RichardKennaway comments on Mate selection for the men here - Less Wrong

13 Post author: rhollerith 03 June 2009 11:05PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (111)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: HughRistik 04 June 2009 07:01:04AM *  45 points [-]

If you do not know any women, something is wrong.

This isn't quite Silas' complaint. Clearly, he does know some women. What he is looking for is women who are receptive to his attempts to date them. This means he needs to know them in a context where he can actually make advances, and he needs to know how to actually make advances (which are appropriate to that context). His other complaint was that he was getting a date, but then it fizzled because she lost interest.

I won't speak of Silas' specific situation, but I will emphasize that there are many men who are decent guys from the standpoint of society, and who don't have anything major wrong with them psychologically, physically or financially, but who don't have significant options with women. This isn't because they don't know women, but because the women they know aren't available to them because the women don't find them attractive enough (since women are more selective, the average women is going after men with above average attractiveness, not after her average male friends), and/or because they are insufficiently knowledgeable of all the societal rituals around dating. Those rituals place a higher burden on the male for initiating things, and men don't have that stuff encoded in their DNA. It's something that the cooler kids learned in adolescence, and the less cool ones didn't.

The result is that by high school, it's common for males with certain personality traits such as introversion and systemizing (i.e. personality traits typical of males who identify as rationalists) to be so far behind socially that their ability to get something going romantic with the women around them is limited, even to the extent of being practically locked out. Women with similar personality traits will also experience difficulties, but not to the same magnitude since they aren't typically expected to be the initiators, and because personality traits like confidence (that can easily be damaged during adolescence) aren't so important for their attractiveness. This is not to say that women don't experience challenges and difficulties in relationships; they do, but their primary challenges occur at different points (e.g. once some sort of dating has actually started, not so much difficulty getting any kind of date) and are a totally different subjects (e.g. being seen only sexually).

It is possible for a man to be surrounded by women, yet be walled off from them. As someone who experienced this years ago, I can say that it was no fun. And meeting friends of friends isn't any use if you can't capitalize on it, not to mention that it's a slow and unreliable way of meeting people. And even if you can get a date, there are a million more ways for the male to bungle than for the female to bungle it (again, women are more selective, and male behavior is a larger factor in female attraction than female behavior is in male attraction... just think about the ways women use words like "weird" or "creepy" in describing potential suitors), which enforces a steep learning curve that is difficult to climb when you don't know what you are doing.

You might say that there is a problem these guys have, which "needs to be addressed on their end," and you would be absolutely right. But that is exactly Silas' complaint. What is the nuts and bolts of what these men need to address such that they can successfully date the women all around them, and who is going to show them how to do it? Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn't.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 June 2009 12:09:15PM 2 points [-]

What is the nuts and bolts of what these men need to address such that they can successfully date the women all around them, and who is going to show them how to do it? Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost?

Nobody. Their problem, they fix it. If they can't, well, not all problems have solutions, and if you're screwed enough, you're screwed.

Ok, things aren't quite as harsh as that, there's the whole PUA thing (I have no experience of how effective it is), and various insights to be had from evolutionary psychology. Information is out there. (Can anyone suggest any other worthwhile -- by rationalist standards -- sources on the subject?) But no advice will magically solve the problem. Unlike giving someone a Google Maps pointer to a destination, the individual still has to apply himself with no certainty of success.

"You have before you the disassembled parts of a high-powered hunting rifle, and the instructions written in Swahili. In five minutes an angry Bengal tiger will walk into the room." -- Eugene Miya

Comment author: fburnaby 22 June 2011 07:10:54PM 6 points [-]

I hate to make this recommendation (especially 2 years late), but figuring out how much alcohol you need to turn from an underconfident introvert to a comfortable socialite (without tipping too far in that direction) has helped me.

Comment author: Mets 10 November 2013 07:59:18AM 5 points [-]

Introversion and confidence are completely unrelated. You probably weren't implying that, but for anyone who comes across this in the future: introversion is not about confidence, shyness, self-esteem, anxiety or anything of that sort. The sheer amount of people who fail to make this distinction is one of the most irritating things I have come across.

Comment author: fburnaby 22 November 2013 06:48:17PM *  0 points [-]

Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.