The most difficult thing about mating for everyone in rich countries is figuring out who actually wants to pair-bond with you. How you deal with that problem is different depending on who you are. This particular advice assumes you are an American young man who is not over 6ft, blessed with a natural musical grace, or a sincere poet.
If you are over 6ft with a symmetric face or are a sincere poet, it’s not that you can’t use advice. It’s that my advice to you is the same as my advice to women: move to where there are higher concentrations of available people you are attracted to and embed yourself in as many communities as possible.
No matter who you are, you must do everything in your power to learn what you want.
For the rest of you, the majority of young heterosexual men who want to start a family, it would also be best if you found a way to avoid the seeming shitshow that is dating.
There are three predictable ways to avoid dating and still end up with someone.
The most fitting way to avoid dating is to show mastery in some hierarchy that is legible to women.
For example, being a young dentist with your own practice. A hospital physician. Organizing volunteers for some non-profit, where the volunteers are mostly women. Leading a dance community. Owning a restaurant, bar, or cafe. Managing government consultants. Keep in mind that being a wizard with a ham radio, the deadliest shot in your USPSA region, or the most admired steep slope logger in Idaho will not help you much.
The second most fitting way is to grow a circle of tight coed friendships. No matter what, you’ll need friends in the end. However, if you do the creative work of hosting events people enjoy, and the even harder work of keeping other people together in an atomized society, well, that will “organically” draw women to you.
The third is to live in flirtation with death so that your vitality attracts like a force of nature.
However, let’s say all three options are not open to you.
Then, date, and date hard.
Everything you need to know about getting into a relationship, you can learn from sales, marketing, history, and ecology.
My advice is based on stale impressions. Its vintage is the wake of the first Trump election. I’ve generally hesitated giving any advice on this subject due to this time difference, though it’s probably the thing that attracts the most readers when I do it. One clear difference I suspect is that women are much more aware of what men are trying than they used to be, and that effort has increased for everybody.
Practical details change, positioning remains the same.
If none of the following applies, this will: figure out what you want and sacrifice.
We’re All Marketers Now
The Woman in Your Dreams Was Constructed by Video Impressions
Your Dating Profile Is an Ad: What’s in It for Her?
Photos Are Your Headlines: Stop Her From Scrolling
Every Date Should Be Unforgettable
Treat Her Like a Baby and Snake-Charm Her Wants Out, Just Enough to Sort
The Point of Dating Is to Stop Dating
No Pain No Gain, No Heartbreak No Art
What Would You Sacrifice?
We’re All Marketers Now
I’m sorry. It “shouldn’t” have to be this way. Yet as someone said on the internet more than a decade ago, the most popular girl in school is no longer a girl in school. It’s Taylor Swift [insert Alix Earle or whoever for today].
You “should” be able to live in a neighborhood, notice a pretty girl, ask her out, meet her parents, and settle down.
You “should” be able to have a best friend who you fall in love with after puberty, get married, and start a family.
You “should” be able to help a community thrive, get elders to recognize you for your contributions, and have them push you and some girl together, using every trick in some matriarch’s mind.
You “should” be happy to do your duty to forge an alliance that will help everyone you know thrive, and marry a competing family’s daughter.
You “should” be able to let your animal smell her animal, beat some rivals up, have her animal smell yours, and let nature do its work.
These are not the worlds we live in any more.
Instead, we live in one where images are repeatedly broadcast onto a population, containing seeds of want that were manufactured to drive sales of products invented long after every major cultural setpoint.
Accept it.
Dating itself is a blip in our timeline, though it co-opts the pair-bonding function that is universal.
The conditions for dating to emerge as a courtship ritual likely started with merchant guilds in Gelderland, Flanders, or Canterbury, but that’s a whole other topic.
The point is, we were marketed into dating. You’ve already read terms like “SMV.” So take the next step.
How can you sell yourself to a woman?
The woman in your dreams was constructed by video impressions
You almost certainly have an image of who you would want to be with.
And that image is almost certainly from a marketer or Hollywood writer.
The only way to figure this out is to train your senses, and meet as many people as possible.
Learn to breathe again. Learn to touch again. Learn to walk again. Learn to taste again. Learn to listen again. Learn to see again.
Learn to let yourself move and be moved.
Notice what you are drawn to, in flowers, drywall, tire patterns, anything.
The point here is to develop your aesthetic sense. Somewhere deep in there, under the layers of falsified preferences from school, work, and ads, your body knows what it wants. It has always known.
Not wanting something is not really relevant here. It is about what you want. What you like, not what you dislike.
What you want to see, touch, smell, taste, hear. Nobody functional walks into a grocery store thinking, “I need to avoid the garbage and shit smell, I need to avoid the garbage and shit smell, I need to…”
Talk to as many people as you can. There is a time to narrow back down and lock-in: after you’re stably pair-bonded.
For now, talk to everyone you’re next to. Everyone next to you on flights. At the doctor’s office. At the DMV. Everyone.
If you’re an “introvert”, well, do you want to be an introvert or do you want to be done with the hamster wheel of searching for a mate?
You could luck into someone at your local board game group, online game that you play (as I did the first time I got married), or niche internet forum, but what are the odds of that?
This would be like a heterosexual soldier insisting that he would only get married to another soldier. It’s possible. And if you optimized for it, you could probably have it happen one day, but you could also win scratch-offs, my guy.
You must be where women are, to find women. You should be going out, in settings where conversations can be held with women, at least two nights a week (and two days).
If, after doing all this meeting of people, you decide that yes, the only woman for you is a high-functioning autistic woman who plays Magic the Gathering, I guarantee that having done all that talking will give you an edge over the competition- and let me tell you that access to such a woman is more hotly contested than access to most sorority girls.
Weird women love men who let them feel slightly more normal!
All this will give you a better idea of what you want.
Your dating profile is an ad, so treat it like an ad: What’s in it for her?
You’re not selling a product.
You’re not selling a service.
You’re not selling a solution. An app. A pair of shoes. A device. A SaaS plan. An upgrade.
Here’s the only thing you’re selling, no matter what business you’re in and what you ship: you’re selling your prospects a better version of themselves. — Joanna Wiebe, Copy Hackers: Where Stellar Messages Come From
Completely true for dating!
Your profile is an invitation for one type of woman to discover a better version of herself.
As hinted at by our introduction through ‘mastery in some hierarchy’, women were mostly with men due to subsistence need. Yes, this is also true of why families, bands, guilds, and tribes stuck together.
That need is gone now. A woman doesn’t need you. She has the global supply chain and the entire institutional stack.
Sure, it might feel asymmetric because you, as a male, still feel a need. It is asymmetric. Accept the asymmetry. Most of the males in your lineage were selected to survive against the odds.
So you’ve figured out the kind of women you’re actually attracted to. How do you find them?
One way to know is, even if an individual woman of that type is not attracted to you, there is enough resonance that she will introduce you to her friends.
Where do they live? What are their habits like? Who do they admire?
What keeps her up at night?
Spend at least half an hour every day, either online or offline, reading what they say or listening to them.
Sure, you’re stalking, but you’re not stalking an individual. You’re stalking a demographic niche. A group of people who move in similar ways at scale.
Keep a running list of what you think they like.
And when you meet them, throw the list out and listen.
Back in my day, women’s profiles most commonly said things like, “looking for the Jim to my Pam”, “looking for something real”, “looking for a partner in crime”, “looking for a doggo dad”, “looking for adventure”, and a slew of No’s, like “no dead animals.”
A/B test your messaging. Mirror them, if it’s honest.
“will meet your parents as soon as you want” (admittedly some may have meant ‘enact a Kay Jeweler’s ad’ by ‘something real’)
“daddy for your doggo”
“your personal Snake River guide”
“who’s your Michael so I can get exasperated with you”
“so into live animals you’ll get vegan superpowers”
I assume there’s a lot of political stuff now. For this, I give you something doglike: most people who loudly profess political stances care exactly as much as a vuvuzela at the World Cup. Observe to find out what their demographic does care about in everyday life.
If any of these women interested you, really interested you, you’re going to want to figure out what they’re looking for several layers underneath the statements.
If JennyCraig.com were a site filled with info on losing weight, you’d think Teresa would be in her glory and sign up immediately.
But the problem with an info-dump is that Teresa’s motivation is not to learn.
Teresa’s real motivations are to lose weight in order to prove herself against the skinny girl next door, to prove to her husband that she’s desirable, to earn her cranky mother’s respect and to love what she sees when she looks in the dressing room mirror. (Don’t get me started on body issues. I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with “Teresa.”) She also wants to get these results with very little effort. And she wants to be given permission to love herself without changing who she is or what she does. She skips through all those deep motivations because they’re hard to confess. Instead, she tells herself that she just wants a website with info about losing weight. Suuure she does.
— Joanna Wiebe, Copy Hackers: Where Stellar Messages Come From
For starters, watch a few episodes of The Office (today I’m guessing it’s The Summer I Turned Pretty or reading A Court of Thorns and Roses).
Earlier, I said women don’t need you anymore.
That is about problem awareness.
Almost everyone would like someone to wake up next to, to have someone who needs them, and to meet life with a mate. Almost every woman is begging for a man to take responsibility for their lives. You can trace this with blame. Our entire reproductive method as a species instilled this need. Civilization co-opted it to bootstrap itself. Deep down, she still has that need somewhere.
Her need for a man is like a sea monkey, a brine shrimp encased embryo that has been out of the ocean so long that she doesn’t know that it’s there, or what will happen when it’s given just a little saltwater.
You will be that sea monkey’s saltwater.
Photos are your headlines, so they MUST STOP HER FROM SCROLLING
Unlike ads, where you can make the headline big…actually, can you just upload an edited headshot with a headline in it? Nevermind…unlike ads, I’m assuming the text in dating profiles is still small, and ignored by most people.
So, get your primary photograph right. It needs to arrest her attention, and make her curious.
The main thing is…you need to show your difference (in a way that flows with your senses).
One splash of color in a sea of gray.
It used to be trivial to spin up an account of the opposite gender and check out your competition.
I don’t know how easy that is now, but this is where friends come into play. Ask to see one of your female friends swiping, preferably someone similar to the kind of women you’re looking for. Note down patterns in the profiles.
The primary photo needs to show you in a light that no one else can show. Don’t forget that your realest competition is Netflix, a nap, or her work.
Really, what makes you different?
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
— Peter Thiel, Zero to One
What combination of skills and activities makes you feel most misunderstood, when you try to talk to people about it? Can it be easily captured in a single photograph, in a fun way? Use that.
It needs to bump her off her tracks.
Get good at photography, ask one of your photographer friends to help you, or, if all else fails, get a professional. It’s all about light.
Also, everything looks good on a fit body. Of all the advice, this is the easiest one to work on, and it’s the easiest result to get.
The rest of your photographs have one job: paint a picture of a life that would make her more admired.
Check out r/ladyboners, sorted by Top to the last year or so. Yes, these are beautiful men, but they’re mostly men who get shown in some ongoing story, rather than just models.
Paint a story for her with your pictures. A story she would want to be a part of.
What this is will differ based on the kind of woman you’re after. Write down what you think her aspirational life is. Now pick the photos that show you living that life. This involves lots of other people! People she would want to hang with!
If you do it right, she’ll think that you’re the key to her dream life.
Obviously, all this is easier if you are actually living pieces of that life.
She needs to be able to imagine showing you off to her friends.
The plus side to all this is, even if you’re not compatible, she might befriend you just so she can show you off to her friends. And one of those friends might fit!
Do they use video in dating apps now? I don’t know. Use it if they offer it.
Every date should be unforgettable, make use of spots, and encourage shared improvisation
I didn’t say expensive, though more money would allow you to buy more interesting experiences.
For example, why pay for a $250 dinner when, if she’s of a class that would never have experienced it, you could rent a Porsche 718 Boxster and let her drive it around. A skidsteer, if she’s of a class that would have experienced a Porsche.
However, most of my dates cost less than $20. Often $0.
The cheapest repeatable memorable dates are when you bring them somewhere familiar and show it to them in a new light. Basically, like a tour guide. I liked fake ghost tours, and later, as I learned more of local histories, actual historical commentary. Don’t do this if she’s a librarian or in a historical society- instead ask her to give you the tour, because she’ll probably know more.
The flipside of this is putting her in situations where she gets to discover how she can be entertaining, in ways she may never have considered before.
If you know a spot that’s publicly accessible and most people don’t, show it to her.
As Casanova’s memoirs show, women benefit from plausibly deniable situations while evaluating you. So any “spot” should be public, but with just the slightest barrier.
A public garden where the hedges offer cover in two directions. A spot behind a 6ft sign outside a bar. An alcove. A museum exhibit with three walls.
Anywhere she can scream and expect help within a minute, but with enough privacy to nibble on your ear.
Taking obscure classes together is also great. If you’re next to a university, audit something that involves physical activity together. There’s also the classic open house stuff, where you go to an open house and pretend to be married, looking for a house. Many variations like that- you could even crash niche industry networking events.
This element of a temporary secret you two share is great. Pretending to be an established couple is great for evaluating the potential for the real thing. There’s a reason Manic Pixie Dream Girls keep getting away with things. You’ll notice they do this even if you try to go on a normal date- so steal their playbook with other kinds of women. Find something to crash as a couple.
In all this, you need a plan for what to do if she ghosts you. Otherwise, you might lose energy, which would be the beginning of a long ‘the poor get poorer’ situation.
If you have a group of friends of both sexes, this is where they come in. If you invite her to things they do as a group, parties, and so on, well, not only does she get a taste of being in your life, but your friends can surreptitiously vet her for you. Her reactions to them, and vice versa, will let you know where she stands.
In short, never do anything you wouldn’t have fun doing yourself. On the slight chance there was a morning after, I prepared a Japanese-style crepe batter every week. If there was no morning after, there was always crepe batter ready for Sunday brunch.
We’ll steal from hospitality instead of sales, this time, from restaurateur Will Guidara:
In early 2010, during an unusually busy lunch service, I was helping clear plates when I overheard a table of four guests talking. They were food lovers from out of town, wrapping up a week-long trip to New York before heading to the airport.
“What an amazing trip,” one said. “We’ve been to all the best restaurants—Per Se, Le Bernardin, Daniel, Momofuku, and now Eleven Madison Park.”
Another added, “Yeah, but the only thing we didn’t get to try was a New York City hot dog.”
That’s when the light bulb went off.
I walked calmly back to the kitchen, dropped off the plates—and then sprinted out the front door to the nearest hot-dog cart. I bought a single hot dog, ran it back to the kitchen, and faced the real challenge: convincing our Michelin-starred chef to serve it.
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. A dirty-water dog in a four-star dining room? But I asked him to trust me.
Reluctantly, he did. He cut the hot dog into four perfect pieces, added elegant swirls of ketchup and mustard, and finished each with a quenelle of sauerkraut and relish.
Just before serving their final savory course—a honey-lavender–glazed Muscovy duck that had taken years to perfect—we delivered the hot dog.
“I wanted to make sure you don’t go home with any culinary regrets,” I told them. “Here’s your New York City hot dog.”
They lost it. I had served thousands of dishes and countless dollars’ worth of food in my career, but I’d never seen anyone react with such joy. Each guest said it was the highlight not only of their meal—but of their entire trip. They promised they’d tell the story for the rest of their lives.
Care about her experiences in the moment. Unreasonably.
If she’s never tied a bowline before and is talking about it, that is a novel experience. Show her how to tie it, or learn with her. Remember, change happens in transitions.
Treat her like a baby and snake charm her into sharing her wants, just enough to sort
Give everyone you meet the Big-Baby Pivot. The instant the two of you are introduced, reward your new acquaintance. Give the warm smile, the total-body turn, and the undivided attention you would give a tiny tyke who crawled up to your feet, turned a precious face up to yours, and beamed a big toothless grin. Pivoting 100 per cent toward New Person shouts ‘I think you are very, very special.’
If there’s one book you read after this, read How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes.
By convincing yourself that there really is something special in everyone, you will find it easier to make your date feel special.
When she’s comfortable, she will begin to give you more clues about what she’s actually about.
You need to get this out, because you will want to know how you might fit together. Remember, this is a sorting. You’re the one who sorts.
Some might be friends. Some might be business contacts. Some might be better fits for someone else you know, each in different ways. Others you will never meet again. A few will fit as mate.
Is she actually someone you could spend years of your life with?
Does she actually want kids, or no kids? Does she want to be a district court judge, or does she secretly want to be a stay at home influencer? How would any of these work with your own mission?
Pull the clues out with rhythm and finesse. Yeah, you’ll stumble many times. That’s where finesse comes from.
It is easier to instill motivation in a crowd, than it is to instill motivation in an individual.
Almost every time I pick up one of our pullets (a young chicken), I give her a treat, such as a blueberry. It doesn’t stop each pullet from running away when I reach for one. However, if I just show up, then, as a flock, all the pullets follow me around.
So your task is to show up for whatever motivations she has, like an archaeologist digging for fossils he could destroy by accident.
Jill Konrath was trying to make a sale. She got a call from someone at Southwest Airlines. Excited, she explained all the benefits of her service, and so on. She never got a call back.
In retrospect, I mistakenly let my own eagerness to do business with this marquis customer outweigh my common sense. I should have known better, but I was seduced by the opportunity.
It’s good for both you and your prospect to dig in and ask the hard questions. At first, they often feel inappropriate, especially when you feel like you should be “selling.” But in reality, they are exactly what you should be doing—helping potential clients make the best possible decision for their business.
- Are they 100% sure they’re going to change—or are they trying to determine if it makes sense?
- What other options are they considering—and have they ever done business with any of these companies before?
- What are their decision criteria – and why is each factor important?
— Jill Konrath
For you, this means…sneaking in talk about dating. Helping her make the best possible decision for herself.
What does she want out of a date? Who else has she found interesting? How is she with her exes? What leads her to a relationship?
Getting these answers in a casual, fun way is a skill (and will be different depending on your individual connection with each woman). A few might even prefer a clear interrogation.
A lower stakes version of this getting her talking about her friends, and the other people in her life.
Use open-ended questions. Repeat what she says through rephrasing to reinforce her aspirations.
There are times when someone will be on the verge of overflowing with talk. In time you will come to recognize this precipice. Do or don’t do whatever to get over that edge, and keep her talking, regardless of subject. It is in her stream of consciousness that the most useful clues are found.
If you haven’t taken an improv class, I recommend it.
The Point of Dating is to Stop Dating
If you can stop after the first date and plunge into a relationship, do it.
At first, you might need years. One day, you might only need five minutes to know.
The more you know what you want, the less risk this presents, though everything in your social environment will tell you it’s risky. Brother, let me remind you, it’s 2026. Social danger is not danger, you’re not going to get banished out into the wilderness.
With this in mind, the ideal second date is to involve her in something with your friends or family, get involved in something with her friends or family, or plain old chores. Help her study, redo the grout, whatever.
No Pain No Gain, No Heartbreak No Art
Odds are you’re gonna get hurt.
When it happens, appreciate it. Pain is your environment entering the body. The more sensitive you become, the easier it is to feel what you want. To know who you want and don’t want, so you can make faster decisions.
The more you feel, the more vitality you get, and the more you are driven to beautify the world around you.
When you make things more beautiful, a woman will look at you and feel, “Wow, he makes everything around him more beautiful. This could be me. He could make me more beautiful.”
What would you sacrifice for a loved one? What demeaning work would you do, how many bodies would you bury, how many luxuries would you give up- now be prepared to do it all to find the women you will love
Okay, maybe you’re still thinking, “what the hell, why do I have to expend so much effort when others don’t?”
I promise you that even when men were more physically needed, an exorbitant amount of persistence is the reason you exist at all.
Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.
The age of magicians is upon us.
Go forth and manifest.