sometimes I tap lightly on the shoulder to get her attention, but usually I just start speaking in a loud voice she will know is directed to her. The two main advantages to the sideways approach are that it is discreet and avoids prior eye contact. Contrary to popular myth, you will soon find that eye contact prior to a cold approach is usually a bad idea. Unless she was already checking you out before you were, the moment she realizes a stranger is not only staring but quickly walking towards her, she will become nervous and defensive. But the side approach will work as well as any other approach that suits your style. Running up to a woman from behind and standing in front of her will also work fine, as will the full frontal, where you cross paths as she is walking towards you.
Honesty
Honesty is generally the best policy when she starts asking the hard questions, if for no other reason than how stressful lying can be. An entire school of thought in investigative police methods (“statement analysis”) is actually based on the premise that because lying is so stressful, people will almost always resort to statements that are technically true. [210] To take a hypothetical example, when asked if he molested a young boy a world-famous pop singer might reply “I would never hurt children, I love children.” This would be strictly true regardless of if he had molested the child: not only would the singer be convinced that he loves children, but also in his mind molesting them would not be hurting them. Aside from how stressful lying can be and how ridiculous you might look if you try tip-toeing around the truth, after a while you might find it difficult to remember what lies you've told whom, especially if you do this on an industrial scale. Honesty is the most practical way, and you will be surprised by how many women will be able to handle the God's-honest truth when they ask you if you do this all the time.
Some time ago in Oxford I approached an especially attractive woman in her mid-twenties. The conversation got going. I was out with a friend, and after a while he joined us. The three of us chatted for a bit before she turned to me with some “hard” questions. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “So what's your name?”
Her: “I'm Cynthia” (not her real name).
Me: “Oh, what a nice name. Well I'm Tony. Can I get you a drink some time?”
Cynthia: “Is that what you do, like going around and...”
Me: (interrupting) “Only to hot girls, like you.”
Cynthia: “Yeah, OK” (skeptically). “So, you do this often then?”
Me: “Well, about once a week. But I am looking for a girlfriend, I'm not a sleaze.”
Cynthia: “No, I'm not looking for a...”
Me: (interrupting again) “It's OK, I know you're not looking for a girlfriend.”
Cynthia: “No, not a boyfriend either.”
Me: “Well, we can just be friends. I'm looking for new friends as well.”
Cynthia: “OK. Have you just moved here or...” (starts questioning about my origin, job etc. - we do some more small talk).
Me: “Listen, are you a coffee person or an alcohol person?”
Cynthia: “No, I don't drink coffee, more tea.”
Me: “Tea, tea's nice! I'm free on like the weekends and stuff. What's your number?”
Cynthia: (laughing) “This is so weird, I've never had this” (some more small talk and she gives me her number).
My honesty had disarmed her objections. There was nothing for her to come back with, no lies to call me out on. A seduction guru might criticize me for agreeing to be “just friends,” but in the end it didn’t’ matter. [211] She knew what I wanted and liked me enough to give me her number. She would have probably given it to me regardless of what I said - within certain parameters of normalcy of course. We did eventually go on date, but things did not progress further.
On another occasion, passing the window of a fast-food restaurant I noticed a very attractive girl in her early 20s, seated with a group of about four or five friends. They were clearly looking at us. I motioned my two friends to follow me inside the restaurant and walked up to the group.
Me: “Hello girls, how are you?”
They were pleased I had gone up to them and a conversation ensued. Due to a physical lack of space around their table my friends had to stay away while I spoke with everyone in the group. After a while I turned to the attractive girl.
Me: “So what's your name?”
Her: “Carol.”
Me: “Carol, I'm Tony. Can I take you out for a drink sometime?”
Carol: “I think...I'm gonna have to say no.”
This came as a surprise to me, as she had given me the impression she wasn’t even trying to hide her interest. Most likely she had a boyfriend, but I wasn’t going to persist and sour what had, up to that point, been a very pleasant interaction.
Me: “OK, well enjoy the rest of your evening. Ladies…” (a slight nod to her friends as I turned to leave).
Seemingly surprised, one of her friends asked me:
Friend: “But, aren't you going to ask us?”
I am not sure exactly what she expected me to ask. Maybe she wanted me to ask their names, or maybe to ask each one of them out. Whatever the case, she was calling me out for my audacity. But their group was just too large, and while I had been polite and acknowledged everyone, I wasn't going to go through the pleasantries with all of them.
Me: “But I fancy your friend. What…”
She interrupted me before I could finish my sentence.
Friend: “It's OK, you said it all, there's nothing more to say.”
I walked away. Imagine how feeble my response would have been if I had tried to reply with anything but the truth.
Walkers and stoppers
After I had approached a few hundred strangers and gone out on a few dozen first dates, I decided to look back and try to identify meaningful patterns. Was there anything in the initial interaction that signaled if things would develop further? This is how psychologists are trained to think, and the habit often carries over to their daily lives. We look for predictors to outcomes, statistical regularities that only reveal themselves after repeated iterations of the same process. I mentally replayed the initial interactions with all the women who had eventually turned up to a first date. To my astonishment, I realized that every one of them had one thing in common: they had stopped walking when I approached them. Most had stopped immediately, while some had stopped after a few steps. But every single one of them had stopped walking - I call these the “stoppers.” I had never gone out on a date with a woman who had kept on walking as we spoke - a “walker.” I tried to verify this initial observation in subsequent mating attempts. The obvious danger was that my bias against walkers would lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, where I started behaving differently - less enthusiastically, or with less effort - towards walkers, making it less likely a first date would happen anyway. I made a deliberate effort to ensure this didn't happen, and if anything, I put more energy and enthusiasm into subsequent walkers. The next few hundred approaches only confirmed my initial observation, and until the day I gave up on them completely I never went on a date with a walker.
Walkers are non-starters, women that for one reason or another are simply not interested. I have discussed this with experienced friends and upon reflection they all agree. This is not to say that all the stoppers will be down to date you - many won't. It is also not to say that somewhere on our planet there doesn't exist a walker who might eventually date you. She certainly does, but I have yet to meet her. What it means is that when you encounter a walker you are almost certainly wasting your time - politely end the interaction and move on. It doesn't matter if the walker is smiling or seemingly having a good time while talking to you. She is probably just being polite or amused by this funny guy who is trying to chat her up on the street. Who knows. What matters is that because she does not want to be there with you, you she will keep on walking. It’s as simple as that. To make it easy for them and end the interaction on a polite note, after a few steps I will usually tell a walker “You're in a hurry, aren't you?” to which a walker will mumble “Yes, sorry,” or something along those lines. If she’s not being particularly friendly I will just smile and turn around without saying a word.
An example of an early conversation I had with an attractive walker on a busy London street - when I was still blind to the walker/stopper distinction - follows:
Me: “I just saw you passing by and I had to say hi.”
Her: “Hello!” (said cheerfully but doesn’t stop walking).
Me: “How's it going?” (walking next to her).
Her: “Yeah, I'm good thanks” (still walking).
Oblivious to the fact that she doesn’t want to be there with me, I press on.
Me: “Wow you're so pretty.”
Her: “I'm meeting a friend” (still walking).
Me: “OK, is that like a boyfriend or a girlfriend?”
Her: “A girlfriend” (keeps on walking).
By this point things are starting to get awkward, and I’m looking for a way out. I turn to point to my friend who is waiting at a distance. She doesn’t turn to look, just keeps on walking.
Me: “Erm, I mean, my friend's over there, he's gonna kill me (for letting him wait). Do you wanna meet up sometime?”
Her: “No thank you” (still walking and not looking at me).
I finally turn around and walk away.
The angle you approach a walker from will make no difference. If you come full frontal or appear out of nowhere from behind she will simply walk around you and continue her way. But if you’re very interested and desperate to get her to stop there is a last resort. Engage her in conversation, and as the two of you walk side by side slow down your step. You will start falling behind her, and soon will be so far back that she won’t be able to continue the conversation, no matter how hard she strains her neck. She will more than likely keep on walking, but you never know, she might just stop. In the unlikely event this happens then congratulations, you have yourself a newly minted stopper.
Walkers will be a substantial percentage of the women you approach, and by filtering themselves off your radar from the start will allow you to direct your time and energy to the stoppers, where real success is to be found. Without knowing it they are your best partners, inadvertently saving you a mountain of time and effort. Be grateful to them.
The easy exit
Even among stoppers, most women will be taken. Psychological methods often place a tremendous emphasis on overcoming the boyfriend “excuse” and trying to “seduce” them all the same. Setting aside the morality of trying to sleep with another man’s woman, the reality is it’s not usually an excuse - she probably does have a boyfriend. Most women, especially the attractive ones, are usually in long-term relationships, and they are not going to risk months or years of emotional investment for some random guy on the street. But even if it is an excuse and she's not really taken, it's probably just her polite way of telling you she’s not interested. Take the easy way out she so kindly offered and move on to the next. A very simple, polite way of doing this is “have a nice day” or “OK, take care.” There is nothing to add, no explaining or apologizing to do. You liked her, you didn’t know she was taken, you found out and are now moving on without delay. That’s all there is to it, as the dialogue below shows:
Me: “Sorry, hiya, I just saw you passing by and I had to say hi.”
Her: (giggling) “Hi!”
Me: “I'm in love, what's your name?” (also giggling).
Her: “Sorry, I'm gonna meet my boyfriend in like a few seconds?”
Me: “OK, have a nice day” (I walk away laughing).
Another interaction with a taken London walker – from my inexperienced days - went something like this:
Me: “Sorry I didn't mean to...”
Her: (startled) “You scared me.”
Me: “I didn't mean to...I just...wow, you have an amazing face, I just had to say hi.”
Her: “Ah, thank you” (keeps on walking).
Me: “Are you in a hurry?”
Her: “Yes, I am.”
Me: (getting desperate) “Listen, I won't beat around the bush, do you have a boyfriend?”
Her: “Yeah, I do.”
Me: “Ok, lucky man.”
Her: “Thank you though!”
Me: “Alright, take care. Bye.”
Though I persisted longer than I would nowadays - she was a walker - I accepted her relationship status when she communicated it, took no for an answer and closed the interaction on a positive note, praising her boyfriend’s good fortune - a sincere comment. Imagine the pitiful sight of trying instead to persuade her that she hadn’t met anyone like me, that I would make her way happier than her boyfriend, or that I wasn’t even interesting in being her boyfriend but her lover. Aim to be a positive force in the life of the women you approach, not a wrecking ball.
I should mention another scenario where you will want to make a quick exit. You see from a distance a woman you think you like, but upon stopping her you realize she is not all you made her out to be. Maybe too old, maybe too young, maybe she has bad skin or no teeth. Whatever the reason, you suddenly don't want to be there anymore. Rather than abruptly and rudely just walking away, you can simply say “Oops, sorry, I mistook you for someone else.” This makes it very easy for both of you.
Out with a friend
Cold approaching with a friend will not only be easier and more entertaining but will open possibilities that going solo cannot afford. In addition to the isolated girl walking down the street, you will easily be able to approach groups of two or three. Being with a friend will also allow you to cold approach in bars, clubs and other night-time venues. While there is nothing stopping you from doing this by yourself, the sight of a man sipping cocktails on his own will put a lot of women off and is frankly something I wouldn't be interested in trying.
Let’s start with a fun daytime scenario. If one or both of you are still having trouble with your approach anxiety, you can try the old school trick of sending your trusted friend to tell the girl you love her. You’ll be surprised how well this works with adults - I would dare to say even better than directly approaching on your own. Perhaps it’s the vulnerability and sincerity it conveys, or maybe it’s because the woman will know you’re not a sad loner or psychopath. Whatever the reason, this works well, particularly with stationary women. You leave your friend some distance behind - say 5 or 10 meters - and walking up to her say: “Hey listen, my friend thought you were very attractive but he’s too shy to come say hi!” If your friend has approach anxiety issues, just seeing the woman smiling and chatting will be enough for him to approach. The three of you can then have what will usually be a witty, pleasant interaction. You will soon find out it doesn’t matter who was supposedly interested in the first place - all is fair game once the conversation gets going.
Here is a transcript of an interaction a friend and I had with a pleasant woman in her mid-20s in central Oxford.
Me: “Hey listen, my friend, he - as you were walking by, he told me he finds you very attractive. He's a bit shy. Alistair!” (motioning to him to approach) “This is my new friend.” Turning to her: “What's your name?”
Her: “Holly.”
Me: “Holly, this is Alistair.”
Alistair: “Hi.”
Holly: “Hi Alistair.”
Me: “Very nice to meet you Holly. What do you for a living?”
We start the small talk, and Holly tells us she’s in the travel industry. We talk about holidays before the conversation drifts to our accents and other trivial topics. After a couple of minutes, I turn up the heat.
Me: “Yeah, so my friend is a bit shy and he just saw you passing, and you know - so, do you fancy him?”
Holly: “I don't know either of you, so I have no way...”
Me: (laughing) “You don't know either - Alistair I like how's she widening the conversation.”
Alistair: “Well we can get to know each other on our first date, how about that?”
Holly: “Thank you very much for the offer but I'm going to have to decline.”
We parted laughing and in good spirits.
A couple of night-time scenarios before concluding. To begin with, the solution to the problem that has plagued us since we started going out as teenagers - what to say to a stranger in a bar or club. Again, simplicity carries the day. She will almost certainly be there with one or more girlfriends. All you have to do is go up to them with your friend and, pointing to the empty chairs in their table, ask: “Hi girls, are you waiting for someone?” or “Hi girls, can we join you?” This has two benefits. First, it’s light - you haven’t gone in with any of the “I just had to say hi” or “You’re so attractive” business. You don’t need to – you’re at a bar, and they know what you want. Secondly, it makes it easy for them to politely decline. All they have to say is “Oh, we’re waiting for some friends, sorry” or “We’re just having a ladies’ night out” or something along those lines. But if they are interested they will invite you to join them - you might have just saved them from another dull night out.
Another way is to approach a pair on the street and get them to follow you inside a venue. The benefit here is that you have a much larger pool of women compared to approaching inside the bar. The downside is that it is a substantially lower probability approach, but you will still be surprised by how often it will work. You go up to a pair of women - alone or with your friend - and say: “Hi girls, me and my friend are going to (such and such bar or club); would you like to join us?” Again, this keeps it nice and light but to the point - they will understand, why out of all the people on the street, you asked them to join you. It also makes it easy for them to politely decline - all they have to say is “no thank you” or “we are going somewhere else, sorry.” If they are interested, on the other hand, they will either accept your invitation or invite you to follow them to another venue.
AFTERWORD
.
SAYING GOODBYE TO THE REGRET FACTORY
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been.'
John Greenleaf Whittier.
We’ve come to the end, where I originally planned to share some personal stories. Like the story of how, at a very mature age, I decided I couldn’t live like this any longer. About how I broke down crying like a baby one day, and the people around me couldn’t believe their eyes. I was going to tell you about the traumatic breakup that led to all this. About how I deleted my online dating profile and never looked back. I was also going to share some stories from my new life, to give you a flavor of the before and after. But I won’t do any of that. You don’t know me, and you don’t care for my stories. And you shouldn’t. There is only one person you can change, and he should be your focus. That person is you. So let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about your regrets.
You have two kinds of regrets, action regrets and inaction regrets. Action regrets arise from an action and inaction regrets from the lack of action. For example, say you’re not very happy at your job and are offered one at another company. There's a good chance things will be better there, but no guarantees. If you take the new job, only for it to turn out worse than the one you left, you might experience action regret - how could you have been so reckless to leave the safety of your old job for a leap into the unknown? If, on the other hand, you stick to your current job, only to become increasingly miserable with time before eventually being fired, you are likely to look back with bitterness at the opportunity you never took. This is inaction regret. The interesting thing about the two types of regrets is that while action regrets tend to sting more in the short-term they subside with time. Inaction regrets, on the other hand, become more prominent with time, so that when psychologists ask people to reflect on their lives and describe their biggest regrets, inaction regrets dominate. [212]
If you think about it, this is not surprising. When you take an action that turns out to be mistaken, the consequences are immediately apparent and must be dealt with in real time. Action is taken to ameliorate the fallout and life goes on, but a valuable lesson has also been learnt. A bitter defeat can thus become an asset later in life. But when you don't act there is no feedback, be it negative or positive. Life simply goes on as before, and you are left to imagine how things could have been if you had only acted. And unlike what was, there are no limits to what could have been. If you had been courageous enough to take that other job you might have ended up much more than happier. You might also have worked your way to the top of the company and then gone on to create your own company and another one and… - you see what I mean?
But with all this we haven’t touched on the content of peoples’ common regrets – what people specifically regret. Unsurprisingly, surveys find that some of the most common regrets lie in peoples’ mating history. [213] Mating regrets are right up there with career and education at the top of the regret mountain. They figure more prominently than regrets pertaining to such core areas as family, finance, health, parenting and friends. But the specifics of men and women’s mating regrets are usually different. Looking back women tend to regret instances where they acted and had sex, such as losing their virginity to the wrong man, cheating on their partner, having sex with a stranger or with someone who was unattractive, or having a one-night stand. This is understandable biologically, since the consequences of having sex with the wrong person or at the wrong time have historically been higher for women. [214] Men’s sexual regrets, on the other hand, are almost exclusively about inaction and missed opportunities. When asked to recall their top sexual regrets, men’s responses fall into one of the following categories: 1) being too shy to indicate sexual attraction, 2) not being more sexually adventurous when young, 3) not being more sexually adventurous when single, and 4) not experimenting enough sexually. [215] This should start to ring a bell.
Let’s see how the psychological mechanics work to pile up the regret. You are at a café, bar or bus stop. You see a woman, and she is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You are in awe. You quickly decide to speak to her. You must speak to her. Problem is, when it comes to getting off your chair and walking up to her you are paralyzed by one of the most intense, debilitating fears you have experienced. You can’t explain it, you don’t know where it comes from and why it’s there, but it’s paralyzing. The girl eventually gets up to leave, and as she walks away you know you will never see her again, and you can’t move nevertheless. But when you subsequently replay this in your head the fear does not figure prominently – it was an illogical, fleeting emotion that disappeared as soon as the girl left. All you can think about now, in a calm and collected state, are a) how pretty she was, b) the favorable logistics (she was alone, waiting to be approached, and there was nothing to stop you) and c) the uncapped, unlimited upside of what could have been if you had been man enough to talk to her. Your inaction now seems even more perplexing, and you hate yourself for being such a coward. The regret is only compounded with time, because your confidence in your ability to speak to her soars the further you are removed from the scene. This is a universal psychological tendency that applies to all areas of life and is common to all people: an increasing belief that you would have done well at a task, the more time has passed since the task.
Now take the scene above and multiply it by a hundred or a thousand, and you end up with the regret mountain of the typical modern man. Unlike what previous generations of men experienced, the problem today is that there are simply too many beautiful girls around. A man will get to regret wasting the opportunity to act with every single one of them. What could have been the biggest blessing is the biggest curse, and it is an inescapable one. Because this is not a question of hacking your mating or not. The choice is between hacking your mating or spending a life surrounded by opportunities you never had the courage to exploit, regretting your inaction all the way through.
I want you to keep it real here. You are reading this alone and nobody else can look inside your head, so be honest with yourself: is there anything in this world like women? Sure, you can enjoy your job and derive much of your identity from it, especially if you’re successful. You love your family and friends too, and would die for your children, if you have any. You also have many hobbies and interests. You love to read, learn and explore the world. This is all great. But is there anything that can add color to your life like women? Can anything compare to your sweetheart sitting on your knees while you stroke her hair? Or finally seeing a woman you've desired reveal her naked body to you? Honestly ask yourself if you wouldn’t trade all the success and money in the world for the woman - or women - of your dreams. I know how I would answer that.
The good news is that with the ecological method you don’t have to choose between women and money, or between women and anything else for that matter. You can have the best mating experiences while living a varied and satisfying life. But because women are, in one way or another, connected to everything you do, you’ll probably find your entire life has taken a dramatic turn for the better.
Take time spent with your friends for example. What were you guys doing prior to your new superpowers? I can recall what we’d do. Gather around the television for football, or, when younger, spend endless hours on videogames, controller in hand, eyes glued to dead pixels moving around on a screen. Other times we would go for coffee or drinks and talk long after we had exhausted any interesting topic. And our number one topic was women. We would talk about women non-stop but barely talk to them. How will you and your friends be spending your time together going forward? How much more interesting and exciting will every minute with them be? Speaking for myself I can tell you I have had more fun with my friends in the last few years than in prior decades combined.
Take another example, something as seemingly unrelated to women as travelling. Sure, you enjoy the trip, the sightseeing, discovering new cultures, listening to exotic languages and mingling with the locals. What if, on top of that, you had the ability to meet women along the way, whenever you felt like it? How much more memorable does that ancient temple become when you’re visiting it with a cute blonde you chatted up the previous night? What about those margaritas by the beach? Or how about your nights back at the hotel, how much more pleasurable are they now?
But let's not go to distant and exotic lands. Suddenly even something as mundane as grocery shopping is laden with opportunities. Everything is laden with opportunities. You have discovered the ultimate entertainment system, and it is with you everywhere you go, at all times. Everything is vastly more enjoyable, and you can’t know what your life will look like tomorrow, let alone in a week or month from now.
I just mentioned that the ecological method doesn’t involve a choice between women and money, but this was probably an understatement. If anything, your new mating superpowers are likely to coincide with more money than ever. It is only a matter of time, after you realize what you have been missing out on all along, that you wake up to the other wallets in this world that are just waiting to be collected. Suddenly that potential promotion at work won’t seem so attractive. The prospect of longer hours and harder work for a marginal bump in your pay check might now seem an impossibly slow and inefficient way of going about it. You will probably find yourself thinking outside the box, making plans your colleagues can’t even understand. It's possible you'll gravitate towards a high rewards sales role or entrepreneurship - whatever the case, you will be setting targets and taking action on a different scale and under a different set of rules.
And it won't just be money - everything will now seem abundant. Friends, jobs, experiences, your health, opportunities, hobbies, interests, passions - you name it. It will all be there for the taking, just waiting to be picked off the ground. Your life is never going to be the same after this. Your only limitation will be the number of hours in a day.
Yes, the novelty will eventually wear off. Holding a beautiful woman in your embrace won't always feel as good or unreal as the first time. Nothing feels as good as the first time. [216] Evolution has designed us to always want more, to never be satisfied with our success or rest on our laurels. Even if you win the lottery or marry the world's nicest lingerie model your happiness levels are likely to eventually fall back or close to their original levels. What you do then, whether you decide to go for more of the same or map a different course in life, is up to you. This book is only about women, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers – I’m still working them out for myself. But whatever you decide, you can rest assured in the knowledge that regrets are forever a thing of your past. No more kicking yourself, no more self-pity. That alone is more than most men will ever achieve. There will, of course, be one regret that will never go away, no matter how hard you try.
Why the hell didn't I do this earlier?
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FURTHER READING
Evolutionary psychology is largely derived from the work of two behavioral scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. An accessible introduction to the field is their “Evolutionary Psychology Primer,” posted online at http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html For the more advanced reader there is no substitute for their foundational text “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” published in 1992 as a chapter in the edited book “The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture” (Oxford University Press).
For readers interested in human mating research, a well-written book by prominent evolutionary psychologist David Buss is “The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating” (Basic Books).
Finally, an excellent non-technical introduction to the theory of evolution is Richard Dawkin’s popular “The Blind Watchmaker,” first published in 1986 by Norton. His earlier work, the 1976 “Selfish Gene” (Oxford University Press) is an indispensable text on the evolution of sociality.