SOLVED with Mark Manson - Dating, Solved: Why Finding the Right Person Feels So Hard

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Most people aren’t bad at dating, they’re just trying to solve the wrong problem. We treat dating like a personality test (“Am I attractive enough? Confident enough?”) when it’s actually a multi-stage process, and each stage punishes completely different mistakes. That one misunderstanding explains why dating feels so confusing, why men and women keep blaming each other, why dating apps feel brutal, and why so much dating advice makes things worse instead of better. In this episode of Solved, Drew and I break down why modern dating feels so broken, and why it actually isn’t. We dig into the evolutionary psychology behind attraction, why men and women are optimizing for different things, how modern culture and dating apps amplify the worst parts of the system, and the three stages of dating that almost nobody understands. We also talk about confidence, rejection, status, attraction, and why avoiding rejection is often the very thing sabotaging your dating life. If you’ve felt stuck, burned out, or quietly wondering “what the hell is wrong with dating?” — this episode is for you. We also put together a free companion guide for this episode with all the takeaways, references, and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here: https://solvedpodcast.com/dating Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁠ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁠⁠https://www.purpose.app⁠⁠ Check out our sponsors: • Get your first month of Shopify for only $1 at https://shopify.com/solved • Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Sign up for free: ⁠https://www.rocketmoney.com/solved Chapters: 5:12 CHAPTER 1: Why Is Dating So Complicated? 51:27 CHAPTER 2: A Brief History of Courtship & Dating 1:21:37 CHAPTER 3: Men's and Women's Dating Advice Ecosystems 2:21:27 CHAPTER 4: The Pre-Dating Phase 2:57:48 CHAPTER 5: Meeting People and Getting Dates 3:29:51 CHAPTER 6: Going on Dates 4:14:44 CHAPTER 7: The 80/20 Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. Dot app. Welcome back, everybody, to Solved. I'm Mark Manson. And today, I have a question for you.

Is your dating life starting to look like a Wendy's dumpster fire? Why Wendy's? Why did you? What's wrong with Wendy's dumpsters? Is it that bad? It's actually a subtle, it's always sunny reference, but yeah. Okay. Anyway.

Is your dating life looking like a Wendy's dumpster fire that's smoldering for months on end? Not fully ablaze, but just hot enough to stink. You really went for it on this one, didn't you? I didn't think you were going to keep this. And yet, there you are, sitting on your couch, swiping your Tuesday night away on another dating app. Well, if so, I have some good news and some bad news. So the good news is that the problem isn't that you're fundamentally unlovable. or doomed to die with a cat that doesn't respect you.

Let's be real. No cat respects any of us. The bad news, though, is you're probably bad at dating. You're just not bad in the way that you think. Most people are not bad at dating because of who they are. They're bad at dating because they're trying to solve the wrong problem. They're treating dating like a personality test. Am I attractive enough?

Am I confident enough? Am I interesting enough? Do I have good enough jokes? do I have good enough podcast intros? When dating is actually a process with many stages, and each stage punishes different types of mistakes. See, the truth is that each stage of the dating process, you need different skill sets,

and they don't necessarily apply across stages. So in this episode of Solved, we are going deep on dating. We're going to talk about why men and women are trained inside different dating universes and why they blame each other for problems that they didn't create. We're going to get into the three ways

that people sabotage their own attractiveness before a date even starts. We're going to talk about the biggest mistake that gets you filtered out of the dating pool before anyone even knows who you are. We're going to talk about the invisible signals that strangers use to decide no in less than a second. We're going to get into what everyone gets wrong

about confidence and how your understanding of it can instantly make you more attractive. We'll get into why you should actually be getting rejected more in your dating life and how protecting yourself from those rejections is actually the thing that is ruining your chances. And of course, we're going to get into each of the three stages of dating and all of the psychological problems that we face within each one and much, much more. Because what if your dating life isn't a Wendy's dumpster fire? What if it's a jack-in-the-box dumpster fire? What if it's a subway dumpster fire or a 7-Eleven dumpster fire? We'll get into all

the dumpster fires in this episode because we're solved. And that's what we do. We go deep on a problem. And the goal of every episode is to solve this problem permanently in each of your lives. I am New York Times best selling author Mark Manson. This is my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the second runner up to 1993's Time Magazine's Sexiest Man of the Year. And this is solved. A very serious podcast about very serious problems. It is, the most comprehensive podcast in the world. Like I said, every episode we aim to permanently solve this issue in each one of your lives. We have a big one here, Drew. A lot of people dissatisfied with dating in the world. A lot of single people wondering what the fuck is going on out there.

And I think we're going to solve it for them here. I was nine years old in 1993. I was a sexiest man alive when I was nine years old. You know, morals change. standards change. Yeah. Anyway. Yes, yes. As always, everybody, we have a free PDF guide with all of our research

and show notes, full summary of the episode, and all of the practical takeaways, recommended reading, and exercises that you can implement into your own life. You can go to solvepodcast.com slash dating to download that for free. And as always, if you love the show, please subscribe, follow, leave a review.

It's the best way to get the word out to everybody else to solve the dating crisis once and for all. Drew, I predict that in 25 years, we're going to look back and people are going to notice the fertility crisis, the depopulation of the earth, reversed itself in the winter of 2026, and it will have begun here. This is ground zero. This is ground zero. Get ready, everybody. hundreds of millions of babies are about to be made. Am I promising too much?

If people are conceiving children to this podcast, Mark, something has gone very, very well. Guys, get a playlist. Please, for the love of God, get a playlist. All right, to set expectations with this episode, which, hint, hence, setting expectations is going to be a very important thing later on. We are going to start with some of the evolutionary science.

Dating is fascinating and that so much of it is really linked to biology. And it is one of the few areas of psychology that you do see very market differences between men and women, how they approach it and how they think about it. So we're going to spend most of the first hour, hour and a half really exploring what those differences are, what those evolutionary forces are. And essentially like why there seems to be a battle of the sexes, why men and women are constantly frustrated with each other, constantly stereotyping each other and just throwing their arms up in the air and being like, I don't get women or I don't understand men. So we're going to clear the air on all of that in the first hour or two. We're going to lay all the scientific groundwork, get all the evolutionary theory out,

because that's what's going to make the back half of the episode make sense. Once we get into the 10 skills and the three stages of dating, all of what we talk about is going to make sense based on the science that is learned at the front of the episode. So people definitely listen to the first half of the episode because that's going to give you a deep understanding of why the advice that we give in the back half of the episode is effective, is important, and why it works. So obviously, humans have been dating and mating and copulating for as long as they've existed. But really, our story starts in the 19th century with Darwin, because Darwin was really the first person to put forth a comprehensive theory of, why we go through the trouble in the first place. Like, why is it so hard to attract a mate?

Like, you got the texting, and then you got to buy the gift, and then you got to, like, figure out where you're going to take them on the date? And it's like, do we get ice cream or go to a movie? It's like, oh, no, she didn't like the movie. Like, why is it so fucking complicated when you look across the animal kingdom and pretty much every other species is just like, bam, thank you, ma'am, thank you, ma'am, good luck, goodbye. Right.

And they move on with their lives. Why is it so hard with humans? Well, it's actually a very interesting story and an interesting theory. So Darwin really broached this subject in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man. It's not the origin of species. This one came later where he really got into the conundrum of the peacock. So in the origin of species, Darwin posited his theory of natural selection, which is basically survival of the fittest, that all of us, every creature, every animal,

evolves traits and behaviors that promote survival. But then you start seeing all these exceptions out there. And the exception that he honed in on was the peacock. Why does the peacock have these gigantic, bright feathers, and it can't even fucking fly? What's going on here? And he pointed out that the peacock has bright giant feathers because it attracts mates.

So in the dissent of man, he pointed out that there is a second natural force on all of us, determining which genes propagate and which ones don't, which is sexual selection. So not only do you have to survive in the world long enough for your genes to replicate, but you need to attract the mate. You need to find somebody who's willing to, you know, put a baby in you or receive your baby. Receive your baby from you. Okay. That's what we're going on. All right. Very sophisticated terms here.

These are very scientific. Basically, survival is not the only game that evolution plays. Sex, sexual selection is the other game that it plays, and it's running simultaneously. And so there is this layer of sexual signaling that is happening on the surface with the peacock. It's happening with its feathers, with other monkeys, you know, rams, male rams ram their horns together and displays of dominance. A bunch of other species do things to signal different status or reproductive status. And obviously, humans, we have our own reproductive signals and sexual selection signals as well. Now, Darwin pointed to two distinct processes that happen within sexual selection.

The first one is intracosexual selection, which is essentially competition between people of the same gender. Right? So if you and I are single and we go into a bar and there's only one female there and we both want to get with her, there's going to be some degree of competition between us to see who can get her attention, who can impress her more, who can be more attractive to her and so on. The second process is intersexual selection, which is basically being desirable or wanted by members of the opposite sex. So men compete with men to exhibit signals of sexual status. Women also compete with women to exhibit signals of sexual status. And then men and women choose each other based on their preferences. They choose traits of one another. Yes.

Those choices kind of form this pressure. Yes. This is evolutionary pressure and select for certain traits of the opposite sex, right? Correct. Correct. And there's both an evolutionary pressure and I would say there's also a psychological or social pressure. Ah, okay. Right, to conform to a lot of these expected behaviors and whatnot as well.

So whether it's a peacock's tail or rams budding horns against each other or a man showing off his new car on a Friday night or a woman dressing up in her best outfit to go to a party, these are all different forms of creatures engaging in sexual selection, trying to maximize their mate selection, their chances of reproduction, and the probability that their genes will propagate and live on in the gene pool. Now, this raises the next question, which is, why do men and women exhibit completely different sexual strategies? And this is something that Darwin never really figured out,

because Darwin was a total beta nerd, and clearly never got laid. I've never heard that one before. Okay. You could quote me on that. He got laid. He had a family. He was, oh, yeah.

Darwin smashed. Darwin smashed. Yeah. Actually, funny enough, Darwin was a very sentimental and emotional guy. He was.

He was. He was a romantic. He was a romantic guy, but he did have a fit. So he did get laid. He just wasn't an alpha. He was a long-term sexual strategies. Which we'll get into that.

We're going to talk about that in a second. So why do men and women exhibit different strategies? Darwin didn't figure this out. It actually wasn't until in 1970s. There was a biologist by the name of Robert Trivers, who published a paper. paper revolutionized our whole understanding of sexual selection in the reproduction process. And it's just one of those papers that comes out sometimes in science that like after you read

it, you're like, that's so obvious. How did nobody ever spot this before? But up until that point, nobody had ever like really put a name on it or explicitly described like what the that's only 50 years ago, a little over 50 years ago. I know. It actually shocked me. It took this long. So Trivers theory was called a parental investment. theory, and it's really simple. It's basically, if you look at any species on earth, whichever sex has to give up more resources to have a child, they are going to be far more selective in who they mate with. The choosier sex. They're the choosy sex. And then whichever sex has to give up least, they're just going to try to sleep with anything that moves,

essentially. So this creates an asymmetry and what Trivers called a minimum obligatory investment. And for humans, that minimum obligatory investment is quite asymmetrical. So if you think about for a woman, right, like what is the minimum amount of investment that she has to commit if she gets pregnant? And it's quite a lot. Very nice, right? So it's nine months of pregnancy. that's nine months where she's completely vulnerable. She's not feeling 100% physically healthy. She's moving around more slowly. She's more dependent on the people around her.

There's intense metabolic costs of pregnancy. There's the physical and mortal risk of childbirth, which in the modern day we don't appreciate anymore because very few people die giving childbirth. But throughout most of human history, a lot of women died giving childbirth. A lot of women had, massive health complications giving child birth.

And then even when the child is born, there is an extended period of lactation and early child care. Not to mention that just raising a little human is like really fucking hard. It takes a long time. Little assholes, yeah. So it is an absolutely massive investment.

Massive investment. And for men, the minimum investment for a pregnancy is kind of just rolling over and making himself a sandwich. So, yeah, yeah. And on top of all that, women are only have fertility for anywhere from a third of their life to half of their life, whereas men are fertile throughout pretty much their entire adult life.

So there's also a scarcity component to the pregnancy. Like there's an opportunity cost component, right? So if you're a woman and you get pregnant by a guy who's like, like not really a good guy. Like not only do you now have to invest so much biological and psychological and emotional energy into the pregnancy, but that is time that you're losing from a limited window that you could have been investing

that time and energy with a guy that was gonna stick around or was a good- A higher-quality partner, right? So there is massive downside for women and very, very little downside for men. Have you ever had that moment where you're about to launch something new and your brain turns into a paranoid little, I don't know, crazy person? That was me before I started this podcast. What if nobody listens?

What if I sound like an idiot? What if I just waste a ton of time? That's just a mental noise that comes with starting anything. You don't know if it's going to work and there's no safety net. But here's the thing. Making that leap, it ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made in my career. And if you're building something, anything, having a partner like Shopify can make the whole process way less terrifying. Shopify is the online commerce platform.

It powers millions of businesses online worldwide. They handle 10% of all U.S. e-commerce. Yes, 10%. That is absolutely insane. From brands like Jim Shark and Death Wish Coffee to folks that are just getting started in their garages. So if you are getting started, they have ready-to-go templates so your store looks legit from day one. There's no design degree required. You don't have to go spend thousands of dollars on a bunch of graphic designers.

And their AI tools, honestly, they're like having an unpaid intern who never sleeps. It writes product descriptions, improves your headlines, even enhances your product photography for you, all without dealing with the headaches. And best of all, Shopify is not just another tool. It is a partner in your success. You get 24-7 customer support from real people who actually know what the fuck they're doing. Plus, everything from inventory to international shipping is handled in one place. There's no more 50 tab hell. And yes, that purple shop pay button you've probably used before,

it's part of why Shopify is the best converting checkout on the planet. So you get more clicks, more sales, less abandoned carts. That means more money. So if you're sitting there thinking, what if this could actually work, it's time to finally turn those what ifs into with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash solved. That's Shopify.com slash solved and get building. Some fun facts here.

Do you know who the most prolific mother and recorded history is and how many children she had? No. Who's that? Funny enough, they don't know her name. They know her husband's name. How fucked up is that? Of course. How fucked up is that?

So there was a Russian peasant by the name of Fyodor Vasilev in the 19th or 18th century. Yeah. Guess how many children? and one woman. Like 30 probably. 69 children. Holy shit. 69 across 27 pregnancies.

69 children? In 27 pregnancies. Okay. 27 pregnancies. Okay. There's lots of twins and triplets. Yes. Okay.

To give that woman. Wow. A Nobel Prize. 27 pregnant. So that means she was probably pregnant. Like she was basically pregnant for 20-some years of her life. Yeah. I mean,

probably starting when she was a teenager up until her 40s. Yeah. Like non-stop. Wow. Okay. Okay. Now do you want to guess which? man in history has the most documented children.

Okay, documented. I was going to say Genghis Khan, but nobody really knows. Supposedly, so there's a theory that, like, something like 8% of the human genome is Genghis Khan. Possesses Genghis Khan's genes. But that's, yeah, okay, so documented, though. Documented. Who is it?

It was the Sultan of Morocco. Ishmael Ibn Sharif, also, often known as Ismail the bloodthirsty. Okay, yeah, yeah. He sired over 800 children. Oh, God. Okay. Okay. That's a lot of sandwiches. Only took them 400 seconds to or whatever. Probably. Probably. Yeah, it took about less than 1% of what that poor Russian woman had to go through. So in documented history, a man has 10, has sired 10 times more children.

More than 10, like 12 or 13 times more than the woman who sired the most or who birthed the most children. Okay. And she literally gave up probably half her life. Yeah, half her life. If not more, yeah. If not more. And he probably just had a harem of hundreds of concubines. Right, right.

And was just enjoying his Friday nights. Right, right. That illustrates the asymmetry you're talking about. Massive asymmetry. And this is worth stating because, and we're going to state this a lot in this episode, but dating and sex is one of the few areas that male and female psychology is significantly different. Right, right. significantly different.

And this is why, right? Because just there are fundamental biological differences that drive different evolutionary incentives, different social incentives, different biological incentives. Like it is, it is a massive pressure on each sex to behave or pursue certain strategies that the other sex does not. Right. And that's not to say that culture doesn't influence that. It usually exaggerates these differences.

This is what happens. But that's kind of the base layer we're working with. That's the base layer, for sure. And this is most of human, so I mean, even the fact that, I mean, we'll get into modern dating in a little bit here. But, you know, it's keep in mind that this is 99% of human history that we're talking about. Like we didn't have, we didn't have dating apps, we didn't have birth control, we didn't have equal rights. We didn't have. Right.

Tons of stuff. As we'll see, a lot of that is very, very new. So, yeah. It's very new and in many ways very disruptive. Right. So the consequences of this asymmetry is basically in female psychology, we see that because there are so many costs in a poor mating choice, women evolved to be extremely choosy, skeptical, and to really demand and have expectation of a certain amount of investment from the man before giving him sexual access. And then male psychology is what we see is that because fertile females are largely a limited resource in society, there are always more fertile men in society than fertile women, which is that they're always more fertile females, which is that because fertile females are largely a limited resource in society, which is that they're always a limited resource in society,

which is, I think, a detail that probably gets overlooked quite a bit. Male psychology is very much defined by competition, right? So it's for every fertile woman in society. There's probably two, three, four fertile men. So that means that your access is limited. That means that you need to show up and prove yourself and take action and assert yourself and make sure that she sees you and knows that you're a badass and wants to spend time with you. Yeah, and there's also, there's some exceptions that have proved this rule, too.

This brings me back to the animal behavior days. It's one of my favorite classes in university. It was animal behavior. It talks about the evolution of animal behavior. So you're talking about this asymmetry. Typically, it's the females of most species that devote more resources and energy towards parental rearing or rearing their young and all that, right? And typically, it's the males that don't invest a whole lot. But there's really interesting exceptions in nature that kind of prove this rule.

maybe you've heard about this before, but like seahorses. It's really interesting. So seahorses, males and females will mate, and then the female will, like, deposit her eggs into this pouch, the specialized pouch that the male has. Okay. Okay. So the male is actually the one that keeps the brood of these eggs.

Interesting. Right? So they'll be swimming around for however long the gestation period is. I don't know how long it is. The females, though, just kind of then go and fuck off, right? It's pretty wild. And so it's kind of reverse there. What happens is the males are much choosier in that situation because there's the ones who who is they're having to essentially deal with the pregnancy

They have to deal with the pregnancy in that case. Okay. Fascinating. Pretty fascinating that way. There's a lot of species of fish do this too. So there's some species of fish that the males will choose and defend a territory and then the females will come around. They'll check out the territories like, oh, you got this good territory. I like it. She'll lay her eggs and hell fertilize them. But then he has to stay and defend that territory. And he ends up being the more choosy one as well. in that situation. Another very interesting one that I found was, uh, their phallaropes. It's a bird species. Actually, one of them is like the rednecked fallow rope. And the females in this species are actually the brightly colored ones. It is a very rare in the bird, uh, uh, world anyway. Most of the time the males are ornately ornamented, you know, they have these bright colors and long feathers like the peacock tail and all of that. This is an opposite example of that where this bird species, uh, the, the females actually end up courting the males. They lay the eggs and then the males will protect the nest and sit on them and incubate them while the females just go off.

So it's just kind of interesting that it's the rule is whoever's investing more is the choose your sex again, right? Just to reiterate that. And it's not always the male and female. Yeah. The like stereotypical thing we think of just because that's what humans do. Right. There's exceptions to this that prove this rule in the animal kingdom. It's really interesting.

Is it black widow spiders where the female like literally murders the male? Yeah, that's why they call it black widow. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of spiders do that. A lot of spider species do that. I wonder how choosy the male is. Like, I'm not going to let any woman kill me. Only the most seductive, attractive woman.

You got one shot. You got one shot. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Where's the equal rights movement for the spiders? I mean, that's pretty, talk about a matriarchy. Well, yes. Again, it's rare in nature, but there are exceptions that have, again, they prove the rule that the acet. It does. Yeah. I mean, the parental investment, it totally makes sense.

I do want to note that it's, it is not as simple as women are super choosy and demand investment. Men are just manhors and want to stick it in whoever lets them. It is, that's a caricature of it's much more complicated than that. So humans are what are known as bi-parental care species. and in bi-parental care species, what you see is that there is a mixture of investment of these two types. One of the things that we'll talk about in a little bit is that there kind of are two

sexual reproduction strategies and there's like a short-term commitment strategy, which is basically like just casual sex, casual hookups, just try to get it in while you can and then like, you know, peace out, never call each other again. Then there's the long-term commitment, sexual strategy.

And what's interesting is that, humans, most humans, or a lot of humans, pursue both of those strategies simultaneously. Yeah. And so you see this both in single people, right? So single people will look for a long-term partner, but if they can find a short-term haughty on the side, like they're not going to say no to it, or at least a lot of people won't. And then even some people, after they have a long-term partner, they will cheat on their partner if they're given short-term opportunities. So those two strategies are kind of always coexisting. Obviously, men are more predisposed towards the short-term strategy, or maybe they pursue it more often, but women also pursue it and many women pursue it a

lot. And similarly, women are more predisposed towards the long-term commitment strategy, but that doesn't mean they're exclusively pursuing it. There's plenty of men who pursue it. And we'll actually get into a little bit of, there's some interesting research about which men and women pursue which strategy under which context. Also, yet another reason why dating is just messy and weird and confusing. Yes. It's because all of us have, we're pursuing different strategies at different times or sometimes at the same time. Yeah. It just causes a lot of confusion. Later, we're going to talk a lot about attraction and like what makes men and women attractive. And what's interesting is that there are certain traits or behaviors that are very attractive

for a short-term mating strategy, but not attractive for a long-term mating. So if you just think about, somebody who's extremely adventurous and fun and exciting, right? That can be an extremely attractive trait for a short-term mating strategy, but it's generally not something you probably look for in a long-term partner. Right. Another point to make about that, too, is like when men are engaging in more long-term strategies, they become almost as choosy as females at that point. Yes. Not just they're looking for like somebody good-looking. That, like, intelligence becomes very important at that point. Yeah.

The kindness, caring, all of those things become more important. Yeah. It's the biggest difference you tend to see. And a lot of this is just summarizing a lot of the research of Buss and Schmidt. So David Buss is kind of the titan of this evolutionary psych around a mating and sexual attraction. He's been doing it for 50 years, 40 years, 50 years. And he's just done some of the largest cross-cultural samples and research on this.

It should be noted for everybody listening to this because I can just already see people in the comments. Okay, so I'm just going to like, I'm just going to cut off two objections before they start showing up in the comments. The first one is, yes, we know it's not all men and not all women. These are averages across populations. These are tendencies. Yes, there are many, many exceptions. There are many men that behave completely differently than the norm. And there are many women that behave completely differently than the norm.

The same way, there are plenty of. individual women who are taller than individual men does not negate the fact that men are taller in women. It's the same that just because some women pursue more short-term sexual strategies than some men does not mean that it's untrue that men in general pursue more short-term sexual strategies. So keep that in mind. There's going to be a lot of talk about men are like this. Women are like this. Men tend to do this. Women tend to do that.

There's lots of individual variations. There's a lot of individual variation. And it's okay. It's great. And there's also, as you said, there's a lot of cultural influence on this as well. The second thing I want to cut off a nip in the bud is, yes, culture matters a lot. And it is, it does affect a lot of dating norms and practices. And it even affects a lot of the signaling that we're going to talk about later.

But by and large, at least at this level that we're currently discussing. And for example, like most of the research that David Buss has done, it is cross-cultural. Like they have a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. They have gone to dozens and dozens of countries. They have interviewed tens of thousands of people. And they've gone all over the world. And they, they, what we are reporting on are things that consistently show up across the globe, across cultures in every different country and in every different society around the world. Yeah.

With all of those caveats, what do women want? Oh, God. Freud asked it. I think Darwin asked it to. I mean, Aristotle probably did too. Apparently, it's impossible to know what women want, because if it was knowable, then Aristotle would have written about it. Right.

Right. Okay. So these are the generalized preferences of women. They are generally demonstrated more often than men. Number one, resource acquisition ability. So the thing that's super interesting about this, I remember back when I used to coach guys. So for people listening who are not aware, I actually started my career as a dating coach, primarily coaching men. And I would say the two biggest insecurities that show up with men who are single and trying to get a date. One is height and two is money. And the money one is always easy because it's just like if you actually look at that. the research on female attraction, it has to do with a man's potential for resource acquisition, not his bank account, right?

And so a guy early in his career who shows a lot of ambition, a lot of industriousness, a lot of intelligence, he's highly motivated, conscientious, he's conscientious, he believes in himself. This is going to be more attractive than a guy who is a trust fund kid, has a bunch of money, but is just like fucking around and not doing anything with himself. You have to realize that money is a very recent invention. Things like fancy cars and Rolex watches and expensive champagne bottles at the nightclub. These are all extremely modern inventions. They are merely their signals of different hereditary traits.

For most of human history, all a woman could judge you by was your behavior and your attitude. And so, therefore, the root of feelings. female attraction is very much behaviorally driven and it's very much psychologically driven, as we'll see. So it's all the men out there who are constantly fretting over like, oh, women just want guys with money and all this stuff. It's no, no, no, no. They want a guy who shows the potential for a lot of money. Maybe not even a lot of money. I mean, that is an easy proxy, but just like resourcefulness. Is this guy going to get shit done? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is he going to figure out problems, right? If, if, if, if we get in a car accident and we're stranded in the middle of the wilderness, like, do I trust this guy to figure it out? That sort of thing.

Right. Now, what's super interesting about this, and this is going to be highly relevant when we talk about how fucked up the dating market is these days, is that this preference for resourcefulness or potential resourcefulness, it doesn't go away as women's earning. power increases. In fact, as women's resourcefulness increases, the bar rises with them. Right. So generally speaking, women are primarily attracted to men who are either at the same level of potential success or above, and they are not attracted to men who seem less resourceful than themselves. This has huge implications for 2025, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Right, yeah. So the argument kind of was, for a while there, there was people making the argument that the reason women do focus on resources is because for so long they've been denied access to those resources.

And so, of course, they're going to try to get what they need just to survive, right? But actually what happens is when you do, when women do gain more access to resources, they get even choosier is what it is. It's not that they, that just goes away. It's that they won't get even choosier around that. Yeah. Correct. And this, in the literature, this phenomenon is known as hypergamy.

And if you ever venture into the cesspool of what's known as the manosphere, you will see a bunch of angry nerds shaking their fist and complaining about hypergamy and how women are so awful because they're hypergamous and you can never trust her because she just wants your resources and all this and that. This is the stupidest fucking thing. Yes. It's like it blows my mind that like these guys don't see the double standard. Like this is essentially like women getting upset of like,

why do men like big boobs? It's so unfair. Like men are horrible. It's like it's just the exact same thing. It's like sorry dude. You have like 250,000 years of evolutionary biology pushing you down downstream. So like you can try to swim against the tide or you can just learn to write it. Right. The second factor that shows up more and what women are attracted to than men is the bodyguard hypothesis. This comes from Snyder at all in 2011. Basically women show preferences for physical traits that are associated with physical protection. So height, upper body strength, physical dominance, again, another form of resourcefulness. The problem is that this often creates a genuine dilemma for women. Essentially, like, the more formidable, physically formidable the man is, and the more he's able to protect her from outer harm, the more capable he is of harming her. Right. And so you kind of get this bad boy conundrum where it's like, okay, yeah, this dude's a

total badass and he could probably fucking kill somebody with his bare hands. But what type of guy develops himself physically enough to that point? It's probably a guy who's maybe a little bit dangerous and paranoid and that could turn on you at some point. What's interesting is that there are studies around women who find physical dominance and physical formidableness attractive. And what you see is that the more unsafe and unstable the environment, the more women are attracted to this physical dominance. And the more stable and safety environment, the more women are attracted to things like warmth, kindness, deference, and just being like a good person. So this is another thing that used to pop up in men's dating advice all the time. You see it pop up in the

manosphere all the time. It's like douchebags like Andrew Tate talk about it that like you need to be a fucking scary dude or else women are not going to respect you. And it's like, well, yeah, women who live in a scary world are going to respect you if you're a scary dude because you are well adapted for that environment that she's stuck in. But if you're like a scary, mean, angry dude and you want to go

meet a woman at like a swanky cocktail bar in Manhattan and talk to a woman, like a gorgeous woman who's like a partner at a law firm, like they're just going to look at you and be like, wow, you're an asshole. Right. Yeah. And this kind of gets this, I mean, we'll talk about assortment theory later in the episode,

but this kind of gets at the point that like generally speaking, we tend to attract what we are. And, and you have to really keep that in mind both in terms of like, A, if you're really dissatisfied with your dating options, like you might need to take a hard look in the mirror. But B, when you think about how you want to develop yourself for your dating life, you need to ask yourself, what kind of partner do I want? want to attract because that's the kind of person I need to become. Yeah, really interesting thing I learned about a long time ago. It comes up a lot. Women actually, there's a wider preference. They show a wider preference for diverse set of attributes in men, whereas men tend to cluster

around a smaller group of attributes that they find attractive in women. And so you get this, this is sexual selection and action, really. You get this wider range of male variability than you do with female for the most part. So like, for example, with intelligence, like men, there's a lot of men who are very, very low in intelligence and a few men who are very, there's a few men who are very, very low in intelligence, a few who are very, very high, a lot of them in the middle. You got that bell curve, right? Right. Gargariusness or whatever. Risk taking. Risk taking. Men tend to exhibit a wider range of variability. The center of the bell curve is the

same. Right. Yes. But it's the male bell curve is wider. Yeah. And lower. Yeah. Women's is taller but thinner. Yeah. Yeah, that's an important thing for people to remember as well. So those are the largest differences in what women tend to find attractive. Let's talk about what men tend to find attractive. The first and probably biggest one is youthfulness and fertility cues. This is both obvious, but it's funny because there was a detail about this that like blew my mind a little bit a little bit. I think everybody just knows that men are a little bit more shallow and much more visually driven in terms of like what they're attracted to. And, and It's just like looks affect us a lot more than, than, and seem more important to us than

than they do for women. And obviously, like, I always knew like, okay, yeah, that's attached to fertility, right? Like everything, whether it's clear skin or long hair or, you know, a certain hipto-waist ratio, like all of these things are indicators or signals of fertility and a signal that, like, you know, Yes, if you sleep with this woman, there's a good chance that she's going to get pregnant with your child and your genes are going to get propagated. So I always understood that. The thing that blew my mind when I was reading about this and I never seen before, I never thought of before, was that age is a recent invention. Right?

Like, think about it. We didn't have calendars until a few thousand years ago. Yeah, you didn't have that number attached to you. So, like, for most of human history, people had no fucking clue how old they were. Right. Right. Like, if you met a new woman, you're like, is she 25? Is she 25? Is she 45? Like, you have no idea. Like, there's no, there's no documented way. They didn't count. They didn't know. There was no, like, they didn't track anything, right? So all you had to go from was your, the visual cues. Right. Of their youthfulness and their fertility.

Like, that makes sense then why men are so, why men's sexual attraction is so reliant on, like, physical proportions. So highly tuned to that. Yeah. It's like just absolutely locked into it because that's the only thing you have to go on is her physical appearance. And again, like you said, a woman, like her fertile years are like maybe a third of her life at the most, right? And so you have to know when she's in that window. So if you miss the window, then you're shit out of luck, right? So yeah, totally, totally fascinating.

The other big thing that men tend to prioritize much more in women is sexual fidelity. So you see this men tend to get more jealous. They tend to be more insecure around their partner's behavior. They tend to value things like loyalty, care, trustworthiness, more than women do. And it actually makes sense. Like, it's, if you think about it, a woman never has any ambiguity or questions around

whether their child is their child or not. It's like she who's baby is this? Yeah, who's baby? Where did this baby come from? Did I make this? No woman has ever actually. that in the history of the world, plenty of men have. If you're a man, you never know with 100% certitude that your child is yours, at least pre-DNA tests. You never knew. So again, men look for and prioritize behavioral signals that show loyalty, trustworthiness, and just basically

things that suggest fidelity. Yeah, there's some actually really interesting research around that. So men tend to, they'll devote more resources to children if they look more like them. Like they've shown this, like they'll, they pay more for them. They're, you know, they, they put up more resources basically for children if they resemble them more. Yeah. And then there's some really fascinating research around. So mothers and like the mother's family are much, are more likely to tell the father, oh, this kid looks like you. Um, especially when he, um, especially when he, he's around. When he's in their presence, he's like, oh, this kid looks like the father. Yeah, yeah. When they're not around, that actually decreases to some extent. So there's like

this evolutionary probably kind of chess game going on where the maternal side of the mother and the whole maternal side is like, oh, don't worry, this is your kid. Yeah. This is your child. This is definitely your child. So you should you should put resources in. Yeah, stick around. Yeah. Yeah. Really fascinating. Don't run off. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, I also remember in when I was in college, we were, as a biology class, we were going to do, we were taking, we're talking about blood types and all this kind of stuff. And they used to at the university I went to, they used to have your blood type and then you have you go home and ask your parents what your blood types were. They stopped doing that because like 10% of people found out that it's like,

oh, my dad isn't my dad. You know, so that was, I remember, I remember that study where it was, yeah, they found like 10% of people like they're basically paternity mismatches. Right. People were like raising somebody else's kid. Yeah. It's funny because I remember that That study has been called in the question a lot. Like there have been some other studies have been run that have shown up. It's been much lower percentages like 3%, 5%, something like that. I'm sure that goes up and down all throughout history. But still, like, yeah.

I mean, if you imagine you're in a room with 50 people, like the chances are there's probably one or two people in that room that were raised by somebody who's not their father. Right. And they don't know it. Right. And you're talking if you've been talking 3% to 5%, even if that was just the baseline all throughout history over a long enough period of time, that's huge. It is huge.

It's huge. It's huge. Yeah. That's actually, it's funny. I remember reading an article a number of years ago. You know, so when 23 and me came out and I think it's genealogy.com or ancestry. Yeah. That came out.

They actually started having a problem because people were taking the DNA test and they, like families were taking the DNA test. And like, children and siblings and cousins and stuff were like finding out that, oh, I'm not actually related to you. Or like, wait a second. Like, you're not my, my father or your uncle isn't your father. You know, like all these, like, crazy skeletons started coming out of the closet with people. And it, like, it introduced a lot of moral conundrums into people's lives. So one fascinating tidbit with the, uh, the fertility piece is that waist the hip ratio. So a study in 1993 went all over the world asking people, asking men, what waste the hip ratio?

They found most attractive. and also just what absolute measurements. They found most attractive in women. And the fascinating thing is that men in different parts of the world found different sizes of women more or less attractive. But the hip-to-waist ratio was constant everywhere. So kind of the magic ratio is a 0.7.

Basically, the waist measurement is 70% of the hip measurement. This seems to like represent, I guess, optimal fertility in the woman. But what's interesting is that in certain parts the world, places like Africa or India, men had a greater preference for larger women. And the theory is, is that the more scarce the resources in that environment, the more men will prefer women who are larger because they're more adaptable to an environment with very few resources, right? Whereas generally in environments with plenty of resources, men are more attracted to women who are

very skinny and small. Yeah. Which is fascinating. There's a concept in all this research that's known as a costly signaling theory. Ah, okay, yeah. Which is basically the principle is that a sexual signal is not, or a status signal is not really trustworthy unless it's costly, unless it kind of doesn't make sense, right? Like, if you think about living in a place like United States, like a wealthy part of the United States, it is, the default is to just kind of get fat. And, you know, you can have as much food as you want.

you have access to as much entertainment as you want, you can kind of do whatever you want. And so there's nothing costly about being large, right? That's the default. That's the easy route. Being skinny is actually costly because it means you have to forego all of these options that you have in your day-to-day life. You have to turn down foods. You have to pass up on certain indulgences.

You have to get out and exercise and put yourself through like intense physical strain. So it is costly to remain skinny in a highly abundant environment. And so that costliness is what makes that signal valuable. It signals that like, okay, there's something unique and different about this person. They have more self-control. They have more discipline. They are able to like turn down things that don't align with their values. And like all those things are considered sexually attractive.

Whereas if you think about an environment with without any resources, then it's, you know, being large is a costly signal. Right. It means that like you go to town on whatever resources and food you have around. And you're able to get those resources. And you're able to get them. You're able to get them in you. And you're able to like fucking own it. Right.

And it's it's like that signals to people around you of like, okay, this person is they have some sort of access or they have like some sort of, you know, they know something that other people don't or what whatnot. Okay. So the last thing I want to leave with to before we kind of transition into the next section. is that we can see from all of this that evolution has kind of left us with two contradictory mating strategies that by and large, men are attempting to gain sexual access

while investing the fewest resources possible, the least amount of time, energy, money, and whatever that they can. Meanwhile, women are trying to limit sexual access until they've been granted as much investment as possible. So this is where you get a little bit of the battle of the sexes, right? Of the playing the game, so to speak, of like she's holding out as long as possible,

he's putting in as much effort as possible, and then kind of seeing where you end up. And I think most of the hostility between men and women is just a direct result of these contradictory evolutionary strategies. Like, it's not, it's not that men are horrible people. It's not that women are horrible people. You know, it's not that men are selfish pigs and women are, you know, demanding, like, hypergamous, whatever. Gold diggers, yeah. There are different evolutionary incentives on each one. There are, as a result, there, men and women have evolved different psychological baselines and set points for what they find attractive and what they find interesting in a partner. And because these

things in many ways are indirect conflict with one another, it does create a lot of strife and frustration between the sexes. And I also think it creates a lot of misunderstanding. You know, we often start our episodes with a deep evolutionary explanation of whatever we're going to talk about. This one, we have spent quite a bit longer than usual. And I think it's just so important because everything else that comes in this episode is rooted in these evolutionary factors. And so much of the frustrations that the men listening to this episode feel and the women who are listening to this episode feel are also rooted in these evolutionary factors, that it is, it is not, there's not something wrong with the culture.

There's no, like, society isn't broken. morals have not fallen apart. Like, it is this, a lot of this is as old as time. Yeah. It has been around forever. And as we move through the rest of the episode and we start talking about dating strategies, different ways to become more attractive, both as a man and as a woman, ways to retain a partner, to meet a partner. All of these things are going to be very much based on these competing sexual strategies. and the sexual selection that goes on between everybody.

So yeah, don't hate the player, hate the game, or don't even hate the game. I don't know. It's just like, this is just the cards were dealt. So you might as well learn how to play them as well as possible. It's a messy, confusing system, I guess, that we have. And not because of anyone's fault. Mother Nature produced it this way. There's no intention behind Mother Nature doing this.

but it's an intentionally messy, confusing process because it almost has to be. Yes. Right? It needs to be hard. There needs to be some friction points. There needs to be checks along the way to make sure, hey, is this the right thing to do? Is this the right thing to do?

Yeah. Mother Nature kind of designed it that way for us, okay? Because if it's messy and confusing, like, again, that's a signal of trustworthiness, right? That's like if somebody sticks with you through the ambiguity and uncertainty. Time investment. Yeah, they give the time investment.

It's like, okay, well, this person actually seems to really like me. costly signal, an honest costly signal. An honest costly signal. So before we do an analysis on modern dating and current dating norms, I do think it is quite useful to go through the history of dating and marriage throughout the last 5,000 years of human civilization, just because it sets a lot of context and it will show us how a lot of what we take for granted as normal today is actually quite unique across the human experience.

Yeah, we're figuring it out on the fly. Yes, as we'll see. So the most important thing to understand is that for a very large part of human history, marriage was not about romance at all. In fact, romance is a pretty modern invention, as we're going to see. Basically, marriage as an institution, the person that you couple with, the person that you mate with, the person that you start a family with, this was very much seen as an economic decision. This was, it was much more based on economic prospects and political alliances and uniting two different families or reinforcing your current family than it was about like finding the love of your life or your soulmate or anything like that. And you can say this was true all the way across the world, from ancient China to Mesopotamia to ancient Egypt to the America. to the Americas.

Marriage was an economic decision. It was primarily driven by the parents. Most courtship practices were designed and delegated by the parents. They were overseen, and your mating partners were either given the thumbs up or thumbs down by your parents, and you kind of had to follow that. On top of that, a huge part of being a parent in the ancient world was collecting a dowry or saving up to for a bridal fee to, you kind of had to, in the ancient world, it's like if you had a son and you wanted to marry them to this daughter, but the daughter's

family is higher status than you, then you kind of had to go and make a sales pitch and be like, you know, I got some farmland out east. And if you let her marry my son, I'll give, I'll give them some of that farmland, and I'll pitch in a, you know, an extra thousand shekels to make it worth your time. And it was... An ox or two. Yeah, I'll give you an ox. And, you know, he's good with horses.

And it's like, it was, it was a negotiation. It really was. That was the courtship. It was. That was, that was, that was courtship. You really don't see the emergence of romance come until the middle ages. And what's interesting, too, is. that for most of the ancient world and even into the Middle Ages, romance was seen with a lot of

suspicion. It was seen as something that resulted in tragedy most often that fucked up people's lives, that created more problems than it solved. If you look at a lot of the classic plays and playwrights, they wrote about romance as almost this sickness that overtook people. Plato wrote about it disparagingly. Plato famously saw the highest human relationship as friendship as a platonic friendship. He had a pretty low perception of romantic love. And so did a lot of people. Even up until the 14th and 15th century, it was looked at suspiciously.

There's documents of books in the Middle Ages urging parents to protect their children from their romantic whims, to prevent them from running off with the neighbor and ruining their lives and messing up their future, that you need to keep your child in the house and only expose them to marriage-worthy partners. Even Romeo and Juliet, which it's really funny because today it's seen as like a paragon of a romantic story, but if you go back at the time,

it was very much written as a cautionary tale. Like people in the 16th century would have watched Romeo and Juliet and seen it as a warning of like, this is what happens when you let your wily teenagers get up to whatever they want to get up to. So as parents, you really need to take care of things and lock that shit down. Yeah, I think there was a lot of wisdom in that, right? I mean, if you look at just how destabilizing that whole force can be, right, just like with Romeo and Julia, they do you do stupid things. I mean, how many, how many bad decisions have you made because you were in love with some girls.

Yeah, all of them. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Any of them you can think of. I've done it. I've made a fool out of myself. I've done stupid things.

I've probably cost myself a lot of money. Dude. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah. I mean, no, I don't want to go back to that. Don't get me wrong. Me too.

But like, you can see why there was all these social pressures and is really a survival mechanism. Like, look, we got to get along with people. Yeah. And this thing is a destabilizing force. It is. It is. And it causes people to make. bad decisions.

Very, very bad decision. Right. It is, by, it's very, and it's funny because we're going to do an episode in a couple weeks about love. We're going to talk about this quite a bit, but like one of the primary features of romantic love is it makes you very irrational. Right, right. You, like, you stop seeing the world correctly.

And that is both a good and bad thing depending on what you're trying to do. But for most of the human history, life was very precarious. Things were dangerous. There were wars and famines and people were starving, all. the time. And so, like, you needed your neighbors to like you. Right. You needed your kids to have stable families. Uh, you needed economic security more than anything else. And so yeah, if you let little Timmy or little Susie run off with, uh, you know, the local milkmaid or the shoe shine boy, like she can hit the fan. Like people can die as a result. So it was, it really was a life or death

question. Something interesting does start to happen though during the middle ages. And that is you start to get this idealization of romance. And this really happens around kind of chivalric narratives. Yeah. Right. Your knight in shining armor who is saving the princess, but he is full of moral virtue. And so he's, he's going to resist any urge to defile her with his, with his desires. And he will go back home and be a good celibate boy. And I don't know, never, never, never spread his progeny ever again. You do see this start to emerge in a lot of poetry at the time. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, beautiful stories and very, like, dramatic tellings of romance in a positive way, but it was still framed as something to be resisted, right? So these old stories of the chivalric

knights, they are admirable because they resist the temptations of romance, not because they indulge them. And that was supposed to be the point. Whereas I think now we read those stories and we're like, dude, go for it, bro. Come on. She's right there, dude. Go go get it. When I was looking through this too, even what I found was that the, even though they were idealizing, this is kind of where that started, idealizing romance and not fearing it so much. There was an idealization of it. It was still separate from marriage. It wasn't like, this is what you should base your marriage on. It was just like, oh, this is a thing over here. This is an experience that humans can have, and it's fine. Yeah, right? But that was the extent of it. Yes. Yeah. So we move up a couple hundred

years. We get into the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial era, and you start to get a lot of these ideas about human rights and agency and freedom of choice. Also, on top of that, you get more economic security, more consistent financial options, and I guess just larger populations and more mobility between places. And so what you see emerge is you start to see choice emerge essentially, especially with women.

Like women start to be able to have a lot more say and who they end up marrying. They did have say in the past in some civilizations and some societies during some periods, but it was generally pretty limited. But once you get to the Industrial Revolution, you start to see it emerge

like pretty more consistently. the other idea you get during this period is the optimization of happiness. So we talked back in the happiness episode, we talked about utilitarianism, this idea that it's our, the moral good comes from human flourishing and maximizing happiness for the most amount of people. And of course, part of this happiness, or at least this perceived happiness, is an ability to live out your desires, indulge your emotions, pursue your family. fantasies and basically have, be with the person that you want to be. And so it's no surprise that

immediately following a lot of these enlightenment ideas around happiness in the 18th century, in the 19th century, you get the romantic movement, which is all about like, hey, why are we depriving ourselves? Why are we like locking ourselves in a box and preventing ourselves from having the things that are going to make us happy for the rest of our lives? Like, why not just pursue those things. And at the time, this was a revolutionary idea. Like, the whole idea that, like, you marry for love is, was groundbreaking 200 years ago. And it's funny because I remember, like, I remember in high school and college, remember reading, like, Jane Eyre and, um, and, uh, Jane Austen and, and, uh, Madame Bovary and just, like, kind of being like, I don't get it.

Like, what's the big deal? And then it wasn't until, maybe 10 years ago when I did a bunch of research on the history of marriage and courtship That I realized like oh this was a huge fucking deal like the idea that you have like a middle class French woman who was like you know my husband doesn't make me happy Maybe I should be with somebody else like that was so transgressive at the time like Unimaginable to those people when it was written or something like Anna Karenina like it's the same thing just like completely revolutionary for the time. And yet we're talking like 150 years ago.

Yeah, this is not long ago. Not that long ago, right? Yeah. We just take it so for granted now. Yes. Yeah. And so then you get into the 20th century. And I think our standards for dating and finding partnership today, I think there's an argument

and I'm going to continue to make this argument in this episode that I think our expectations are probably too high. around a lot of dating. Because this whole notion that you're supposed to find a partner out there who is not only your life partner, your best friend, but they are also economically viable, financially stable. They have shared interests and values as you, shared worldviews, have similar life story or life trajectory, and you're in love with them. And they want to watch the same movie that you want.

And they want to watch some Netflix shows you want to watch. And they meet your emotional needs, right? And you're supposed to stay with them for the rest of your life. Like all of these, like this is so much to ask for in a single person. And I think a lot, like what's gotten mixed up is that there's kind of these ancient notions of marriage, which is till death do as part. And it's like a non-negotiable lifelong commitment. a lot of that was because it was primarily economic and financial in nature. A lot of that was also because people lived until they were fucking 35.

Right. And also because emotions had nothing to do with it. Nobody cared if you were happy or not. Whereas you take these more modern concerns around maximizing happiness and emotional support and like maximizing, you know, freedom of opportunity and letting people self-actualize. And you combine that with these ancient standards and expectations of marriage. I just feel like there's, you can't have everything all the time. Like something's going to give.

And I think people are just so allergic to the idea of settling that they don't want to think about that. The emphasis we put on dating is, it's weird. It's just a weird, like historically it's just a strange thing. The way we approach the whole institution of dating and marriage now is just strange it and it's weird. And so yes, there's another reason why it's so confusing and difficult and messy today is because we're just figuring this stuff out as we go. There's no blueprint for us. And for the longest time, yeah, it sucks. Somebody else chose it for you. But like there was a

clear path at least what went on. Don't get me wrong. Again, I don't want to go back to that necessarily. But there were rules and there were like this whole, there was this whole structure, this whole social structure. And once it was decided, it was over. Yeah. And it's like you were just That's it. Whereas like today, it's like you can date three people over eight years and you're like, I don't know. What am I doing? Right.

So, yeah, the ancient problem was you didn't have a choice now. Maybe you have a little too much choice and that gets into the whole paradox of choice. And like you said, you don't want to settle, all of that kind of stuff. Sure. Also just, you know, like you were saying with the whole life expectancy thing, really interesting a thing I heard recently. So for the vast majority, like hundreds of thousands of years from the dawn of humanity, up until really the last,

the first few hundred thousand years, like life expectancy was around 30 years old, okay? By 1840, do you know what? Life expectancy wasn't 1840 even? 40, 45, 35, 35, okay. 35, okay? Wow. We got five years, okay?

Then the Industrial Revolution hits, science kind of takes over. Now it's longer long or wrong. Most of that also is due to infant mortality. Infant mortality and childhood, mortality, people under five, right? but that does like that changes the whole dating scene too right this is a whole new thing we're just figuring out over the last 150 200 years again we're just trying to figure it out yeah um as we go

and this is a whole new system it's weird we don't know what to do with it um and that is where a lot of the conflict and friction comes from too yeah for sure that does it does get us up out though into the state of modern dating is you want to get into now mark sure um i'm sure a lot of people listening to this. I've heard all of these. If you're listening to this, you're probably, yes, I know a lot of, like, dating sucks, this and that. But let me just hit you with a few things that even, I, I've looked at some of this stuff before and it still shocks me every single time. 42% of U.S. adults today are unpartnered. That is an all-time high, which is insane. There's, they're calling it like a romantic recession, right? And it's not, it's singlehood.

It's sexlessness. There's emotional burnout, too, is a big. component of that, which we'll get to here in a second. But there's just crazy stats around this. But the thing is is that I think a lot of people think it is, oh, like we've already mentioned, it's men who are like this or women who are like this or whatever it is. But it's actually there's larger kind of structural, there's economic, there's technological forces. A lot of these we've already touched on, right? But there really is, there seems to be this whole kind of cohort shift. It's not just kind of like a temporary cultural phase we're going through because, uh, interestingly, men under 40 right now are significantly, uh, more likely to be unpartnered

than women. But then once you hit 40, that flips. Right. So women over 40 are more likely to be unpartnered where men are more likely to have a partner. Yeah. And 25% this is an all time high too. 25% of Americans hit age 40 today and, and I've never been married. I'm part of that group right now.

that's an all-time high. That's up 5% in just the last like less than 10 years, actually. So this is, this has changed quite a bit. A lot of these are leveling off and kind of finding those maximums that they found anyway so far. But another scary thing too, I don't know how scary it is, but sexual activity like across the board. Yeah. I thought it was just young people, but it's actually across the board. Everybody. Like everybody's having less sex right now. In 1990, weekly sexual activity among adults was around 55%, 55%, said, yeah, I've had sex in the last week. That's dropped a 37% as of 2024, which is insane. It's really, it's, it's, it's pretty bad for, uh, young men, too, especially about 31% this was in the, I think in 2024, about 31% of men age 18 to 24 report

zero sexual activity in the past year. Uh, that's doubled since the early 2000s. So about 15, 16% of, of men had no sexual activity within the last year in the early 2000s. Now it's like they're over 30%. Wow. Women, young women have seen a slight increase to about four or five percent increase, but not nearly the same as young men. Now, of course, we've talked about some of this,

the reasons for this before, too, and just kind of recap some of these, but if you go back to the friendship episode, we talked about some of this, and it carries over into relationships as well. Erosion of third places, right? Everything's kind of going online. We don't have these physical spaces to hang out.

Yeah. Dating apps, everybody knows. Dating apps suck, sure. They're designed to keep you trapped. We're going to get to get to that. We'll get into those. There's more just like, just rejection in the culture has changed as well. So now there's like, now there's ghosting.

There's bread crumbing too, which this is a new one for me. Like bread crumbing is kind of like you're, you check in with people just kind of intermittently, not very consistent. Just kind of keep them in your sphere type of thing. Keep them on the line. Keep them online. Yeah. Orbiting is the same, like common as similar. Like when you do break something off, you're still.

Maybe you're still following them on social media. They're still around. You still hang out with them. Maybe at work, whatever it is. There's also like these economic barriers, right? The average date now, the surveys have shown, average date is $168. Wow. Which is insane.

Dude, I used to take girls to get ice cream. $20. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we're just cheapskates. They could have been too.

Yeah. Gen Z is spending even more money than that, even though they have the least amount of money. there close to like 200 bucks. Yeah. And so that causes just a lot of economic strain on people when there's, you know, the average annual dating is if you're dating, you're spending like over $2,000 just on dating. There's some people who even just forgo dating altogether, imagining that they're going to save about $4,000 a year.

So they're just like, oh, screw this. I'm just going to take the money instead. And then, of course, there's the ideological chasm too. We've mentioned this before. Politics has become like this kind of sorting mechanism, but it's like on steroids. This was crazy. I found this, okay? 47% of Republicans say they would reject a Clinton or Biden voter, just based solely on that.

They wouldn't even consider a date with them. Wow. That's pretty crazy. 71% of Democrats, though, said they would reject a Trump supporter. Wow. So it's even more on that side. So it's, there's all these things going on. It's the new racism.

It's, yeah, yeah. This has led to things like the, like in South Korea, there's the 4B movement. Have you heard of this one? It's basically women just foregoing, dating, and relationships altogether. They call the 4B movement because in Korean, it's the B sound for each one of these. But translated, it's no marriage, no childbirth, no dating, and no sex. I'm just like, none of that. In the West, it's kind of been adapted as boy sober.

So there's a lot of women who are just like, I'm just not doing this. There's a lot of men, too, who are just like on. Yeah, there's a movement called men go their own way. Man go their own way. Which is men who have decided that there's like zero upside to. having a romantic partner and so they've just decided to be single professionally. Now, okay. So, all right, we're all aware of the problem.

Fine. There are some glimmers of hope, though. Okay. A few things that I think. Save us, true. Well, they're at least, they're pointing in the right direction. I think we're actually coming around of figuring this out. We figured out that dating apps suck.

Yep. That being perpetually online is not helping anyone. Yeah. That there may be the battle of the sex isn't so much of a battle as we think, right? I think we're figuring that out. Some of those pieces of evidence that make me think of that. There is a return to third spaces at this point. Activity-based dating is becoming more and more of a thing in recent last year or two, right?

Run clubs as like dating markets basically have popped up. Huge explosive growth in 24, 2024 and 2025. And they just come right out and say, this is a run club for single people. Show up if you're interested in meeting people. That's kind of what it is. And they go off and they run. And it's showing some success. some companies are doing these new singles events too

they're more curated they're age gated maybe based on interest so these companies are coming along that are like okay we're actually trying to figure this out now not just let's make an app that's super addictive and people never find you know love on them a couple other things the pair ring have you ever heard of the pair ring no I just heard about this

it's a it's a turquoise silicon ring that you can wear the signals that you are single so instead of like a wedding band It's the opposite. It's like, no, I'm single and ready to mingle, right? I don't think that one's going to work. They sold a lot when it first came out and then it kind of tapered off because I think people are like, unless everybody's doing this, then yeah. Yeah.

They're trying, though. Okay, they're trying. That's a good, I'm for it. Can't you just ask somebody if they're single? Yeah. Well, okay. Okay, that might be a little bit of a problem. Am I getting old?

Well, okay, so there is. Is it that hard? Well, okay. There is kids these days. Oh, kids these days. there is a, there's a reticence to approach people in public. Guys, just ask her if she's single. Just ask. Just ask and then if she is, just move on.

Yeah. And if she's not, just say, it's great meeting you. Yeah, yeah, and just move on. But there is, there's like, a lot of Genzi find it rude if you walk up to somebody and try to start a conversation with them. Yeah, fuck them. So like, get over that. Guys, Genzy, get your shit together. Another one. This is why you're single, Ginzy. This is why you're single. You have to, you have to let people talk to you. Okay. And then another one other promising avenue that I've seen to, there's this, have you heard of the Thursday app?

No. I just heard of this one too. It's a new dating app. It's called Thursday because it's, they only let you message and match on Thursdays. Huh. And then it's shut off. Like you're supposed to set up, you're supposed to match message people just on Thursday. Then it shuts off.

You're supposed to set up your dates for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, whenever. And then it shuts off. You don't have access to message. you to can't sit there and be in this perpetual message fest with the other person. And yeah, so they're trying people, we're trying things out, okay? It's giving me some glimmer of hope, like I said, that we might actually figure this out. The Thursday app is, that's what's going to save us. I thought that was interesting.

If you think about it, like, since Tinder came out, there's a hat, like every app has tried some variation of it. Bumble tried, okay, only the women. For hetero people, only the women can initiate the messaging. and so we're getting there, maybe. There's glimmers of hope. There's glimmers of hope. I'm not convinced, Drew.

I'm not convinced, I'm not either, but I'm just saying at least we're trying some different things, some individual things. I like your optimism. We're getting in the right direction. It's just, yes, dating's a mess. It's because this is very, very weird.

Okay, think about all of the things that we've talked to up to this point. Yeah, like I would say the defining characteristics of, say, the 21st century dating and why it's so hard. I'd say number one, paradox of choice is by far the biggest thing. And it's not just more access to all the single people. Right.

But it is also the pool of single people is much larger. People are waiting longer to get married. They're waiting longer to commit to relationships or move in together. So it used to be, you know, back in the day, it was single people were aged 18 to 25. Now single people are aged 18 to 45. Yeah. Right? So the pool of single people just doubled.

and you have access to exponentially more of them at any given time. And we 40-year-olds are getting hot, too. We could talk about that in a little bit. I will say, too, the other thing that I think is disruptive is just how well women are doing. It's pretty much, if you look at all of the data for people under the age of 40,

women are ahead by almost every metric in almost every developed country. when they're graduating high school, they're graduating college more, they're going to grad school more, they're making more money in their initial jobs more, they are advancing in their careers faster, like they're more financially secure sooner.

Women are doing up into their mid-30s, women are doing better than men, by and large. And what we talked about earlier, like when women are doing better, when women are or have more resources, they get choosier. Right. Their bar raises.

They're bar raises. So their perception of what's an acceptable partner narrows, and that it can throw the entire dating market out of whack. So you end up in the situation where women are like, wow, I have access to literally thousands of men and none of them seem acceptable to me. And meanwhile, if you're a man, you're like, wow, thousands of dudes are all messaging the same chick.

This sucks. Right. Like, just demoralizing on both ends. Like, why do I even bother? Yeah. Part of me is like, dude, it's time for you step up. But then part of me, like, I sympathize too. Like, that's a difficult position to be in.

To get on my dating app so box here. I think dating apps sort in the most superficial way. Right. Right. So if you are, and it's just human nature, right? Like, if you're on a dating app, you're reading the bullet point summary of an entire human's life. And so you were getting a rude caricature of who they actually are.

And the signals that you're receiving, the sexual. selection signals that you're receiving are extremely simplified and boiled down to just like the most plainly obvious signals. So that's not very efficient for finding a partner. Like all of the research on dating and attraction, it finds that it's even if you do have an algorithm that has a lot of accurate information about people, it still struggles to match people who are going to actually be attracted to each other. And then if you have an algorithm that just like is basically on very superficial measures, it's going to do a terrible job. We're not very consciously aware of the things that we're attracted to.

So if you think about all of the times, I don't know about when you were younger, but like when I was younger, like there were many women that the first time I met them, like, they weren't really my type. They were totally women that like I would not have swiped right on. Okay. Absolutely not. Okay. But you see him a couple times. You talk to them.

You're like, oh, she's actually kind of cute. And, you know, and then you hit it off and like, you realize there's some chemistry there. and then you're like, wow, she's actually kind of hot. And like, and next thing you know, you ask her on a date and you go on the date and it goes amazing and you're like, wow, I'm really into this chick. Like my girlfriend in college was a girl like that. Like when I met, I never would have swiped right on her. And we spent like three years together.

Had a great relationship, great time. So like stuff like that happens all the time. There's so many stories of people like that, stuff like that happening. So like most of what you're attracted to is only revealed over time. And like you, I think the best filtration system for finding those people is actually going out in the real world and living your life, like doing the things you enjoy and you care about. Because just by the pure act of doing the things that you enjoy and care about, you are going to naturally filter for people with similar personalities, similar values, similar worldviews, similar goals, desires, ambitions. And then you're going to get face to face with them. And it's like, yeah, okay, sure. Maybe she, you're like a couple inches shorter than she would,

would have wanted on Tinder. And yeah, maybe you make a little bit of less money than her. But like, you got great chemistry. She really respects, you know, how smart you are or your hobbies or, like, you're really into some like interesting, nerdy things that she's also into. And suddenly she's like, wow, I really like this guy. Okay, sure, on paper, he's not what I was looking for. but like, it's great. I really like him. I feel great around him. Like, that's what's got to happen, essentially.

As long as you're on the app, you're just looking at like a very, very superficial version of every person and you're filtering them based on things that are like not accurately going to predict how happy or how attracted you are going to be them to them in the long run. So the TLDR is just that the apps

are terrible filtration mechanisms. And there are a lot of reasons for that. And so if you are going to, who's feeling frustrated, I would say like, A, develop yourself, develop some skills, some knowledge, really work on your lifestyle. And then two, like meet women in the real world. And meet, meet them doing the things that you already like doing and doing things that you're good at doing. And like, that's probably going to overrule a lot of this stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, not all women have to like you. That's another one. I think a lot of guys. Mind blowing. I know. Mind blowing. Like I talked about,

women have a very wide range of what they find attractive and maybe find your niche. You know what I mean? Like I'm not going to attract women who like like big meathead gym rat, you know, kind of alpha. I'm not going to do that. I'm okay with that. Like I had to become okay with that. Yeah. So don't try to be something you're not.

Yeah. What's next, Drew? Tell me what's next. Well, I wanted to dig in a little bit into the different dating advice ecosystems for men and women. Okay. They are quite different. They are. And I don't think a lot of people realize this.

I think this section is actually going to be fairly eye-opening for people. It was for me, definitely. I know you've dug into this more kind of in the past when you were doing more dating advice. You looked at a lot of more women's advice than I ever have. I researched the enemy. Right. Right. Went behind enemy lines.

Yes. I think this is something that people don't really think about a lot. It's like just the divergence there is. Or if they do, it's a very strange. weird world. Or I think they, I think a lot of people think that it's, it's arbitrary, right? Because you know, like, I think they look at men look at women's dating advice and they're like, that's so fucking weird. Like, why are women, why did women decide to agree upon this? Right. Or women look at men's dating advice and they're like, wow, that's so creepy and scummy. Like,

why did men decide to be this way? And it's, but as we've covered in the evolution section, there are reasons. Right, right. It wasn't as conspiracy. You know, like all the men didn't get together and all the women didn't get together and they're like, okay, here we go. Yes. We're digging in. Wahaha. Here's the battle line. We shall pull their pigtails.

Exactly. That's how people like it comes off, right? That's how it comes off. Yes. And so I think it is very, I think it's just, like I said, it'll be eye opening for a lot of people. It's important to know kind of like why, why men are getting a certain set of advice. Whether good or bad.

Good or bad. And same thing for women. Yeah. As we've kind of already set up, you know, the dilemma really is. is like, like we've said, like, what do women want, right? That's like the male complaint. What do women want? They're impossible to read. On the other hand, women often complain, well, men get to be pushy or they're avoiding or like, like, I get this negative attention that I don't really like. Like, why is that, okay? That's kind of a big setup. And we've went through all the reasons why

that happens. They're not just getting different advice is that they're occupying these separate psychological realities, like we've already pointed out. Okay. So the male ecosystem really is the scaffolding is really around initiation burden that men have. Because like we said, the problem is access for men, right? Right. Like the problem for men is that, oh, we're going to be seen as invisible, right? We don't want to be invisible to women. And so we have to find a way to like stand out, to initiate, to get things started, right? To remind the audience, women are choosier. Right. And for every fertile woman, there is three to five fertile men. Right. So, Right. Right there, it's intense competition pressure on men. And so they have to assert themselves.

Exactly. Right. On the other side, the female ecosystem is really more about discernment, right? Which is filtering good suitors from, from poor ones. Is he going to stick around? Is he a good person? Is he trustworthy? That's the female problem. And that's what the ecosystem tries to address. Yeah. Right. Okay. So they're right there. You just have these two completely different problems that men and women are trying to solve. And so the ecosystem. reflect that, right? There's also kind of like, if you think about this, a lot of the, um, behavior in this domain is kind of motivated by some fear. Yeah. Right. There's, there's, there's, there's fear on both sides. So for men, the fear is being rejected. It's being invisible, like I said, being humiliated. Um, a big one in the modern world too is being labeled creepy. Like that's a huge fear that men have. And so being canceled. So that's like, like if women are like, oh, why doesn't he talk to me? It's like, usually it's because, um, usually it's because, because we don't want to come off as creepy.

Right. We don't want to come off as like a bad dude that you just want to stay away from and you develop that reputation. Yeah. And in this day and age, it's like there are very real social repercussions to that. Exactly.

You could lose your job. You could lose friends. You could lose, get kicked out of school, like all sorts of things. Right, right. The female fear profile, if you will, is more,

it's obviously around like physical harm is actually a real fear that women have to have. And I think, like, men need to be more cognizant of that sometimes. Like, female, that is a real danger for some women. Okay. That's not to say that like all men are dangerous or anything like that. Right. But even if one percent are dangerous.

Exactly. If a woman's getting approached by 100 guys a year, like, she needs to figure out who the one dangerous guy is. Huge asymmetrical risk there. But there's also a fear of like being emotionally manipulated. Yeah. So again, like they're trying to figure out if this guy is going to stick around. Is he just bullshitting me so he can get my pants? right?

And then just wasted time, like we've talked about, you know, giving up fertile years of your life to somebody who's not like a good, a good partner, right? So there's an asymmetry there. If you look at that too, like, yeah, man, it's you're afraid of being humiliated. Sure. That's more short term, more of that short term. Whereas the female ones, there's a greater danger for them.

So again, that plays out. And like we talked about in the evolutionary side where women will be choosier and the men will seek to gain more access more quickly. Okay. This really does, though, it results in, in psychology, what they call it is error management theory. Okay. And I think we've maybe kind of mentioned this already, but men are biased towards, like, assuming that women are more attracted to them than they actually are.

Yeah. And it's the opposite for women. Women are biased towards, like, not, like thinking, oh, he's not interested. He's just being nice. Yeah. Right. And you see this every, you see this like all over the place. Like, if you go to a restaurant or bar,

And you'll see like there's a bartender, a female bartender, she's just being nice to the guy. And the guy's like, oh, she's into me. Right. Like, this happens all the time. Right. And I totally, I've done this many, many times. Yeah. Well, it's funny because we were just, uh, uh, Jess just told us a story yesterday about

her wife in the gym. And a guy approached her and was complimenting her and how her wife had like, was like, well, he's just being really friendly. And it's like, no, no. No, no. He's hitting on you. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, no guy just randomly walks up to a pretty girl in a gym and just starts being nice. Exactly. That's not to say that every situation is like that. Yeah, but it's it's like that's the default. And it is funny too because, you know, when I think about me hanging around, like if you think about a group of guys hanging around together, especially when you're young and you're single, it's like when I remember me and my friends going out the bars, the amount of delusion that we had like how every guy thought. thought every single girl was so into him and and and and it was genuine it was like no dude like like did you see the way she smiled it's like bro you're drunk yeah like what are you talking about

this is where yeah men get to like reading every little signal like oh she's totally into me she looked at me she smiled at me she whatever it was yeah but but it makes sense right because it's kind of mother nature's nudge on men to you know you'd rather you'd rather err on the side of of being overconfident right uh because that helps solve the the males problem and then all with women, you'd rather err on the side being underconfident and unsure because that also protects you from investing too early or moving forward with a guy who's bad for you. Exactly. So really, though, at the end of the day, like both sides, they're not acting maliciously, okay? This is the whole point of this whole segment is to show you it's like,

no, there's like, these are the incentives for both men and women. This is why this shakes out this way. They're not acting maliciously. It's really more defensively. Or like they're optimizing their own or around their constraints that they have. Okay. So just as we go forward, just keep that in mind as well. I'll, I'd like to make a point here too because, you know, when I think back, one of the things I noticed back when I was a dating coach is that generally a lot of the animosity that men and women have towards each other, I think it's specifically because the thing that they struggle with, the other sex does not. So what do I mean by that, right? So what do I mean by that, So when I used to work with young men, they used to get really frustrated and even angry.

They're like, it's so unfair. Like a girl, all she has to do is just dress up nicely and look good and she'll get approached by 10 guys that night. Or all she has to do is find one good photo and she's going to get 100 messages. It's so unfair that I have to do all this work and she doesn't have to do any work. And yes, that's not fair. That is the male's problem, right? but what they don't see is that the woman of those hundred messages that she's getting 99 or from guys that she doesn't want to talk to right like yes she gets approached more often but she doesn't

get to choose who approaches her yeah every single guy that approaches her it's like now it's the stress on her system of like okay is he nice do I like him is he being honest uh like is is this okay am I being too slutty am I being too cold like It's just all of this constant like self-evaluation that happens in her mind, which men don't really ever have to deal with that. Yeah. Yeah. And the double standard too. Like, oh, yeah, a woman could go out to a bar or whatever and get laid whenever she wants. Well, then she's going to be labeled a slut. Yeah. Right. Like it's. Yeah. And I've talked to, I've talked to plenty of single women too that it's funny because they're like, it's so unfair. Guys can just meet whoever they want. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. There's the other side of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, nobody's acting maliciously. It's just they're working within their constraints. And this is how it shakes out. So I think just like an acceptance of reality here is probably that's your baseline. Yeah. Right. These are the cards we've all been dealt. That's right.

So let's dig in just a little bit more into the specifics of like men and women and their their dating advice industries, uh, respective industries. This will be fun. This should be fun, right? Okay. Um, okay. So while you're the expert here, I'll walk us through the male advice, uh, kind of industry first. Okay. Here we go. Back down memory lane. Right. So again, it's really centered around kind of like access, right? Like the core curriculum of the advice industry for men is about initially anyway, it's about approaching and initiating. And despite the anxious feelings you might feel around that. Right. There's a lot of men's content around like, oh, how do you just even walk up to her or messenger or whatever it is? So much of like, I don't know, probably half of the advice out there is. I was just going to say, I would say, probably 80% of men's dating advice is like the first five minutes. And then 20% is everything else. That's, okay.

That's wow. All right. Another, like, big area is like the confidence and status signaling as kind of the proxy for your mate value. Like to show her that you're, you know, a worthy suitor, I guess, right? You're the knight in shining armor. And then things around like escalation, being decisive, showing leadership, those sorts of things are like, those are key core components of the male

It's a piece ecosystem. Yeah. There's a momentum to initiative that needs to continue, right? So you're not just approaching her, meeting her. You're the one asking her out. You're probably the one who's deciding where to go. Once you're going, you're probably deciding how the night's going. If things are going well, you're probably the first one to initiate, like, touching her or hugging her.

You're definitely almost every situation you're going to be the one who initiates kissing her. Right? So it's, as a man, you are just always expected to take the next step. And with every single one of those next steps, there's a risk of rejection. Right. And there's a risk of being creepy. And there's a risk of making a fool of yourself and humiliating yourself. So it is, it is very daunting.

The thing that I'll say, too, is like, and maybe I'm getting ahead. Maybe you're about to get to this. But like, I would really, I think both men's and women's dating advice, like you could kind of branched them off into, I would just call them healthy and unhealthy. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So let's define healthy as kind of authentic, honest, high integrity dating. You know, like actually, you're actually optimizing for happiness and finding a good partner. Whereas I would describe unhealthy dating advice as more tactical, manipulative, and you're, you're optimizing for some certain outcome or result without really caring who that,

that person is, like, gives you the result. So on the men's side, the toxic, unhealthy dating advice is, like, a lot of the pickup artist stuff, which is extremely tactical, manipulative, and it's really just like, this is going to get you laid. Right. It doesn't, there's no discussion of, like, who you're getting laid with, whether you actually like them or not, whether you're actually attracted to them or not, whether it's a pleasant experience or not.

And from working with around that industry and with a lot of guys in that industry, I can tell you that there are tons of guys who went down that road. Sure, they got laid a few times. But they're like, honestly, that kind of sucked. Right. Like, that wasn't satisfying. I didn't like her. I feel like slimy and gross. And it was a lot of work.

So, like, why, why am I doing this in the first place? And that's definitely, like, one of the landmines we go over is, like, over. emphasis on the tactics, which ends up in authentic. You don't get that real connection, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. But another thing though, too, another part of the male advice kind of industry is this whole idea of self-improvement as a prerequisite to dating.

So kind of the logic is become desirable first, then go out and date. And I think there's some merit to that. I think there's some of that advice is definitely good. But it kind of gets to like, okay, relationships are your reward. at the end of this journey that you're going on. And it can motivate you just for self-improvement. Absolutely. I think it's a very valid motivation for men.

We would be uncivilized swine if we, if it weren't for, you know, some chance to get with women and have relationships with them. But can also, the other side of that, there's like a demoralizing aspect to it. Because if you don't live up to all those things, especially now what I've seen online anyway is like, oh, you have to be super ripped. You have to have super awesome job. You have all of this stuff. That can be very, very demoralizing for men.

If you can't achieve all of those things, check every single box. Yeah, I would say the self-improvement before dating is like, it really depends on kind of where you are in terms of like where your life is. So that it's a curve that the shape is not a straight line, right? So I think it's extremely valuable. if you're a guy who basically has nothing going for you, then it's probably the most important piece of advice. Right? So let's say you have no job. You live, you still live with your parents. You're just a slob, have no interesting hobbies, no friends, whatever. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be dating. You should, you should get your life together. You should just get the basics and fundamentals handled.

Once you're kind of independent and self-sufficient, you know, you've got a job, got your own place, you've got some friends, you've got a couple of hobbies. You've got a couple of or whatever, I think it's, the self-improvement should continue in the background, but it's, it's like, I don't think it's, it's no longer the most important or urgent thing. And, and then the trap that I see that a lot of people fall into is that is what you just described, is that they get this false sense of like, oh, I have to be amazing to even have a chance, which is just, that's, A, it's completely unrealistic. And B, it's probably a message that's been force fed to you by somebody marketing shit to you. Yes. Yeah. So, it's, a, A, it's completely unrealistic to you. So, And I've seen this in guys, too.

Like, I've seen, like, I knew a guy who, like, really successful guy, good looking guy. And he told me he worked in finance. And he was like, you know, I don't really want to date too much right now because, and I definitely don't want to settle down, you know, because I think in my 40s I'm going to be really rich. And so I'm just going to, like, wait until then. And I was like, what? And he was like, yeah, because, you know, then. my girl problems are just going to be solved. And I was like, no, they're not, my friend,

because you're going to be 45. And yeah, you're going to have a lot of money. And sure, you can probably find ways to use that money to get some attention. But you're going to have zero skills. You're not going to know how to talk to them. You're not going to know how to relate to them. You're not going to know how to have any sort of emotional intimacy with them. You're not going to know how to deal with conflict. Like, you're going to be a mess. You're going to be a rich man child. And it's not going to end well for you. Yeah. And not only that, you're optimizing, the way you're optimizing your life in that situation is you're going to attract women who just want you for the money. Gold diggers. Yeah. So that's who you're going to attract.

You should work on these other skills. That's what you're going to. Yeah. And totally agree. And by the way, you should find her before you get rich because then you know that she loves you for you. Like anyway, right. Get off my soapbox now. Uh, yeah. So, okay, so to wrap up the, the men's ecosystem section here, some of the common landmines, one of them you already, already mentioned. was focusing way too much like on the tactics and the manipulation side rather than like actually developing some emotional intelligence. Some skills. It becomes performative at that point, right?

Or performative masculinity too, I think is a big thing. Like, you know, men who aren't necessarily super assertive or super aggressive or anything like that, like trying to be aggressive and alpha and all of these things. And God, that just like you can smell that. It's gross. It's, yeah. Overcompensation is always unattractive. no matter what form it takes.

The other one, too, kind of alluded to this, but treating women as algorithms. I remember this. Like this, you see this a lot, too. It's like, okay, you got to like, you know, touch her arm here. Say this word. Look her, this at the, in the eyes for this amount of time or, you know, wait three days of the caller, all of those things where it's like, here's the formulas for it. It gets way, way too much.

And this is because a lot of smart, nerdy guys who have trouble with women, I think there's just like, oh, there's all this advice out here. You can overanalyze this and get way too tax. Yeah, I think you're definitely onto something there. Like generally men who struggle the most with dating tend to be men who over-intellectualize a lot of stuff and think too hard about stuff. And I think those types of men are very attracted to algorithms, formulas, frameworks, you know, step by step. We were laughing. When we were prepping for this episode, we were laughing because I hadn't thought about it in like 12 years, but there used to be a thing called mystery method. It was like, it was like the main pickup art. framework for like for like eight years it was like the main thing that was taught in men's dating advice had a show on MTV yeah it was just remember it because it was like I was trying to really hard to remember like what what it was yeah and I was remembering parts of it I just like I was crap we were cracking up dude like it was so ridiculous it was it was a nine step framework and I

remember too that there were even like recommended minute lengths for each step like it's like it's like oh, when you build rapport, you shouldn't do it for more than three to four minutes because then she'll start seeing you as a friend. And then once you're making her comfortable, the optimal length is five minutes because, you know, and I'm just like, oh my God, man, are you serious? Yeah.

Like, can you imagine, like, being in a party with like a stopwatch and being like, oh, wait, wait, wait, hold that thought. You can whistle out more. Yeah, yeah. Hold that thought. I'm supposed to make a joke now. Exactly. So attractive. So attractive. And yes, a trap that a lot, a lot of men fall into. And it's easy to fall into because there is so much information out there. Yeah. That it's just like, you know, here's all this information and it's easy to get bogged on this. Like you've always said, a smart person's favorite way to procrastinate is learning more. Right. And that's what happens. Yes. That happens quite a bit. The other thing I will say about men who struggle in this area of their life. And I think this is this is, this is, this is.

something that is a bit more unique to men than women. I just found, when I think back to a lot of my clients, I just found a shocking lack of exposure to women. I think a lot of guys just, they've never had a female friend. They've never had a sister or a female cousin or like they just didn't grow up around women. They didn't spend time around women. They never hung out with women just socially. And so they developed these like very bizarre ideas of like, like you can't be friends with women even or something weird like that. Well, yeah. Like, or that they're like they function that they're not human. They function completely different ways and they want completely. You know, it's like no, no, no, dude, they're like, they're like 99% the same. Right. Right. It's just this

one area that they're a little bit different. Like it's, there's still people. And, uh, and if you just talk to him as like, I mean, it's crazy. You have to say that out loud. It's crazy to say this. But like, I literally remember talking to guys and I'm like, you realize she's just a person, right? Like you could just talk to her like a person and probably get further. Somewhat related to that to the last landmine I'll go over for the men's industry is under-emphasizing compatibility. You already said this like, yeah. Do you, are you actually, like, the whole goal is just get with a hot girl. It doesn't matter anything else about her, right? And there's, there's just a lot of that. Like compatibility long term is going to be one of the most,

the best predictors of like happiness in your relationships and everything like that. And if you're just optimizing for all these superficial things early on, men tend to do this. Yes. Especially when they get really into the dating advice. Yeah. And I, I think most men have an experience at some point in their life where they do something very, very stupid because of how hot a girl is. Oh, yeah. And put up with a lot of stuff they shouldn't put up with it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because how hot a girl is. I just, speaking from experience, but it just also like, yeah, it's, it's funny too, because it's not just that men over index on it. Like, I honestly do think that men, I mean, there's the old joke, you know, you're thinking with the wrong head, right? You know, you stop thinking

with your dick. Yeah. Men say that to each other all the time. Like, stop thinking with your dick, dude. Like, it's just, there's something about, like, beauty. and feminine sexiness that like men's brains kind of stop. I bet if you could measure a man's IQ, you know, when like a, what a gorgeous woman's put in front of him, like it probably drops like 20 points on average. Because it's just, I didn't look that up. We should look that up. Like there's probably research around that.

That would be fascinating. Yeah. 100%. early on and looking for those is going to take you a lot further and then she's just going to be a lot easier. It's going to be a lot less stressful. Yeah. And yeah, keep you out of a lot of stupid situations. Okay. Okay. So let's get into the female advice industry a little bit more here. Okay. So the core curriculum for for women really revolves around more things like boundaries, the red flags. That's like a, you know, a big thing. Self-protection in all sorts of different ways,

not just like physical safety, but just like emotional safety, all of that screening for consistency, alignment and tension. I can get into some of these attachment awareness and kind of being in a strategic non-initiation. Let me go through some of these. Okay. So like the boundaries in the red flags, you know, you hear this a lot. Don't ignore the red flags. Don't overextend yourself. Value your time. You know, make sure he's worth it before you even go on the date. And this is a defense mechanism for women. It's there, it makes a whole, whole lot of sense to me because women either find out or are taught very early on that their penchant for like empathy can be weaponized against them very easily. And I think that's like many

to understand that. Like women are supposed to be, you're supposed to be nice. You're supposed to smile. You're supposed to be empathetic. You're supposed to be attuned to the people around you. And when you're not, you're seen as cold and and brash and a bitch, you know, or whatever. So there's there's a certain area of the advice industry that's like very protective around that for women and that's what they get get sold over and over and over again, right? Screening for consistency, alignment and intention. So this solves the problem for them of like, is this guy going to stick around? Is he worth my time?

Yeah. Like, is he not, is he bullshitting me? Is he being deceptive? Is he being manipulative? So they look for consistency. They look for clear communication. Is he being vague or is he communicating with you directly? What's his relationship history like, too?

Yeah. You know, this is a big one. And alignment to is he doing the things that he says he's going to do? Attachment awareness and therapeutic language. I want to dig in with this a little bit with you because this is a lot more common on the female side, on the female industry. These days it's very common. So every woman, it seems these days, who's of a certain age, knows all about attachment theory. What her attachment style is.

They're taught to avoid avoidant men. men, which I take issue with them, not just because I'm an avoidant, but because I think it's just bad advice in general. Speaking as to avoidant men. Yes. In long-term relationships, maybe you shouldn't avoid avoid a men. Yeah, maybe so. And there's, there's, there is this like heavy reliance on kind of the therapeutic

vernacular, the therapeutic language in, in the female advice industry. And we'll get into some of the downsides of that. like women are really taught to, okay, recognize signs of like avoidant men or the avoidant anxious trap that you might get sucked into to. That's, you know, a shitstorm to be in, I'm sure. And then there's like really big emphasis on healing your own attachment wounds. Yeah. You know, either before getting into a relationship or in the early stages, you know. Um, so that, some of the downsides to that definitely can be this like you start to, just like we see in the larger culture too, you start to pathologize normal variation and behavior. Right. Right. Like men,

men who are super busy or they're not super responsive to you, well, he's avoidant. Yeah. And so just stay away from him when maybe he's just got a lot going on. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Or like, oh, he's a narcissist. Like, you know, avoidant and narcissists get thrown around a lot and overused for sure. Definitely overused. You know, you do one selfish thing. It's like, oh, you're such a narcissist. He's a narcissist, leave him. So there's like a huge emphasis on these red flags that probably gets blown out of proportion to some degree. The strategic non-initiation, too. This is what in the women's advice is called receiving mode, right?

It instructs women to let the man pursue. Yep. Right? Let him lead. Stay receptive. Don't chase him. Okay? Because you're either to chase him away or you're giving away all your quote-unquote power

in this realm, right? There's kind of this logic behind it. that if a woman initiates, then you never really know if the man was actually into you or not or if he's just like, yeah, sure, why not? Yeah. And by by kind of leaning back, she forces him to show whether he's actually invested or not, again, solving that investment problem that she faces. Okay.

I don't know, the merits of that, like, we can debate that if we want, but that's definitely a big part of the female dating advice world. Yeah. I feel like the, and maybe this is just because I'm less than, familiar with the female side of the dating advice market, but I do feel like the line between healthy and unhealthy women's dating advice is a little bit blurrier because I feel like a lot of stuff like this is it's based, it has the right intention. Right. It's just like over, over applied. Okay. Or it's applied with like a sledgehammer instead of, you know, a small hammer.

A little teeny tiny hammer. A little, a little, little baby hammer. But it's, You know, the stuff like don't chase and avoid in, don't get caught up in a, you know, don't become codependent with a narcissist. Like, yes, this is all very important stuff. And if you have a history of doing this, then yes, you should be extremely aware of it. But in the same way, it's like, yes, you should wait for trustworthy signs of his interest and investment before committing too much of yourself or getting too emotionally invested. Like these are all like good principles. I just feel like they get misapplied quite frequently. I think probably one of the most highest leverage things

women can do is really kind of sort men into two buckets. And I actually kind of do this myself when I decide if I'm going to be friends with a man is like there are some men who are very self-reflective and relatively self-aware. Yeah. Right? They have some sort of sense of their own emotional interworking

their own patterns and proclivities, their own desires, and their flaws, their flaws, and they're able to talk about them. I mean, maybe it's not easy to talk about them, but like they're aware of them

and they'll talk about them or they'll at least try to talk about them. And then there's another class of men that, like, they just don't go there. Yeah. Like, it's just a brick wall and you're not going to open it up. I feel like if you're a woman,

like those two men needs to be approached differently. the men who are brick wall like maybe it's even I mean it depends on the woman but like you have to kind of decide what you're going to do with that and I could see a man who's like doesn't have that self-awareness

and isn't able to kind of share his inner workings and inner desires then like yeah maybe you do need to test his behavior over an extended period of time and maybe you do have to kind of implement some of these tactics in a certain way just to like develop certainty and trust in yourself

like I'm a little bit it more amenable and understandable to that. I think if the man shows any sort of self-awareness and any sort of honesty or integrity around like, you know, yeah, this is kind of what I'm looking for and this is what I'm into and this is how my last relationship went. You should just fucking ask him what he wants. Yeah. Yeah. Like you should just have the conversation. And the trust will either emerge or not emerge as a natural byproduct of that conversation. Right. And it's, so I think if you're dealing with a man who is, does have some self-awareness around this stuff, then, like, the best thing you can do is just, like, have that conversation.

And then this is the hard part, and this is the hard part for both men and women, is that if you don't hear what you want to hear, be willing to let go. Because, like, what happens a lot is, you know, let's say a woman is seeing a guy, she does have this conversation with him. He is self-aware. Like, let's say she really wants to settle down and want something very serious. And he's very self-aware and he's like, look, I just got out of like a really long, rough, long relationship and a rough breakup.

And I'm like not really looking to like settle down anytime soon. But I really like you. If that's, if you hear that and that's not what you want, then you have to walk away. You can't just be like, well, maybe I can change him. Maybe, maybe, like, let me give him a chance. Maybe I can change, like, maybe he'll change his mind after he sees like how awesome I am. Like, it's just you have to, you have to be able to let it go. The same way, it's like if a guy approaches a woman and he hits on her and she doesn't reciprocate, you got to walk away, dude.

Yeah, but she's not playing hard again. Like, you just like, don't, don't try to convince her to like something she doesn't like or want something she doesn't want. It's just there's fucking four billion women in the world, like, go find the next one. Right, right. Yeah. Okay, so some of the quote unquote landmines, let's go over some of those that women run into. We've mentioned a couple already. One of them, though, I think this is a big one actually is, like cynicism that masquerades as discernment, right?

All the red flag stuff that gets that gets pushed to women. Like, this is red flag. This is red flag. You know, every little thing. This gets, this gets, like, this is somehow like, oh, you're being super, you're protecting yourself and you're, you know your value. It's a trap because you feel like you're discerning, but you're actually. kind of just indulging and there's probably a little bit of a moral righteousness that comes with it too of like god all these men are such shitheads like all these insecure men who are avoiding and

like don't know how to deal with their issues and like why can't I find a good one and it's like there's probably some sort of like satisfying like deep like very subtle satisfaction that comes with that like consistent disappointment that nobody's good enough right right it can get down to even more superficial things than that. Like, ah, his shoes, right? Like, ah, he was a great guy, but his shoes. I didn't like his shoes, so I'm done with it. Right.

You get into that, even, too, you get down to that level. And it's like, okay, come on. So my wife has a number of friends who are still single in their 30s and are explicitly looking for a husband and, like, want to settle down. And my wife has had a couple hard conversations with them about why did you stop dating that guy? And it's shit like that. Yeah.

And she's like, you're 38. And he's really nice. Like, what are you doing? And your wife is like, look at what I put up with. Yeah. Like, this is, I'm sorry, but this is what you got to do. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah. Funny story about that. Yeah. She actually does say that. I know. I know. She said it to me before. So I know.

Because like I was a, when I met my wife, I was a fucking barbarian. Like I lived day and night and old gym shorts. and like sleeveless t-shirts. I ate everything with my hands. I burped and farted constantly. I forgot the shower every other day. Like she like really tamed the beast. And she like tells her friends.

She's like, when I met Mark, I was like, wow, this guy's so smart. He has so much potential. Oh my God. Why is he wearing those shorts? It's like, we can work with this. We can work with this. But it's like I just, you know, yeah, she cleaned me up. Let's just put it that way.

My point, though, my point is not that, you know, oh, yes, you have to settle for all this bad behavior. That's not what I'm saying. Like give people a little bit of leeway here. Right. We're all imperfect in some way. Right. Obviously, right?

Like maybe we chose a bad outfit one time or said something stupid. Like, okay, that's maybe a little bit of a yellow flag or red flag even. But is that really a deal breaker? Yeah. Like there's a difference between cynicism and discernment. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I feel like having standards are not settling. Yeah. It's kind of been like, there's like a fetish around it these days. And I notice it with both my chronically single male friends and my chronically single female friends. Oh, yeah. That there's just this like kind of absurd expectation of who they're going to settle down with. And I actually, I had a conversation with a guy friend of mine who was also frustrated. also in his 40s, also wants to settle down. But, you know, after dating probably two dozen women at this point over the last 10 years, none of them are good enough. None of them work out. I remember sitting down with him and I was like, look, man, why don't you do this? Why don't you write down everything you want in a partner? And he did that. And I was like, okay, now put it in order from most important to least important. Like put the things that you just are non-negotiable at the top. Like you have to have those things. And then by the

they're just like they're nice to have so it's like oh it'd be great if she was like this but it's okay if she's not and he did that and I was like awesome now cross out everything except for the top three yeah yeah I was just like be willing to give them up right because it's like if you find somebody who who you who has your values shares similar a similar lifestyle is attractive and is nice to you like who cares what music they're into who who cares what sort of like t-shirts they wear, you know? Like it's just, who cares like how they eat their soup? It doesn't, none of this matters.

None of it's going to matter. Right. No, exactly. Yeah. And another one I wanted to bring up was idealizing perfection, just like you just said, and that's definitely like the knowing your value, raise your standards to an extent. Yes. Again, like you said, that's good advice to an extent.

Yes. It's a similar curve where it's like if you have no standards, then yes, that's probably the best advice you can receive. Yes, yeah. But if you already have. a lot of standards, it's actually probably hurting. Right. There's a diminishing return at a certain point. Right. Right. I think it was it you that said like one point if like if you can get somebody who's like 80% of your whatever

list. Right. I recommend making a list or whatever. Like that's your, wow. You're amazing. That's probably, that's probably a max of 50 year marriage right there. If you can get 80% of your list or especially if you can get the, if you can get the top three items plus 80% of everything else, like that's probably a 50 year marriage. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, some other ones. We talked about the over pathologizing of normal male behavior. You know, maybe he's not avoidant. Maybe he's just busy.

You know, that kind of thing. Or maybe I hate to do this, but maybe he's not that into you. Yes. There's the other one too. Like, just because he's not into you doesn't mean like he's. He's avoidant. Yeah. Yeah.

Or, you know, mentally ill in any way. Yeah. Like, yeah. The passive vetting, um, suppressing your, like signaling. healthy interest in somebody else too. That's another one too. Like this whole,

the whole thing I brought up about receiving mode and strategic, uh, non-initiation. Um, while, yes, that probably is, like you said, there's probably some merit to that, um, and to some extent, but at the same time, too, you do need to be able to show some interest to because we're men and we're dumb and like, you know, we are dumb. Well, I mean, and, but we overestimate too. So it's like just a little bit and it's like if it's, even if it seems obvious to you, like, yeah. I mean, You joke about it, but it's funny because it is super interesting. Like in all the psychological literature, there are, there are a hand, like men and women are basically the same on most measurements.

There are some measurements where they're slightly different. There's like a small discrepancy. You know, men are slightly more this way. Women are slightly more that way. And then generally, like anything that you get into that there is a massive difference, it has something to do with sex and dating and relationships. But it's funny because what you said, it's like men are dumb, right? We don't discern. Men are worse at discerning social cues than women are.

That's just like a very consistently replicated measurement that men don't pick up on social cues as quickly or as consistently as women do. So in a lot of cases, it's like if you're in your head, you're signaling to him like, hey, I really like you. Let's keep this going. And he's missing the cue. Yeah, he might just be clueless. he might just be dumb. Yeah. You might just need to like flash a neon sign in front of his face.

And because it's, yeah, we don't pick up on subtlety sometimes. Right, right. Or even if we do, even if we do have that bias where, you know, we're thinking, oh, she's definitely into me. We still might not act on it because we're anxious about it or fear or whatever. Because we don't think she is. Yeah. Clear, clear signs help a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to, I think most, and this kind of gets back to how like the five percent of shitty men kind of ruin it for everybody. I think the majority of men, they're gonna wait until there's a clear signal. If they're a good guy and they're waiting around for a long time, then it's probably just not clear enough to them.

Or they're just really insecure and nervous. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I think that's it for the two ecosystems. Let's talk just a little bit about, now we've went over that, how do these systems kind of collide and cause some of this conflict we talk about, right? Just real quick here.

Like, so for, for, there's this, I'm going to call it the volume versus filter loop. Okay. So if, if men's problem is that access and initiation, then a pretty logical strategy is just to increase the volume of access and initiation that you have, right? Like try to go out there and take as many at-bats as you can. Yeah. It's the opposite for women. They're like, no, no, no, tighten it down.

Like, increase your filters here. Right. And obviously what that does is it kind of just produces this burnout. like burnout for women. They're just like getting tighter and tighter filters and, oh, like you said, getting bombarded. And they're like, all men are like this, whatever. Men get demoralized in that situation too because there's like I'm trying all this and nothing's, nothing's working out.

Right. I don't know what the fix is necessarily for that other than just being aware of it. But that's one way that that conflict comes up. I think that that cycle is definitely happening in the culture today. Yeah. And I think I think the reason it's getting so bad is just that it's, we have really, really, really bad matching systems. Like I just think the apps are absolutely atrocious at matching people who are actually

going to like each other. Again, I think in person, there's so much signal and information that is lost from not being in person with people. If you're a guy and you're in a room, let's say you're at a party or something and there's 10 women, you talk to 10 women that night, there's so much. much unspoken nonverbal information that's being conveyed. There's body language, there's facial expressions, there's vocal tonality, there's laughter, there's all sorts of things, the way they're dressed, the where they decide to, you know, if you go outside and three minutes later, they, they suddenly

show up outside. Like there's all sorts of like little cues that happen in the mix that are just lost online and you have no and because they're lost online people kind of default to like the most superficial and shallow assumptions that they have. I think if you're in person that that volume filtration advice functions properly, I think it's when you remove people from a natural environment that you they potentially become problematic. Okay, another kind of conflict area that comes out of all of this is, I'm calling it the stoic versus anxious trap, or really the stoic trap, I think is what it is. Like men's advice, they kind of tell you to be a little more, quote unquote, stoic.

Reserved, yeah. Reserved. Like, don't show too much interest too early on, all of that. And then the women's advice side says, avoid the avoidance, right? Which is like they're flagging that as avoidant. And so you get this, just withdrawal on both sides. And you see that a lot, too. I think it's that just, that's going to naturally happen if you go too far into either

one of those kind of modes, right? Last one. The nice guy paradox. I'm going to get your take on this a little bit too. So, you know, you have nice, the nice guy thing, right? Like, nice guys finish last, right? Or like, or a lot of nice guys will think, I'm a nice guy. Why doesn't she like me? Right. There's, that's, this is as oldest time too, right? Like, there is this kind of like weird thing that men see, they think they see anyway. It's like, oh, women say they want a nice guy, but then they go after bad boys or whatever it is, right? What's your take on the whole nice guy thing? I think it's actually a quite nuanced thing.

Definitely. I think a lot of it is contextual. I think a lot of it has to do with who the quote unquote nice guy is and what his intentions are. What I see, so the first thing I'll say is what I often see is that most nice guys are not actually nice. They're needy. They will agree with everything the woman says. They will compliment her all the time, tell her she's amazing. and basically just kind of like grovel at her feet.

And if you go back to what women are attracted to, it is a man who shows the potential for resourcefulness. And if a guy is just like fucking licking your feet everywhere you go, like that's not a very resourceful guy. That's actually kind of a pathetic guy who's like desperate for attention and validation all the time. So of course it's completely unattractive. Right. You're going to be a resource drain.

It's obvious. You can be a resource drain, right? Exactly. So, but nice guys are like, I'm so nice to her. Yeah, like, I bought her flowers and I do everything for her. I wrote her poetry. Like, what's the problem? It's like, yeah, dude, it's, it's like, it's not that simple.

Like, if it was as simple, it was just being nice to somebody. It was like, what got you like, I don't know. It just. It's cheap, yeah. It seems, yeah, it just seems very ridiculous. And also, it's like, why are you, why are you being nice? Right? You're being nice because you think she's hot, right?

So it's a very, it's a very. it's actually a very conditional niceness. Right. And it goes back to, too, we were talking about the evolutionary stuff, and you brought this up about how, you know, this, the protector aspect of it. It's like women have to walk that fine line, right, between somebody who is assertive and even aggressive in certain situations, but is also very generous and kind to them. And that's a very difficult line for women to, to tread, to walk.

Right. It's like if we're shipwrecked in the Pacific, is this guy? going to get me out of there. Right. And if you're grovelling at her feet, then clearly you're not. Right. So there's that aspect to it. That said, so in the nice guy's defense, I think a lot of women, particularly insecure

women or young women, which are usually insecure women, they mistake excitement or romance. They will look at the quote unquote, the bad boy, right? They see he's a challenge. They see he's uninfluenced by her opinion or her objections to what he's doing. They see his confidence. And they find that really sexy and attractive. It's the same thing as young men with hot girls. Every man has to go through a phase where he learns that, okay, just because she's hot doesn't mean I should date her.

Right. Right. And I think every young woman goes through a phase where it's like, okay, just because he's hot doesn't mean I should date him. right? Because in this case, a lot of hot men are very unstable, like unreliable, chaotic. And in some cases, like, actually dangerous. So I think a lot of women have to learn that lesson, too. But it's just that when you're young, you don't have any context or understanding of, like, what long-term attractive traits are. Right? You're like, you're a 20-year-old girl. You've dated, like, one guy in your life. You have no idea, like, what are the actual personality traits to filter for?

like what what sort of values you should be paying attention to in a kind of no you're just like wow this guy's super hot and he's really confident and he like he's giving me a lot of attention like that's probably as far as your mind goes and I think a lot of I think a lot of nice risk-averse men when they're young they they see that they get overlooked a lot by the women they're attracted to and so they get very bitter and resentful and and you kind of they develop this assumption of like, well, I'm such a nice guy. That's why I got overlooked. That's why, you know, she's like didn't even look my way. Right. What you find, though, is that as people get older, so two things happen. One is, as people get older, nice guys start winning more. Because older women have

enough experience and knowledge and understanding to, like, realize, like, okay, there's, there's some deeper, longer-term traits that I should be looking out for and paying attention to. On top of that, I think just the nature of attractiveness and sexiness kind of changes as you age. You're less impressed by like flashy hot stuff and you're more interested in like, okay, who is this person really? the second thing that's very interesting is that the more affluent the environment, the more nice guys win. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but generally speaking, like, high achieving women who are well educated and have lots of options and resources, they don't really see why they should put up with an asshole. Yeah. At least most of the time, right?

Right. And it's, again, this is on average. but like they're going to be actually be more drawn to a guy who is who's who's actually kind and nice. The other aspect of this is that as a man, the higher status or higher amount of resources you have, the more being a nice guy wins. So it's one thing if you're kind of a broke loser and you're nice, like that's not going to do anything for you. But if you're like a badass and you've got an incredible life and you're nice, Like, okay, now that's really, really attractive. Because you don't have to be nice anymore. It comes back to that costly signaling.

Like, when you're a loser, you have to be nice because you don't have any options. So being nice is not costly, so there's like not really any value in the signal. But when you're rich and successful and like have a yacht south of France and you're nice, it's like, okay, that guy does not have to be nice. So that actually means something.

Okay. It's funny. I remember I was talking to to Randy Blythe, the lead singer of Lamb of God, and they toured, they did a big world tour. They opened for Metallica.

And I asked them, I was like, how are the Metallica guys? And he was like, he was like, you know what, dude, they were so fucking nice.

And what's incredible is they didn't have to be. Right. Yeah. Like, they could have been the biggest dicks and we would have just taken it because they're Metallica.

Yeah. There is a weird status. There's like a weird interplay between niceness and status. Yeah. You know, so like the higher status you are, the more important. The further niceness gets you. Survey show around the world, like warmth and generosity are two of the most attractive things that all people find.

Yes. Men and women. Yes. So it's, yeah, I think you do have to exhibit some level of competence first, though, right? Like you said, otherwise it's not a very costly signal. Yeah. So, yeah, it is that fine line. there's a balance.

Yeah, and one of the things I wrote in models, my dating book, is that most of what's attractive or unattractive in communication is intent. So you can say, you can have the most clever joke in the world, but if you're like a really needy dude who's like desperate for attention and validation, it's going to be very unattractive. Whereas if you say it in a way that like,

you just think it's funny, you're just sharing it. like clearly you there's like nothing at stake um then it becomes attractive right so most of what and this is the thing that the pickup artist people got wrong is that they saw they saw language is very tactical it's like you have to say the right thing make the right joke tell the right story and i think my book undermined most of that by saying no no no it's about your intent why are you saying the joke why are you telling the story what for what reason are you pointing something out. Yeah. Yeah. If I may wade into a pool that I may quickly regret waiting into. Okay. I'll allow it. I do think, and Jess, please interject if I step out of line here. But I do, I do think we'd be remiss without at least

mentioning how some of some of these dynamics would potentially play out with like LGBT people. Obviously, I don't have first-hand experience with this, but I have heard from and talked to a lot of LGBT people who have read my content and given me feedback and asked me questions over the years. And there's also a lot of very interesting research on LGBT dating and how it differs from heterodating, of which I've read some. The two things that are really interesting and distinct. So we come back to the two different kind of approaches to sexual selection, the two different strategies, you know, men, it's primarily about initiation. Also, men have a much higher sex drive on average than women do. And so when you think about gay relationships, like two men, if you look and analyze how they play out, it's pretty much how you would expect. Yeah, right.

They are just banging the shit out of each other all the time. Right. Right. I remember years ago, I forget, I think his name was Donald Simon. He did a large survey about sexual behavior in the late 70s. I believe he was the first one who really studied and surveyed a lot of LGBT people. And it was funny. It was absolutely hilarious because he basically he asked people how many sexual partners they'd had in their life.

And I think it was lesbians had the least amount. I think on average it was like two or three partners. Hetero women had on average like four or five or something. Hetero men had like seven and then gay men had like 39. Yeah, right. Like, it was, it was five, ten times more, which if you're a dude, you kind of know why. And it's, if you've ever hung around a lot of dudes, you just implicitly know why. I imagine that that environment is just rife with initiation.

It is rife with being very forward. I don't know how much you've been hit on by gay men, but I've been hit on in gay men. I've spent some time in gay bars. And it's like, yeah, they don't hold back. They're just like, they just throw it right. right out there and they're, you know, they're, to me, they've always been very polite about it. Yeah, except the consequences either way. They're very good about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's just, that seems to be kind of the culture and the environment and that's how it goes. So I imagine my guess here is that

probably a lot of gay specific advice is probably more on the, on the actual, more similar to actual the female advice, which is raising standards, creating better filters, setting more boundaries, because there's probably opportunity everywhere all the time. That would be my guess, at least. And part of this, too, is just over the years, I have, as someone who primarily wrote dating advice for men, I have primarily heard from lesbians who have emailed me and told me that it's very applicable to their world. And this is where you should correct me if I'm wrong, Jess. But my sense is that in lesbian dating it's

it's probably more about learning how to assert yourself initiate, take the first action I mean I don't know is that like yeah what do you think Jess does that register because like I don't know I imagine a lesbian bar and I just kind of imagine like a bunch

of girls standing around waiting for somebody to talk to each other in my experience that's my experience yeah that's part of the reason why like your blogs it was really helpful for me as I was, you know, trying to figure out how to approach women, too, because there weren't a lot of advice around that as a gay woman.

Yeah. Like, I kind of, if I wanted to get late or if I wanted to date women, I had to kind of take on that role of being more assertive, being the one to, like, talk to them and make first contact. Because if I didn't, nothing happens. Yeah. Other bisexual and lesbian women have expressed that complaint. Okay. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. And I remember, too, you know, when I first started working with you, one of my men in jobs was sorting through your email. Yes. And I think it was probably a ratio of something like two to one. When an email did come through the LGBTQ community, it was usually a lesbian. Usually lesbians.

And they said, read your book models. It works great. Yeah. Loved it. It's interesting. And just kind of anecdotally as well, my experience is mostly like when I hear from lesbians, they're like, this was directly applicable. Yeah.

Like basically like Jess just said. Whereas when I've heard from gay men, typically they're like, this was great, but I feel like there's some caveats here that are probably specific to my experience or a gay man's experience and like, what would you say about it? And then they have a bunch of questions. They're like, what would you say about this or that? It is interesting. One of the most common questions. I mentioned this on the Q&A podcast at the end of last year, but one of the most common requests over the years has been from women who have read models, my men's dating book, and said, this is actually

more useful than any woman's dating book I've read. Wow, okay, yeah. And then they've asked me, like, can you do a version for women? And because it's for people listening who have not read models, it is the subtitles attract women through honesty and like the core argument throughout the book is to date with integrity because when you date with integrity and honesty, these natural filtration systems are allowed to work their magic. Right.

And generally what that looks like in terms of experience is that you'll experience. it's more rejection. Like basically it's like the more open and honest you are in the dating process, you will have more rejection, but the few people who don't reject you are going to be like really, really compatible with you. And it's going to be a very good experience. Whereas if the more you hide yourself, maybe the less rejection you experience, but the people who don't reject you, there's just going to be a lot of ambiguity.

There's going to be a lot of confusion. There's going to be a lot of like, I'm not really sure how much I like this person. do I really want to keep doing this? And the decision making is going to be very, very difficult. So I think that has been incredibly effective for men. And a lot of women have asked for like kind of what's the female version of that. One day, maybe when I have time again, which at this raid will probably be like 2046. Good luck.

Yeah. I will write a female version of models. But until then, this is what we've got. Okay. Cool. Well, I think as we get into the latter half here, the episode, we'll bring up some more of the things from models. But yeah, that kind of wraps that up. If you are, though, a young man or even women, too, go get models.

Yeah. Like, yeah. Still, it holds up. It's, it holds up. It does. And there's not, you know, it was before dating apps and everything like that. Your first editions were anyway. And I still think it holds up.

Yeah. It still sells really well. I still hear from readers all the time. I still hear from now, now it's Gen Z guys are reading it. by and large, and it's still, it's still, it's still probably, at this point, it's one of the, probably one of the best selling men's dating books ever. So check it out and, or just listen the rest of this podcast. You're going to get a lot, a big dose of Mark Manson dating philosophy. All right, we're in the back half of the episode, Drew. Just a reminder to listeners that we do have a

free downloadable PDF with everything in this episode, full summer. all the research, all the notes, all the advice and takeaways, you can get that at solvepodcast.com slash dating. Moving into the back half of the episode, we're going to start talking about the skills that are necessary to do well in dating, to have an abundant, satisfying dating life, to find good partners, and then ultimately to find that one special person that you want to spend a lot of time with. So we're going to break this up in the three phases. The first phase is The pre-dating phase, this is just like stuff that you should kind of get figured out and get an order before you even enter the dating market because it's going to pay dividends in the dating market and everything else you do. There is the meeting people phase.

So how well are you finding the right people? Are you meeting them well? Are you filtering for the right people? Do you know how to approach people? Do you know how to get things going? Set up meetups, all that sort of thing. And then the third stage is the actual dating itself, right? So if you meet a person and you like them,

are you able to keep things going with them? Are you able to keep in contact with them? Are you able to move the ball forward? Keep things escalating, getting closer to them, getting to know the better. So those are the three phases. Predating, meeting, and then dating, I guess. Anything you'd like to add.

Yeah, or Bernie. Well, I think just the way I want to approach is too is that each of these phases kind of has an associated psychological problem. right, that we have to address. And the skills we're going to go through hopefully help you kind of solve those psychological problems. But it's good to be aware of like each of these phases has a different psychological problem. And then sometimes whether confusion comes is you're trying to solve one of these problems

later or earlier than you should. And not to get too over analytical about it, but I think you'll see that there is like clear division between these stages where your your psychology shifts a little bit. And we're going to address that as we go to. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So starting in the predating phase, what are the, what are the most important skills? What's the first skill that you want to talk about? Well, the problem we're solving here, right, is would a stranger even consider me? Right? Right. Am I desirable? Are you desirable? Right? Well, anybody ever love me? This is the, this is the problem. This is where we start to fret about those kind of things. Yes. And so, like, is this, the, the question and the issue. you're solving is, is this a plausible romantic option for me? Is this other person, are we,

you know, would I even sit down with them, basically? That's what we're trying to get at, right? Okay, so the skills we're going to review here, um, going to be appearance, confidence, and status signaling, okay? Okay. And we can talk about the merits of these. We'll go over some of the research. We'll get your take as a professional dating coach, former, former professional dating coach. Um, and yeah, we'll have some fun with it here, okay? Okay. Where do you want to go for? I feel like appearance is kind of like. Let's start with appearance. Yeah. Because, you know, that's, maybe it gets, well, I don't know, do you think it's properly rated, overrated, underrated? Yeah. It's very context. This is what I'm talking about is that each of these phases kind of has a

different problem set. And then some things matter more early, some matter more later. Appearance is one of those, though, that, you know, the research anyway says, yeah, it matters. It matters initially. Well, it matters. It matters a lot. Yes. But I think it matters in ways that, like, people assume it, don't assume that it does. I think most people assume that appearance is like a very superficial thing, right? And it's like, are you hot? Are you not? Like, you know, are you

if you're a guy, it's like, are you tall enough? Are you, do you have a six pack? You know, if you're a woman, it's like, you know, are you skinny? Do you have big boobs? I think that's just like one slice of the pie. Like, appearance is a very large pie. And there's a lot of signal, coming back to this idea of signaling theory in terms of sexual selection,

there's a lot of signaling that happens in your appearance that goes far beyond just your physical proportions or actual dimensions. So like everything in this category, this skill, like we are putting everything together. So it's not just your genetic, phenotypal appearance. We're talking about the clothes you're wearing, your hygiene, you're grooming, your body language. Fitness. Yeah. Like how you take care of yourself. your mood, your responsiveness. And, you know, it's just like a lot of things go into how you come across the people or how you show up in a room that have nothing to do with like how chiseled your jawline is or like

what your body fat percentage is. Right. The research, like I said, it does show that like initially this matters a lot. Again, we're using these, it's kind of heuristics and shortcuts early on because we're in these complex environments. Right. That have a lot of uncertainty in them. We have to kind of go on something.

thing, right? And yes, initial appearance cues, all those that you just mentioned, they do matter to some extent. I think maybe this was you who said it at one point. It's like it's more of like you're removing barriers at this point, right? Like if you are sloppily dressed or have bad grooming or whatever it is, those are barriers to you meeting people. Right. Right. It's not necessarily that they're going to help you a ton. They could. They might help you with opportunities, sure. Right. But it's more like you're removing barriers at this point, right? Yeah, I would say that they open doors, but they don't necessarily get people to walk through them. Right.

Right. So if you're a very physically attractive person, yes, you will have more opportunities. Point blank. Right. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to go well or that you're going to actually capitalize on them. I think, too, this is another one of those situations where the curve here is like people mistake, like it's very diminishing returns.

Yeah. It's, I would say it's far more important to. to get the basics in order, than it is to, you know, looks max as the TikTokers call it. What is all about? Okay, I didn't, I came across, yeah, the looks maxing.

I came across this and I don't quite under, well, I mean, I understand it, but. It's particularly, is Gen Z men who are like maximizing their physical appearance. Right, right? So they're in there, like, obsessive about hair and jawline and, you know, their physique and, you know, all sorts of stuff.

They're grooming. I mean, I have to give them, Like a lot of the looks maxers, they are, they've made themselves very, very good looking. And yeah, it matters. Like there's, there is a lot of social benefits, romantic benefits that come from from looking really, really good. Sure. But that being said, it's the most of the advantage just goes from being a slob to like a normal well-kept person. Then it goes from being a normal well-kept person to like super fit or super hot.

Right. I think people vastly overestimate. how much extra that's going to get you. There's also some interesting differences between men and women when it comes to this. So men are typically more attracted to or interested in physical characteristics, right? So the dimensions of her face

and the size of her body and the proportion, hip the waist ratio and all these proportions, that it's much less about the ornamentation. How is she dressed? how she groomed, men put much less emphasis on that. Whereas women, it's the other way around. Women are much more forgiving about physical proportions. They're much less forgiving about how well you're groomed, how well you're dressed, how well you present yourself.

It's almost like women are looking for, I used to tell this to the male clients. I'm like, women just want to know that you like give a shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They just want to know that you, you know, you put effort in. And you're trying and that you care, right? Like, that's actually 80% of it. Yeah. And depending on your social circles or where you live and stuff like that, sometimes a bar's pretty low for that.

It can be. I live in a small city in Colorado. And, hey, if you wear anything but a flannel shirt, you're, hey, you're getting somewhere. Yeah. You know. The other really interesting difference, I think, between men and women is that women, I think there's almost like a certain point where they get turned off by a guy.

Like, if a guy is, like, absolutely. impeccable, like just massive, spends three hours a day in a gym is absolutely impeccable, like massive muscles, like grooming is perfect, you know, it has better skin than she does. I think actually a lot of women get turned off by that because they see that and they're like, wow, he's really into himself. Yeah. He's really high maintenance. Whereas I think men, like, there's not really ever a fall off there.

Like, there's pretty much the hotter she is, the better. Yeah. I saw one interesting study, and I don't know how replicable this will be necessarily, but they've shown, like, they'll show pictures of an attractive woman and different dress style. So it could be she has a dress on, you know, like more formal, all the way up to like business attire. And basically men just that she's hot. Yeah. Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. But like you just said, though, women rating men dressed in different ways, the more like if it's got business attire or some sort of status signaling of some kind,

they generally will rate them more attractive. There have been a couple viral polls on Twitter the last couple years. One was, I remember it was a guy who he showed, it was a before and after picture of his body transformation. And in the before picture, he was already like pretty fit. You know, he had a little bit of a belly, but he wasn't overweight or anything. He was in decent shape. He was fit.

But he was like just very much a normal guy. And then in the after picture, he was shredded. He had a six-pack. He was, like, was super muscular. It was very tan. And it was funny because the poll asked, you know, are you male, female? And then which one do you find more attractive? And it was the men, by and large, judged the after picture is more attractive.

And the women overwhelmingly said the before picture was more attractive. And of course, all the fitness bros lost their fucking mind. They're like, women are liars. This is not true. This can't be true. And it's so funny because I just. I've seen this among my own friends and my female friends. It's pretty consistent.

Like women, it was very interesting watching that thread because a lot of the women were saying that the reason they found the after picture less attractive is they're like, he seems like he's not fun to be around. Like I'm going to have to worry about what I'm going to eat. I'm going to have to worry about like, is he going to want to leave the party at nine o'clock? You know, like whereas like the before picture, like he looks like a fun guy. Right. And that I can have a really good time with. It's just so interesting because, like, in a photo, that never crosses a guy's mind. And there was a similar one that was equally as controversial.

It was a woman. It was two different photos of the same woman. One, she was basically no makeup, very simple outfit, like kind of a Sunday morning going to brunch type vibe. And then the after picture or the second picture was, like, her dialed up to the nine's super exotic dress, tons of makeup. hair done, clearly going out to like some very fancy event. And the men overwhelmingly said that the Sunday morning brunch vibe was like way more attractive to them. She was a beautiful girl in both photos.

But the men found the early morning brunch vibe like way more attractive. And of course, women were losing their mind. They're like, you guys are all lying. This is impossible. Like, do you know how much work it takes to look like that? And I think this comes back to this idea of, uh, intracosexual competition. Ah, right.

Yeah. Because I think the, the, the super jacked, chiseled dude, it's, it's really, it's not so much a signal to the women. It's signal to other men. Ah, yeah. Of dominance. Similarly, I think the woman who's like super dressed up and dolled up, it's not a signal to men.

It's a signal to other women. So, I think that checks out to you just because anecdotally what I see is that, yeah, men will pile on in the comments on online anyway of a guy who's you know maybe post a selfie or something like that and same thing women will pile on women for like any sort of like if they're trying to show off a little bit or something like that online anecdotally i don't know if that's actually true or not but i think i think there's something to do that yeah yeah anecdotally as well from all my time as a dating coach i would say that you do not have to go live inside a gym for a year to be hot the 80-20 here is that if you get good clothes good grooming

good body language, that's, that gets you most of the way there. Like, you can completely transform a person if you put them in a really good outfit, give them a really good haircut, clean up their skin a little bit, you know, and fix their body language and make them a little bit more presentable. Right. Yeah. No, definitely. Yeah. And just some of the, real quick, some of the like research-backed ways to improve your appearance in the dating world, grooming fundamentals like you talked about, like cleanliness and it just demonstrates kind of like internal order too. Like you kind of have your shit together. Clothing fit and coherence is more not the fit than anything really than like extravagant clothing. If you just wear clothes that fit you well. The health signaling like we

talked about if you do have some sort of fitness regimen. A healthy diet too is a longer term one, I think, but that will definitely show up in your appearance as well. One I found out too was interesting was context matching, like dressing for the occasion. Yes. It's not really an appearance thing. Well, it is an appearance thing, but it communicates your social intelligence. Yes. In a way, right? You show up to a first day at a, you know, a bar and you're wearing a three-piece suit as a guy. You're like, okay, dude. You read a book on peacocking or something, I'm sure. But you're also a little bit socially awkward here. Okay. And then just like maintenance habits that just how well you keep all of that up. Those are kind of the research back.

ways anyway to improve your appearance. The other thing I'll add to this is that because we're going to talk about confidence next and confidence is also universally attractive. Very related. When you look good, you feel more confident. Yeah. Yeah. Like everybody knows that. When you're dressed well, when you're feeling fit, when you're, you know, you like how you look. Like you're just going to have more confidence in every room you go into. And that that matters. Right. That comes across. Right. All right. So, Mark, like what are some ways that people can use to actually build real confidence? in this area of their lives. I mean, look, fake it until you make it,

I think it works in the short run. Yeah, like if you just need to get through one night or one date, like, okay, maybe you can work for a little while, but it's not a long-term strategy and it's not something you should be consistently relying on. Nobody likes to hear this answer, but the only consistent way to build confidence

is by building evidence. And you build evidence by getting out there and making things happen. Nobody likes hearing that. Nobody, like, everybody's just like, no, tell me how to be successful. Then I'll be confident. And it's like, no, no, no, no. You go fail a bunch of times.

You realize the world's not ending. You learn a bunch of stuff from it. And then that's what makes you confident. And then that's what makes you successful. So it's, there's no shortcut there. And, yeah, that's just, that's the very unpleasant truth. But I think we all have to live with it. Yeah.

One little thing I'll tack on there too. one of the interesting tip I found as well. You know, one of the best ways to increase your confidence to besides, like, the evidence stuff, is having values clarity. Oh. All goes back to values, right? Like how you work that in there.

Knowing what you want, like knowing what you value, that just reduces approval seeking, right? Which is the opposite of confidence, yeah, essentially. So especially in dating, it's like, I know what I want. I know what I value. Does this other person value it? No. Okay, great.

I'm gone. Or yes. great, I'm around. That's very confident and very attractive. That's true. Yeah, that is true. A bit I found. The last thing I want to talk about is the, there's this concept in psychology called Halo Effect. And it's very interesting. Been observed many, many times that basically the more good looking you are, man or woman, the more other people assume positive things about you. So generally speaking,

more attractive people are perceived to be smarter, more intelligent, more trustworthy. more compassionate, more reliable, all these different things, even if they're not. Right. It's just our snap judgment biological assumption is like, oh, that person's really good looking. They're probably a great person. Yeah. I wonder if there's any truth to that, though, actually, too. You know?

Like, if that's a heuristic we use, I don't know. Anyway, let's not get in that. Yeah, I mean, look, if you take really good care of yourself, like, that's kind of what I mean. That subcommunicates certain traits. Some level of competence, I would say. Yeah, certain traits and behaviors. But yeah, there are a lot of scumbagging people. Yeah, yeah.

And maybe that's another reason, too, like, women are suspicious of that, too. Again, they're more biased to be suspicious of, like, oh, what's going on here? Yeah, why are you working so hard? Yeah, why you work out so much, bro? Are you avoiding something? What are you compensating for?

Yeah. Or like the, you know, the small penis cars. Like, it's, it's like, maybe explain what you mean there, Mark. I know what you mean, but it's like the guy who conspicuously just buys a ridiculous car, either like some like hot rod sports car out of nowhere or like a gigantic truck that is super loud and like annoys the shit out of everybody. Like there's just at a certain point you're like, what do you compensate it for? Yeah, right.

Like what is there's something inside you that you're clearly trying to paper over? It's not communicating confidence, which is our next one. Yes. Okay. So confidence in this arena. Well, there's a fine line, right, between confidence and kind of the overcompensation or narcissism. Narcissism as well. However, you know, people tend to interpret like a calm confidence, grounded behavior. This is kind of a proxy. This is another one of those shortcuts that we use. We see them as more psychologically stable. They're more predictable. And there's less interpersonal risk with a calm, confident person.

Okay? So of course they're going to be more attractive. You're going to want to spend more time around them, right? It shows that even people who appear confident, this is maybe one of the little nuances you have to get into. People who appear confident, even if they're actually not all that competent, are still more attractive than others. And I think this is where like, especially men's dating advice, you're like, fake it until you make it.

And sometimes you just fake it until you fake it and keep faking it. So you kind of, you've got to watch out for that. Importantly, though, overconfidence does backfire. Like people, people can sniff out arrogance too and narcissism. So, you know, you don't want to take it too far. This is an early stage attraction signal more than anything. It does matter throughout the whole dating phase for sure. But it does, you know, communicate a lot of like social value.

If you're if you're confident and competent and follow through things like asking, escalating. You know, if you're confident in that, that's obviously going to benefit you a lot more. Yeah. I feel like there's kind of two aspects of this. One is the external perception of you and your behavior, right? Like if you are bold, taking risks, making loud proclamations seem very self-assured, there's some aspect of that that is just inherently attractive. It gets a lot of attention and it signals a lot of potentially positive traits. The problem is that that is easily faked. So it's confidence is the sort of thing that, if it's not legitimate, like, you're going to turn into a pumpkin at some point. So if you're faking it, like you, yeah, if you're faking it, you can make it for maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe even a year, but at some point the truth is going to show up and you have to be prepared for that. Again, this comes back to why it's just better to be honest about who you are, not only because it prevents you becoming a pumpkin, but also, ironically, the more honest you are about who you are, the more vulnerable you are about your

insecurities, the more confident you become. Because confidence is not about expecting success, it's actually about being comfortable with failure. The second aspect of this, which is actually, I think, psychologically a different thing, but we'll just lump it in the confidence because they're just, they're so interrelated, is your perception of your own self-worth. And we talked about this a little bit in the evolutionary section, but generally speaking, your self-perception is going to have a very large impact on who you pursue, what you find attractive, what you feel like you deserve from the dating market. Generally speaking, people who have a very low perception of themselves, a very low self-worth, they don't expect much. And they are

kind of desperate and needy, and they put up with a lot of bad behavior. And in many ways that that self-perception is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like you believe like, oh, nobody, nobody who's very great is going to love me. So I should just take whatever I can get. So you end up taking whatever you can get. And you never like actually push into higher quality partners. But there's also a very like deep instinctual side of this as well. Again, if you kind of go back to the caveman days, back when we were hunter-gatherer tribes,

you didn't have a whole lot of social status signals. You didn't, no, we didn't have fancy cars and Gucci suits and, you know, Rolex watches and and all this stuff. Like, we didn't have friend counts on Instagram. It, you really, the, one of the only ways that you could accurately perceive somebody's status is how comfortable and calm they were around others, right? Because if you were a high status person in the tribe, then you probably don't have a lot to worry about. Because other people's opinions don't matter a whole bunch to what's your fate, essentially.

Whereas if you're low status, other people's opinions of you matter a lot. You need to keep people happy all the time. And that becomes a very subtle social cue, right? It's a very subtle cue of your potential for resourcefulness. Do other people like you? Are you constantly worried if somebody disagrees with you? Are you looking over your shoulder all the time? Like that is that has that has consequences and so I think we've evolved a way of like unconsciously

gauging that when we interact with somebody. In my book, I called it non-neediness, which is essentially being prioritizing your self-perception over the perception of you that other people have. For men, I define it as kind of the root of all attractive behavior, but I also think it's incredibly important for women as well. Neatiness, I think men are probably a little bit more forgiving of neediness than women are. but I mean, let's put it this way. I think women are just allergic to neediness.

It's just, it's just abysceral. It's an absolute ick factor. Whereas men like don't immediately throw up if a woman is really needy. Like it becomes more of like, okay, well, this sucks, but am I willing to tolerate this because I don't know, she's hot or she takes good care of me or she's really nice or whatever. So really, I think confidence itself, or like the concept of confidence, evolved as a proxy for judging status when there are no other material proxies to judge it by, which brings us to our third factor, our third skill that matters before dating is understanding your social

status, right? We are humans. We are a status-driven species. We, it's not even con- I mean, we, do it consciously, but we also do it unconsciously. We kind of quietly put ourselves in pecking orders and tears. There's kind of an understanding that in certain environments, I'm very high status. And other environments, I'm very low status, right? Like, if I go to a conference about personal growth and development, I'm going to be a very high status person there. If I'm at a auto body car shop and talking to guys about fixing engines, I'm incredibly fucking low status. because I know absolutely nothing about cars. So it's just we all need to have an awareness

of kind of like our relative stature in certain contexts and environments. But status is also attractive. It's also a big driver of what we find appealing in other people. And I think one of the most important and most practical pieces of dating advice is look for partners where you are high status.

Like you're saying, knowing your place kind of, A little bit and that that know your strengths shallow or anything like that but yeah know your strength to know where you do fit in where you do have status Yeah and then like that's the your that's kind of your the box you play in right I used to run into this all the time with yeah with guys like I would have clients you know like Like I had like a nerdy academic guy you know like a professor you know who was a client and and he was like trying to chat girls up in bar he was like a professor of like English literature right and I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like like, dude, don't you go to academic conferences or something? And I'm like, isn't it like 80% women at those conferences? You know, he's like, well, yeah, but like, you know, it's just like it's a work thing.

I'm like, I'm like, don't you think you're going to meet somebody who's going to make you happy there? And oh, by the way, don't you think you are a lot more impressive at an academic conference as a professor at this prestigious university than you are in like a fucking dive bar while like the Patriots game is playing? just like pick your lane, man. Yeah. Now to that point, I guess too, like I learned very quickly, I was not a club guy. I can tell you that. Like, you know, I'm a short dude. You know, I didn't dress flashy or anything like that.

And I was like, okay, this is not my scene. I don't have any status here for sure. And I'm okay with that. And yeah, for me anyway, it was much more like the areas I found status were much slower, low key took a lot more time to develop. up. I think people need to be a little bit more amenable than that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the research does show to that, you know, status. It's actually, it's an early attraction queue for sure, but it's usually evaluated in a more of a long-term context. You know, so people,

you know, they're judging your status very early on. It's very much a cue. It's very salient. But they're translating into how good of a long-term partner might this be. Right. Right. And so, I don't know, I just thought that was kind of interesting, you know, along with the confidence thing too, like somebody being competent, you know, you can build confidence from that and status from that as well. And that seems to be also a kind of a longer term predictor of whether or not somebody sticks around to. But yeah, the biggest impact really is on the longer term context, even though it's a very early signal. Yeah. Yeah. This is one area that I do think the pickup artist advice, I don't want to say it was good, but like I do think it was accurate.

Directionally accurate. It was directionally accurate because the pickup bars, like they had a very good understanding of status. Like everything was kind of optimized for status or at least perceived status. But one of the things that they would talk about is like if you're with a big group of friends, that signals something. Okay. That signals like to bring this up too. Yeah. You have a big social group.

You have a lot of friends. You're a popular person, right? Especially if you have other women around you. Like that's also a signal of like, okay, well, she seems comfortable with them and she seems comfortable with them. You know, so, okay, he's probably. a good guy. There's also, I would say, too, that coming back to body language, subcommunication, there's an aspect of this that just noticing, even if you're, like, let's say you're a young

person, you don't have a whole lot of status in anything because you're fucking young. You haven't done anything yet. There's a lot that's subcommunicated. I would say actually most status is just subcommunicated in the room. Like, do people listen to you? Do your friends stop and ask for your opinion on things? When you make a suggestion, do people take it? Right?

Like there's a lot of just like very subtle cues that happen in normal conversation or normal social environments that can tip people off to like, okay, is this a high status person? Like it comes back to signaling the competence. Like is this somebody that other people listen to? Oh, they seem to all listen to her. She's probably smart. She probably knows what she's doing. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I was going to bring up the social proof thing too, because it does show. some social competence like you're talking about. I always tell people, you know, when they come to me for dating advice, which I'm not, you know, I'm not necessarily, everybody comes to me for it. But I would say, go, you know, expand your social network. Expand your social group. Because yes, I mean, that is a status signal. Yes, it shows your social competence and all of that. But it also, like, it just gets you into contact with more people and probably more people who, again, you're going to, like, you share some sort of overlap in your interest or whatever it is. And you're,

have some status within that world. Yeah. Okay. So that's one of the, that's one of the, I think, the fastest ways or one of the healthiest ways, I would say to increase your status. Well, I do believe in terms of like when you look at where successful couples met, I think meeting through friends has the highest hit rate. I would argue that that, you know, we're kind of talking about this like filtration system.

Yes. Like what is the, what is the filtration system for matching people? I think friend groups is the most efficient human filtration system for matching people who are probably compatible with each other for dating. And it makes sense. It's part of it is it's, you know, if you meet through friends, there's already a certain type of vetting that has happened for things like values, worldview, interests, also for status. There is a social proof component, right? It's like you meet, you meet a girl. You know that like all your friends think she's great.

so like you don't have to sit there and try to figure it out yourself. Okay. So it just it unloads. You kind of outsource a lot of the mental burden that happens when you meet somebody new. I think it's great. And it's it's probably underutilized these days. Yeah, yeah. I've had women tell me they're like one of the hottest things about you is your friends.

You know, and like that you have a friend group and that you are like. You have friends. Yeah, you have friends. The bar is so low. I want, and it kind of is, you know, it kind of is for a lot of people. And it's just on the one hand, sad. But on the other hand, like, yeah, that's a really good, I think, like I said, it's just a healthy way to get some confidence for one. You have a good group around you, some the resilience that comes with it.

And then the status as well. Yeah. Okay, so that's the early dating phase. What do you think some of the pitfalls a lot of people fall into in this, in this phase of dating mark? Two big ones I can see is like you're you are Preparing too little before you go out and preparing too much I was just gonna say that okay I was just gonna say that like it's stereo thunder no no no but you're a hundred You're around you wait too yeah yeah right but you're a hundred percent correct I think there there are some people who don't think about any of this

Right and so they they they're they're they're a mess their life's a mess and then they get out there and they're like I can't meet anybody like nobody likes me like women are horrible men are horrible they're looking for somebody to fix all of that mess. Yes, exactly. So that happens for sure. And then then I think they're like the over optimizers, the people who, like you said, they overprepure or are, you know,

neurotic about it. And I think from what I observe in men's case, it tends to be kind of this over obsession, over money looks, social status, like, oh, I need to have the car first. I need to have a house first. I need to have a higher paying job first. Then I can go meet, try to find the woman I want to spend my life with.

And I think on the woman's side, it's more kind of emotional base. It's like, well, I need to fix myself. I need to figure my stuff out. I need to get better at boundaries. I need to get better at this. I think what both men and women miss is that a lot of this is improved in the relationships. Right. Like, like, my girlfriends have taught me a lot about how to be more attractive.

Because they just show up and they're like, hey, dude, I got you a pair of shoes. Yeah. You should probably start wearing. I'm like, all right, I can take a hint. I get it. I get it. And I started the shower for you, Mark. Yeah.

Yeah. Dude, my wife has got stories. And then, like, on the other side, too, it's, it's like a lot of the ways you become more confident is through. your relationships. A lot of the ways that you do develop competence and knowledge and social proof is through relationships. So

I think don't wait too long to start, but also if all three of these areas are kind of a mess, then you should probably get them in order first. Yeah. Which one would you work on first? Honestly, I would work on appearance first.

Yeah. Like if we're lumping in So if I can just lump in lifestyle with appearance, I would work on that first. So that's not just, you know, clothes, grooming, fitness, all that stuff. It's, I'd also include there like, you know, have a job, have something going on in your life, a hobby, have a couple friends. I think in models, I put all this in one chapter and I call it the fundamentals. Right. And basically what I say is if you don't have the fundamentals, nothing's going to work. and if you have the fundamentals,

then you can at least get into the game. And everything else is, like, a nice to have. The craziest thing about this, too, Drew, is like, this is the easiest stuff to handle. Right. And, like, people gripe about it so much. People gripe about it so much, and they're like, oh, men are so superficial

or, like, women are just, you know, their greedy, money, they're greedy, money gold diggers or whatever. Like, just, like, get your shit together, right? Yeah. Like, it's really, this is the simplest stuff to handle. Right. Like go go take care of yourself build build up your life and even if like and even if it doesn't get you more dates like your life will be better. Like everything else in your life will be better for working on these things. People at work will respect you more.

Your friends will look up to you more. Like it you'll feel more confident everywhere else. Like it just it helps in every part of life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say I think that confidence is the most important one. but I think where you should start is with appearance because that like is downstream.

It creates some momentum. Right. It builds that first confidence. Right. Of like, okay, I can do this. I can improve myself. I do have something going for me. Okay.

Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're ready to start meeting people. Speak for yourself. All right. So we got the predating skills. Let's talk about actually meeting somebody. How do you go about meeting?

the right person. Right. So the problem we're solving here, who do I actually encounter? Right. Who do I around? And how do I get them to go out with me basically, right? Meeting and getting dates. Yeah. That's where we're at. Okay. And I feel like, I feel like this problem is, it's kind of double-sided, right? And on the one side, it's simple initiative and effort. And then on the other side, it's a filtering problem. And I think men mostly experience the initiation or effort problem. But they also have a filtering problem. And women mostly experienced the filtering problem, but they also have an initiation and effort problem. Right. Yeah. So really like who you're actually encountering, how often you're doing that, under what circumstances, all of this is kind of encapsulated in this. Like in models, I think you called it demographics too. Wasn't that part of it? Wasn't that part of this? So demographics is the filtering system. Is the filtering part. Okay. Which I think men underestimate

because they don't think about it a whole often. This perfect example is the one I gave about the, the professor who's like trying to chat up girls in a diet. bar. It's like you're, dude, you're in the wrong, you're searching in the wrong demographics. You know, it's like trying to go sell ice to an Eskimo. Like, they're just not buying my man. So go find the market where you're going to have the highest value. Yeah. And that's kind of where we're going to get into with these skills that we're going to talk about here. Now we're going to be looking at like the digital dating skills is what they're calling them. Which encapsulated us a lot. Yeah, I know, I know. Sorry. No, there's actually, puked in my mouth a little bit. No, there's some

interesting stuff with that too. I think we can kind of dig it to. The more of the nuances with that. Okay. We're also going to talk about flirting. That's fun. It's fun. Reading people too. That's important. All right. Let's start with the digital stuff. Okay. Let's get that out of the way. How about?

Because this is how a lot of people are meeting people today. And this is this is going to have to, you're going to have to kind of carry the section, Drew, because I'm an old man. I'm a boomer. And I've known my wife for an eternity. So I honestly, like the only online dating experience is I have. was a website, little old website called Plenty of Fish.com. Oh, wow. Yeah. Hey, it's still around. Is it? Yeah. Yeah. How about that?

I haven't used dating apps in a while either, but maybe the good news is that they're kind of, they're kind of on their way out. I don't know if they're on their way out, but they're changing a lot. They're struggling and they're changed. They're trying to, they're definitely trying to pivot, it seems. Right. Right. Yeah, like I mentioned in an earlier section, there is a glimmer of hope that some of these dating sites are, or at, and apps are finally like getting the hint that people fucking hate them, you know, like, working. Right, right.

So that's good. I don't know. You know, when I have used dating apps, the thing that I think most people need to understand about them is like, look, this is the way to meet people and like, that's it. Okay. You need to go from connecting and meeting people to seeing them in real life as quickly as possible. That was my whole strategy anyway.

I even got to the point where if I had matched with somebody, I would just mesh with them and be like, hey, I'm not. going to pen pal you. Yeah. Do you want to meet? Right. And that was it. And that actually like sped things up.

Just throwing the hammer down. Just do it. Just do it. Right. That said, you know, some of the research around it. Obviously photos play a huge role in this. An outsized role, I would say, blown out of proportion. You know, online, it's efficient and it can scale well, but there's, it's pretty low resolution.

Yes. Two at the same time. It's low quality information. Low quality information is a good way to put it. Yeah. Another thing, too, is that I think the margin for error is kind of a little bit. You get punished on these platforms if there's even like a little bit of an inconsistency or, you know, the classic case is, oh, you don't look anything like your picture when you show up or you lie on your profile or something. Yeah.

You get punished doubly so in that market for that. So honest signaling, I think, is obviously just a baseline should be anyway, but, you know, we got to say it. Yeah. I don't want to just talk about dating apps, though, too, because like I said, this is changing, this information will change, the platforms will change, the culture around it changes very quickly. AI, I think, too, is having some, like a pretty big effect on this, your AI photos, like touching up photos with AI or writing your profiles. There are services now as well that will, AI will do your text messaging for you. Right. So I think more and more people are going to distrust these platforms more and more. So, but I do want to talk about more of like texting, social media as well, that kind of stuff that we can get into.

Before we get into that, I do want to make one point. So we've talked to, I mean, I talk about it all the time my work. We've talked about it on the podcast many times, but there's a concept known as the paradox of choice, which is that essentially the more options you have, the less satisfied you are with whatever you pick. This is true not just with dating. this is true with everything. You could, you know, basically study shows that if you offer somebody, say, two types of hamburger and they pick one, they'll be pretty satisfied with it. But if you offer them like 10 or 15 types, then they're going to have a much hard.

A, they're going to have a much harder time making a decision. And in B, when they make the decision, they're much more likely to have buyers remorse and question if they pick the right one, if they could have done better, if maybe there's a better one and, you know, whatever. So if you think about that in the case. context of dating, it's a huge problem. And I used to see this all the time with people in New York City when I lived there. Just everybody's like, they've got six more people lined up. So like you said, coming back to, oh, I don't like his shoes and then disqualifying them. Part of that is enabled

by the fact that there is a perception of endless options and abundance. Right. So it's like if you feel like you have endless options or potentially endless options, why tolerate anything wrong with the person? Why settle for any of your criteria? And so people end up in like kind of almost trapped by their own brain a little bit, by like a little, the perceptual biases that are caused, like the appearance of abundance. What they're not realizing is that that perceived abundance is unfiltered, right? When you go out in the real world, when you go out to a party with your friends or a concert or, you know, a book club or whatever, there's a filtering system that is that is already kind of sorting the people who are more likely to be good for you.

And sure, you meet fewer people in the real world, but that's because they're on the other side of the filtration system. Online, there's no filtration system. So you're just barraged by inless low quality options. Right. The second thing I want to say, and this will dovetail into the texting stuff, which you were about to get into. You know, we talked earlier about how so much signal is lost online, right? So things like vocal tonality, facial expressions, body language, attitude, right?

There's also signal that exists online that doesn't exist offline, which, and I think this trips a lot of people up. This is where you see a lot of confusion and people kind of agonize over what to do, right? So time to response. Like how long does it take somebody to wrong? reply to you, right? That's a signal. Length of response. Emogies, right?

Did they get your sarcasm or not? Like there's all these little things that you don't really think about as being part of the communication, but they are part of the communication. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, and also what it is to like online, they highlight different information. This is kind of what you're getting at here. It highlights different information, emphasizes information.

Typically, it's more superficial to online. It compresses that information, exaggerates kind of the ranking and the comparison as well. Right? Because all of that information is right in front of you. It's super easy to rank and compare. And so you're going to rank and compare more readily in that situation. Whereas you're right, when in offline situations, you have richer social cues. It's just fewer opportunities.

Yes. Right. Which me personally, I just think that's the better. environments. Yes. My, my, my, a lot of my friends who would like get burned out on dating apps, I'm like, just get off of them for a little while, slow down. I think that should be your point is to slow down. Like you want that low, that higher resolution slower pace. Right. To, and introduce those frictions that are going to actually maybe spark something. Like we said, maybe not right away, but maybe down the road. And honestly, having a little bit of scarcity is probably

a good thing. It's a good thing. Like, limit yourself. Put a box around. It's really funny because back when I was a dating coach, like the thing that everybody in the industry used to hammer into people's brains was like, abundance, abundance, abundance. Like there's always more fish in the sea. Don't get hung up on one person. Like don't, don't agonize and freak out if like one, one thing doesn't work out. These days, I think some people need to hear the opposite. Yes. Of like, no, you should actually have a little bit of scarcity because then you're invested. Then it's like, then you actually care if it goes well or not. Yeah. But okay, all of that said, I don't want to trash dating apps too much because a lot of people do meet on them.

I have friends who've gotten married. Yeah, they met on dating apps. I think it's a third of marriages. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not like in the past, I've really shit on them a lot. But like I think the thing to take away really is that they, they amplify kind of what's already there.

They amplify your systems that you already have a lot. And sometimes in very negative ways. And so just to be aware of that. And if we go back to, you know, kind of the lifestyle stuff we were talking about earlier, one of the things I think you can do is just build a bit. a better friend network and that can kind of be your dating app. Right. Like that's how I've approached anyway and not everybody's like that.

Yeah. But that's kind of like where where I land on it. But like the other avenues that digital avenues that we use to communicate to now, you know, texting is pretty much everybody does it now. You probably do need to have a little bit of like awareness around texting like you said, but using emojis and using lingo or whatever it is. again, though, I always see these as like, this is how you get from like asking for the date to bringing this real world. Yeah. That's the avenue to use it. That's what it is. It's a tool for that and that's it. Don't try to get so cutesy with it. Don't try to overthink it too much.

I think people see the skill of digital communication as something to be mastered the same way you would master, I don't know, storytelling in person or public speaking. And, yeah, I agree with you. That's the wrong way to look at it. It's a means to an end, right? Like, you're texting, your text game or whatever. It should be optimized to simply move the interaction forward. And there's not really anything else to optimize for it. It's just the worst.

Like, you haven't experienced this because you've never been on. But you go on a dating app and you get into like a two or three day long text conversation asynchronous. you know, between two people you've never met. And then you meet them and you're just like, ah, there's nothing there. Yeah. The worst. It's just, it's off as demoralizing. So again, that's why I go back to like just as quickly as you can get offline and meet them somewhere. It's funny because I've, I've read about, I think we talked about this, you know, with one of the dating experts that we interviewed on the old podcast. But there are a lot of people

now that they actually prolong the text conversations and avoid dating because of what you just said. And they're like, wow, we're having such a great text conversation. I don't want to ruin this. Yeah. I don't want to ruin this. And also it's like texting. It kind of allows you to like fantasize and idealize the other person. You get to fill in all the gaps yourself with like what you want them to be.

As soon as you meet them in person, it's going to just obliterate all of that idealization. Yeah. There's research around that too. That's what they find. That's what they suggest is like the longer these happen, the more idealization that happens. Yeah. With both parties. And yeah, usually doesn't it?

Yeah. So in terms of building this skill, I would say, tell me if you agree. But I would say it's, the goal here is to remove ambiguity, right? So don't try to get too cute. Don't try to like be extra snarky or funny or subtle. Anything that can just be construed is in the wrong way is probably going to be self-defeating in the long run. Like this is what I used to always tell, you know, because even though I never did dating apps, texting was like a huge part of, of, of, of, of, a, of, dating when I was coaching. This is what I always used to tell guys. I was like texting, it's, it's mostly about just not messing up. It's not about, like, you're never going to convince somebody who's not into you to suddenly be into you because you texted them something funny. Perfect text. Right. It's like amazing meme or something. It never happens. Like the, there's only when you're texting somebody that you just met or who's somebody who's just like very newly interested in you, there's almost only downside and very little upside. So as you said, It's just like be as as as as as is blunt communicate as clearly as possible be consistent, right?

Don't make them wait around for three days and or like and then suddenly blast them with like a wall of text out of nowhere and get them offline as soon as possible. Yeah. Yeah. Next one we're going to talk about flirting a little bit, Mark. Flirting gets a little bit of a bad rap sometimes because it's kind of misunderstood as like maybe being a little too aggressive or even. and performative, but I think, I think what you're going to say, anyway, is that it's really just a, it's a way to communicate interest. It could be clearly. It should be clearly, I think. It's a way to communicate interest in like a safe way. Right. That's how I, a healthy form of

flirting. Yeah. I should go, right? Well, I don't know. What's your definition of flirting? I'm not a super great flurter, I wouldn't say. Really? It's not my, not my strong. suit but you know it's funny because I feel like if you are flirting is the type of thing that you can actually overdo yeah very easily and and I find that like people particularly people who are like very witty and clever can overdo it okay they can just spend the whole time trying to make the other person laugh and and you know dropping all these like really clever subtle cues right and then that that actually never really moves things anywhere okay yeah I would say flirting is less about what's being

communicated it's all about what's being sub-communicated. So it's about having kind of a fun, jovial, playful interaction with somebody with the clear intent of sub-communicating to them that you're interested. And there's a lot of different playful ways to do that. And it's obviously a lot of it involves humor. A lot of it involves like misdirection. Sometimes there's kind of a playful teasing aspect to it. I think in Anglo cultures, teasing is a huge part of flirting. What's fascinating that I learned the hard way is that teasing is not seen as cute and flirty in many cultures. Oh, like where? Well, Latin America, for instance. Oh, really? Yeah, if you go down the Latin America and you start teasing a girl,

like, she just gets really sad and she's like, why are you so mean to me? And I'm like, because I like you. So, you know, you learn that the hard way. It's similar, I think, in a lot of Asian cultures, it's very similar. Yeah. So flirting, the teasing, aspect of it is, uh, is quite cultural. But like there is, I would say the thing that's cross-cultural is that there's a playfulness. There, it's definitely like intense, positive vibes. Um, and I would say that there is kind of a playful misdirection that's happening. So it's, it's, you are creating ambiguity or uncertainty in a way that is intentionally supposed to kind of get the other person thinking about you romantically.

Okay. One way to do that is through kind of teasing. So if you're kind of like playfully teasing with somebody, you kind of make fun of them for something, but it's in a really cute, funny way. It creates that mixture of emotion of like, oh, he's kind of being mean to me, but he's also making me laugh. And so that that mixture of emotion kind of creates like a, I guess, a heightened experience. Okay.

And it also is a social signal of. like I'm singling you out. Like I'm giving you special treatment in some way or shape. I think you can kind of do it with like playing with your intentions, right? Like joking around like telling her like, oh my God, you're so funny. I like you so much. And then like 30 seconds later saying like, oh my God, you're unbearable. I can't be around you anymore.

And then like, you know, it's just this constant kind of misdirection. And like push pole. Yeah, push pole is a big part of it. It's almost like you're initiating a game. or they are the person who's interested in you is initiating a game and you have the option to play with them and if you play with them you are signaling

I'm interested. Okay. I like this. And if you don't play with them, then you shut it down. You just don't go along with it and then the subcommunication is like, okay, I'm not interested.

The problem is, is that communication's hard enough already. Yeah, I was just going to say. Subcommunication is like very, very subtle. and difficult for a lot of people. Like this is, I would say good flirting is a high level social skill. Okay. So if you are,

if you don't have great social skills to begin with, flirting's going to be a big struggle. And this was the biggest thing that I ran into when I was a dating coach is that you would get a lot of people who didn't have great social skills to begin with and they are all the dating advice is telling them to be playful

and be ironic and, you know, kind of play games. games with people and joke with people and point out like funny things about them. And these people like they can barely get through a conversation normally, right? And then suddenly they're trying to do all these like high levels of subcommunications. So it was just a disaster. It was like an absolutely utter disaster. So in that sense, I think flirting is a little bit overrated.

What I personally found both with myself and with a lot of clients back in the day is that you can accomplish the same thing. as flirting with kind of a piercing honesty and vulnerability. And it's, and it also has the side effect of not introducing ambiguity into the interaction. Like, I think flirting is fine if both people are charismatic enough to like play the game and understand that they're playing the game and not be too invested in the game as they play it. like kind of see the smoke signals that are happening between them. But a lot of people are not sophisticated enough to understand that. I used to find quite a bit that, well, first of all, there were a lot of people that were just bad at flirting. But also, there are a lot of people that are just kind of compulsively flirt. Like, they don't know how to stop flirting. Yes, if you are

a flirt. Right. And so, like, you, things just kind of never go anywhere because it's just this constant repartee of like battle of wits going on. And it's like, well, no, no, I'm trying to you on a date and they're like, ha ha, you're so funny. Oh, and like making all these references to old jokes. And I'm like, no, no, but I'm asking you on a date. Like, this is not a joke anymore. I'm like actually trying to ask you on a date. So it's like I think it can get overdone in a lot of contacts. This is the other thing that's just different with a lot of other cultures is, you know, again, I think flirting tends to be more of a Western, particularly Anglo or Northern European habit.

a lot of other cultures, they're just direct. They're just, the man tells the woman, you're beautiful. Oh, my God, you're my dream girl. I want to be with you. Like, that's their version of flirting. Or, like, buying her a gift or doing something really cute and romantic for her. Like, that's flirting, I think the whole existence of flirting is the attempt to show interest without overtly showing interest. And I think it's very much born out of a culture that generally like, right?

represses emotions. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I, like I said, I'm not super great at that style of flirting. What I really liked about your work earlier, like when I came across it all those years ago and models and all of that was the like, yeah, you don't have to engage in that if you're just upfront, honest, it accomplishes much of the same thing. It can build a lot of tension and, you know, you put your cards out there and that's what like, that was, that rang very, very true to me. And I think it does for a lot of people. Oh, okay, great. I don't got to like be this like expert conversationalist. Yeah.

It's like slip this joke in here and touch her arm there. And that was, oh God, that was so clarifying for me. Sometimes in, I mean, sometimes you just start feeling like a clown. Like you feel like you're,

you feel like you're just performing. It's a performance. That's what I'm saying. At the top, I was like, like a lot of people think of it as performance. Yeah. And that's what gets you into trouble.

Yeah. It's like, oh, you can just cut all that bullshit out. There's a form of flirting where it's just like, hey, I like you. Yeah. What's your name? You're cute.

Yeah. Right. Totally. And that's flirting. You know, it's not sophisticated by any means, but it's effective. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure. I also think, last thing I'll say, too, is, I think flirting is, it's definitely an 80-20 thing. Like, a little bit of flirting goes a long way. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of flirting is probably not doing a whole lot of extra value.

Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. What I figured out, too, is like, when I finally figured out, like, the kind of women who were interested in me and the signals they would give, like, once I figured that, I was like, oh, okay, then I could engage. in that behavior without doing all the performative stuff.

So there's some subtleties to it. It's not very much. And then you're getting. Yeah. I think the importance of flirting is simply that you either subcommunicate or directly communicate your interest. Okay. Yeah.

Like as long as they know that you're interested and they find out in a way that like isn't creepy or freaks them out. Yeah. You did your job. Right. And for that exact reason, I didn't find a whole lot of like really good advice on how to get better at flirting because it's kind of one of those things that it's a personality thing.

sure you could probably get better at it with some practice, but it's, there's probably a diminishing return to it rather than just still in your intent. The old advice around that back in the day was comedy classes and improv classes. Yeah, right. And it's, I mean, sure. Like, if you really want to be like the funny guy. Take time to go with like sign up for a lot of guys did. I know.

A lot of guys did. I'm like, get a life, guys. Come on. In their defense, I do think improv comedy, It's a great skill. Don't give me wrong. There's a lot of great social and verbal skills that come with it. Okay, okay.

But yeah, that being said, I just think it's, this is, it's another example of like how a lot of the pickup artist stuff just over indexed on something that's really fundamentally tactical. Right. And on the women's side too, you know, the flirtation is generally taught as like being hard to get. Right. It's like, okay, you like give them a little bit of interest. and then back off. And then you give him a little bit more and then you back off again

and you kind of keep him like coming towards you. And it's like this game or this dance that you play with him. And like, yeah, sure. That does build sexual tension. And sure, like if a guy is insecure and really, really desperate for your interest and affection,

yeah, he's going to keep jumping through those hoops. But is that what you want? Is that really what you want? Is that the relationship you want? on is a is like a guy that you constantly have to test and he constantly has to prove himself to you. Like that's just, that sounds like an awful relationship. It's just so much cleaner and easier to to just state what you feel. Yeah. I'm just realizing as you're talking about this, the whole Anglo thing and this culture thing, like when I did find like your work in this area

and stuff and I was like a big revelation for me, it didn't have to be, you know, it was, it's just it's so simple, but it's so effective. And I, it was just, I don't know why. You don't have to complicate this area so much. That's what I'm saying. You really don't. Dating can actually be extremely simple. And it's honesty, not only on the male side when you initiate, but also on the female side of just like how you're feeling. Like it just, I think, I think women worry a lot about, you know, is he going to be sad? Is he going to be upset? And again, I understand. because there's, you know, a minority of guys are just, they're not going to handle it. And they're going to be awful and shitty.

And yeah. But by and large, like, you need to state how you feel. Like, if you're into it, just say it. If you're not into it, say it. And, um, and yeah, a lot of people will be kind of taken aback at first. But ultimately, like, the secure, confident, good people, uh, will, respond positively. That gets us into this last skill of this section then too, which is reading people. Now, in the psychological research, it's called interpersonal attunement, but you said,

don't call it that, Drew. Everybody will stop listening if you call it that. So we're calling our reading people. Okay. This is just, you know, basically just your ability, like, can you take a fucking hint more or less for men, especially, right? Where the research shows we're actually really, really bad. Both men and women are pretty bad at actually being able to gauge romantic interest from the opposite sex, right? We're pretty bad about it unless it gets to a certain point, you know, if like once you state your intent, obviously you're there, but just like the, all the other signals that come around this were pretty bad. It's actually. I actually, I don't think that like reading people as a skill, like, you're like, oh, I'm going to like get inside their mind or

anything like that. That's not what I mean by this. It's more just like picking up on a few signals. Honestly, too, more than anything, and you talk about this a lot too, is like getting the hint when she's not interested and just moving on, like assume she's not playing hard to get, right? Or, and women probably just like assume he's just what he's saying is what he's saying to to some degree. I think, though, that the other thing is like not not, not, not putting yourself in the position where you need to be read, like that clear communication. More than anything, like this whole like interpersonal attumet is more of a communication. Right.

Like a call for more direct communication. So you don't have to read people. That said, like, yeah, you need to pick up on some social cues. Not obsessing over it, not like getting really super deep into body language or anything like that. But you do need to have some basic social skill around this. Yeah. I mean, I said earlier that, in my opinion, when it comes to date, and romantic relationships.

Intention is more important than what's actually said in most cases. And I think this is about reading intentions. It's like understanding, okay, he said this to me. Why is he saying this? Is he saying it because he's mad, because he's insecure, because he's desperate, because he's horny? Like, what's going on in this person's head? And yeah, you're going to have,

there's going to be a pretty high error rate to that. this, but I do think it's an important skill of just, like, properly gauging when things are going well, when they're not going well. This kind of comes back to just fundamental social skills. But unlike flirting, I think this is a social skill that benefits you in every area of your life. Like being able to read your co-worker's intentions or get a sense of like when your mom is angry or not. A lot of it is just pattern matching behavior or body language context and words. And so I, to me, like, the best way to get good at this is just to simply get as much social exposure as possible. Yes.

Yeah. And it's funny because I look back, you know, I went through. So I was a dating coach for about five years. And before those five years, I mean, I went out. I just partied all the time. I was going out meeting girls, dating, partying four or five nights a week for another four or five years. So I had like a full decade of just being social. almost compulsively.

And I look back at that period and on the one hand, it's like, I wasted a lot of time. There's a lot of wasted time and energy. Had a few too many Yeager bombs. Yeah, definitely drank too much on many occasions. But when I look back at that period,

I feel like this is the skill that I took away from it. Like one of the most important. Like these days, I feel like I can walk into a room and pretty quickly have an intuition. of like... And do you feel like you weren't good at that before? Or you just feel like you got better with it? This is, this is like, like, I'm not really sure if there's, you know, like, some people are just really good at it naturally. Yeah. There is like a personality component to this.

Yes. The way to get better, I agree, is by just socializing more and you're going to have to go through some awkward conversations and awkward situations and yes. But like, yeah, I don't know. Do you feel like you weren't real good at this before? I feel like I've always been fairly sufficient at this. I think it was decent at it. Yeah. I don't think I was ever bad. Yeah. But I do think I went, I probably went from like okay to very good at it. Okay. I do feel like now I'm like better than the vast majority of people like just reading the situation or reading people's intentions and kind of understanding what's going on with them. And I do think a lot of that came just from all of this experience. But yeah, some of it, what's interesting too is I actually have never looked

if there's research on this, but I've, like, read it in many places, and I've talked to a number of children of abusive parents. Typically, people who come from, like, a very dysfunctional home with alcoholic parents, drug-addicted parents, physically abusive parents, they are often excellent at this. They're, like, masters at it. Oh, okay, yeah. They just have this unbelievably uncanny gut intuition of, like, they can look at a person in a, immediately know what they're feeling and thinking. And it develops as a like a survival mechanism. And I've come across it in like, you know, various kind of like family systems books and books around addiction and stuff. But I've also just talked to people. Like I remember this was one of the

things that, um, that Will Smith said to, you know, his father was an abusive alcoholic. And he said that he really thought that his ability to empathize and intuit people and emotion. like really came from that because he could he said that he could tell by the way his father closed the door and put down his keys he could tell whether he was Happy sad drunk sober You know gonna be nice gonna be an asshole just by putting down his key just by just by just by closing the door and putting down his keys He already knew he's like okay. This is gonna be a long night Wow Again like the What I said before one of the best

Dating pieces of advice that I have is just getting a good social life and this is like the this is like the Here's another benefit. Another example. Yeah, you get really good at understanding people. He's socially attuned. Again, if you're not a super social person, that might be painful up front, but it's going to be worth it in the long run. Okay, so we've went through those three skills. What about Mark, the part where, like, asking for the date, getting the date.

Okay. So this is like, you're meeting the people. You're talking to them. You're reading them. You're flirting with them. Right. Get in the date. What do you do?

You say, do you want to go on a date with me? I really not right. Do you know how long it took me to me? to figure this out. I was like, oh, hey, you want to get dinner? You want to get coffee? Oh my God, it's not hard. I know, right.

We'll never complicate that too, don't we? It's simple, but difficult. That's actually different. It's not complicated, but it is hard. Right. Because it's emotionally hard. But because it's emotionally hard, people want to make it complicated. It's the same with, like, guys, you know, approaching a girl, like introducing themselves

to a girl. I remember I used to have clients actually get angry with me because, you know, they, I'd take him out, we'd go to a bar or a cafe or something, and there'd be a cute girl, and I'd be like, okay, cool, like, go talk to her. And he'd be like, but, but, but what do I say? And I'm like, say, hi, my name's David. They're like, I can't say that. What are you talking about? Like, what else are you going to, he's like, I've got to have a line. Like, you know, like, you're a coach, you're supposed to give me a line. And I'm like, yeah, your line is, hello, my name is David. Yeah.

And so anyway, I'd have this argument with them. And then they'd walk over and they'd say, hello, my name's David. How are you doing today? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They'd go great. They'd get the girl's number. And then they'd come back and they would be furious. They'd be fucking pissed off.

So pissed. I brought this guy in for this shit. No, like they'd look at me. And they're like, they're like, it was this easy this whole time. They're like, I could have been doing this whole time. Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah.

But we overcomplicate that part of it. I definitely, what, okay, one little thing, though, that's helped me, I think. The last, so my current girlfriend, the way I asked her out, okay? We actually, we met through other friends and we kind of spent, I had a few different times where we hung out. And then I finally asked her out. Well, I caught, I chickened out a little bit. I was going to ask her out. And then she left.

And then I called her. And we were on the same text change. So I had her number earlier. I called her up. And I said, hey, do you want to go get dinner sometime? Yeah. And she's like, wait, what? And I was like, I'm asking you out.

Do you want to go get dinner? Yeah. And she's like, yeah, she was driving. And I was like, I got to, I need to check my schedule on this and that. And she was busy over the next couple weeks. I was like, yeah, no, no problem. Cool. I didn't hear back from her for like an hour or two. And I was like, oh, you know, the wheelers. Yeah. There's yeah. So I texted her. I said, hey, look, like, I would really like to take you out to dinner. If you don't want to, that's totally cool. And I'm not going to be weird about it. Right. So that like just communicated to her like, hey, this guy's probably cool. He's not going to be weird about it. It's not going to be weird about it. It's not going to be weird. If you. I say no. She was just like, she had a lot going on. And so she text back, she said, no, I totally want to go. Let's do that. What I found, though, in lots of situations, and even since I'm in our early, when we're early faces of dating, I would always like, I'm like, hey, you want to go hang out, go to this, go out to dinner, whatever. I'd always give her that little out. Yeah. Be like, if you don't want to her, you're busy or whatever, totally cool. Right. And I meant it.

Yes. And one of the things was is that it gave me kind of like a little bit of like, it set it up like she might say no and that's okay. Yes. Right. And so if you're, if you're guy or girl, you know, in that situation. I think just letting, like, giving somebody that out is like it relieves pressure on both sides. It's a great tactical point. Yeah. And I think especially coming from a man to a woman. Yeah.

Because we talked about how like women, there's always that kind of question of safety hanging over their head. Right. If I tell this guy, no, is he going to flip out? Is he going to get angry? And is he going to start stalking me and following me everywhere? You know, when you, when you give her that. out. It signals so many things. One, it signals like, I'm safe. I'm not going to ruin your life.

Two, it signals like, I'm okay with myself. I'm confident. Like, I don't need this. I like you, but I don't need this, which is by itself sexy and attractive. Right. And then, yeah, it gives yourself clarity because if she doesn't say yes or it's not a fuck yes, like it immediately resolves the situation for you. Yeah. You're like, I gave her the chance to say a clear yes. She didn't say a clear yes. So like, cool.

There's no, there's no decision here. There's no ambiguity. Don't get but heard about it. Like, just move on to the next thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it really does. Even if you don't, even if you are a little anxious about it, just putting that out

there, I don't know, for whatever reason for me, it just, it did like make me okay with it. Yeah. But for whatever it was, I don't know, it's just subcommunic it to myself that I was okay with it, you know? Yeah. Just saying it out loud like, oh, yeah, this is. There's a possibility this might not work, and that's okay.

It's funny because it's the, this kind of comes back to the confidence and the status piece, but it also comes back to the reading piece. So the way I met my wife, you know this story. I was going to ask you to bring this up here. The way I met my wife, she shot me down the first time I met her. So I was in a nightclub in Brazil. She walked in. It's hilarious because in Brazil, the parties started.

at like 1.30 in the morning. Yeah. Me being a dumb gringo, I showed up at 1145 and was the only person in the club. Are you serious? Oh, my God. Oh, that sounds exhausting. It was me and my British friend just standing at the bar for like 45 minutes by ourselves. And but then she was, she was like the first woman to walk in.

And as soon as she walked in, we like locked eye contact. She looked stunning. And I was like, oh, sweet. definitely going to go talk to her. So maybe like 10 or 15 minutes later, I approached her on the dance floor and introduced myself, started talking to her. And she was polite.

But it was one of those like classic, she's being polite, but she's like, doesn't want to be in this conversation type situations. Like lots of one word answers, not making eye contact, looking around the room as she was talking to me, getting distracted frequently.

again, reading people, right? What are the signals? What are the subcommunication? She's like barely engaged in the conversation. She's adding absolutely nothing to it. And I think a lot of men in that situation, they like, they start getting anxious and they're like, I need to win her over.

I need to like prove to her how fucking alpha I am. And I just, years before that I had decided, like I realized that that's just so pointless. Like, why are you trying to convince somebody who's not interested or excited? to be interested and excited. Like, there's just, like, such an awful mindset to have. So after three or four minutes,

uh, I was like, okay, this is going nowhere. So I told her, I said, hey, um, you know, it was great meeting you. I hope you have fun with your friends tonight. And she kind of looked at me. She was like, kind of startled. And, uh, I was like, have a good night.

And I walked away. And it's funny because she later said, she was like, wow, no guy does that. Right. Yeah. She was like, less and less attractive. She was like, I didn't have to say anything. I didn't have to, like, drop a hint.

I didn't have to make up an excuse. I didn't have to pretend to go to the bat. Like, you just, he just noticed and then was like, have a great night and walked off. And I honestly thought I was never, because this is the other funny thing is like, often in the past when I would tell this story, guys would be like, oh, that, oh, that's a great tactic.

You got to like walk away because then that's going to make her want you more. Like, okay, awesome. Like, what's step two, Mark? And I'm like, no, no, no, no. That's no, that's totally beside the point. I walked away genuinely believing I was never going to see her again. And then sure enough, like, I think maybe three or four hours later, literally bumped into her on the dance floor, you know, bumped into somebody behind me. The club got a lot more crowded and bumped into somebody behind me, turned around.

It was her. She was super friendly. She's like, how's your night going? I'm like, oh, now she wants to talk. Well, was she like three caperinas in or whatever, though? She had not had a single drink. Okay, all right. What had happened, though, is that she had been hit on by a really creepy man for, like, the last hour.

Okay. And so suddenly, yeah. And so suddenly she was like, wow, he was really cute. I should have talked to him instead. And so she and I hit it off from there. Yeah. And then like. And now today she's putting up with all your bullshit.

She's still around, still giving one word answers and looking at the ceiling when I talk to her. Yep, yep. And that's the goal. Everybody. There you go. Okay. Speaking of which, speaking of which, this actually segues pretty perfectly into the actual skills of dating. So let's talk about like you've met somebody.

You really like each other. How do you keep it going? Like, how do you keep somebody once you've met them and you've hit it off and it's gone well? And the first skill is trustworthiness. Ah. Trustworthiness is, it's huge for both sexes, but I think it's huge in slightly different ways. But first, I think it's probably worth taking a moment to just kind of explain, like, what is trust?

Like, why, what is trust? What does it mean? And why does it seem so important? So basically, like, when you're dealing with anybody, forget romance for a second, when you're dealing with any other human being, you have no idea what's going through their head. You have no, like, they could go crazy. They could run off the teherstahe.

they could steal all your money. Everything's on the table. Huge amounts of uncertainty. Yes, there's always uncertainty. So, generally speaking, what you look for, what we're wired to look for, is consistency and reliability. Right. Does this person actually do the things that they say they do? Have they actually done the things that they say they've done?

Do they actually feel the things that they say they feel? Are they going to do the thing that they told me they're going to do in the future, right? It's just like making sure your words and actions and emotions line up consistently over and over and over and over again. And part of this, you know, we've been talking on and off about costly signaling throughout this episode, right? The signals are what signal your status and your attractiveness to the other sex. The costliness of that signal determines how trustworthy it is, right? So the fact that one way you could look at me meeting my wife is the fact that I willingly, first of all, I read her social cue correctly. And then I willingly walked away and I did it politely and respectfully.

All of those things are cues about my character, my personality, my intelligence. But the fact that I'm also losing the thing I want, which is to get to know her, that I'm paying a price. some, it is a, like, all of these are costly signals that I am volunteering to her. Also signals to her that it's like, okay, this guy's not bullshitting. Like, he's not faking. He's not pretending to be honest. Like, otherwise, he wouldn't have walked away. The more skin in the game you have, when you are consistent, the more potential downside

there is to your consistency and reliability, the more meaningful it is. And the more people respect it and depend upon it. So that's what. trust is. And if you build that consistency and reliability over a long period of time, you build trust, you know, people start believing, like if you say you feel a certain way, they trust that you feel that way. If you say you're going to do a thing, they trust that you're going to do that thing. The interesting thing about trust, it's like there's a famous quote from Warren Buffett where he said that, he said that it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin. Right. It's exactly the same with trust. You spend years. years and years building trust in somebody, and then all it takes is just one big fuck up, and it's all gone. Right. Like, you're back at square one.

So you have to be very, very careful with trust. I would argue, you know, this episode's not about relationships, period. Like, we're focusing on dating and courtship. But if this was a relationship episode, trust is number one. If you don't have trust, nothing else really works. Right. Everything is just, like, struggling. because people don't know if it's true, right?

If I don't trust you and you say you respect me, then like you saying that means nothing. It has no value. It doesn't add anything to the relationship. So trustworthiness is a, it's a signal of potential long-term value, right? So if you are trustworthy, it signals to the other person of like,

hey, this is somebody I can go a long way with. That it's like I can depend on them. I know that they're going to have my back. I'm not going to have to guess of what they're feeling or thinking. I'm not going to have to play games with them. Things are going to be straightforward. They're going to be simple and they're going to be dependable. I think in terms of how men and women kind of worry about trust,

I think in the case of men, I think a lot of it has to do with fidelity and loyalty. Right. Yes. And I think with women, it has more to do with safety and stability. So it's, I think it's, and again, that's just the generalization. Obviously, like both men and women worry about fidelity and both men and women worry about safety and stability.

But by and large, that's probably the trends use a little bit in both of those directions. So, you know, if you're early in a relationship, let's say you're dating your like first month of a relationship. The thing that the man is probably going to be more sensitive to are things like flirting with other men, hanging out with other men, being touchy-feely with other men. They're going to have very low tolerance for that sort of thing. Whereas I think women are probably going to have much lower tolerance for things like lying instability, changing your mind all the time about things, being super-incorrenties.

consistent, unreliable, not showing up for things, being like an hour and a half late for stuff. You know, it's just my guess is that those are probably huge, huge turnoffs. Yeah. Yeah. And the research backs from almost all that up to. I mean, really that trustworthiness isn't necessarily like a big predictor of initial attraction like you were saying. Yeah.

But it does determine whether or not that attraction survives. Yes. Right. Going down the road, like you said. The interesting thing, too, is very similar to the Warren Buffett. quote like if if signs of untrustworthiness are there early it's that you're done but if as long as you have just one or two of those you can build off of that yeah it just takes a lot longer so it's not like a oh this guy's trustworthy that's super fucking hot or you know whatever but there there's

definitely this is a red flag issue where it's like this can hurt you if you don't have it yes early on yes yeah yeah it can break things it does doesn't necessarily build anything but it breaks things if it's not there. So the way to be more trustworthy is be more consistent, reliable, dependable. Be more trustworthy.

Yeah. Do the things you say you're going to do. I mean, it's essentially it's just integrity. I do think there is a component here that's very interesting, though, which is there's a component

of self-discipline. And again, this kind of comes back to the improving yourself point, right? You know, we do a lot of content around self-discipline. There's a lot of self-discipline content in this space in general. there's a lot of productivity content. There's a lot of content about habits and goals and all this

stuff. I think an aspect of it that people don't consider very often is this, right? Is like, sure, building self-discipline. It helps you get in shape. It helps you do better at work. Helps you build good habits, break bad habits. But it also gives you more capacity for trustworthiness in your relationships, right? Like if you are, if you develop, if you build that discipline muscle in your head where you're able to do hard things consistently, even when you don't feel like doing them, that signals to your partner and to other people you care about in your life that you're dependable, that you're going to be there for them, that you're going to be reliable, that you're not going to just pick up and disappear and ghost them. So it's, I think a lot of the

quote unquote, like personal work that people may be obsess over when they went before wanting to get into a relationship. It's really just like finding that stability and that consistency within themselves. Like, okay, I'm now capable of waking up and doing all the things I need to do every single day. Awesome. Now I, now I can have a partner who can depend on me because they can, they'll see that I'm able to just do all the things I need to do each day. Yeah, yeah. You have to trust yourself before anybody's going to trust you and self-discipline as a way to develop that self-trust that you have to. Yeah. Yeah, totally agree with that. So next skill for keeping a haughty who's into you.

Conversation skills, communication skills. This is super important. This is another one that it's like if we were doing a relationship episode, this would be a huge, huge chapter in that episode. But it's also important in dating, right? Like how well you communicate with the person, how well you express yourself, how well you set expectations and so on. Yeah. I think also like a big component of this too is, you know, in this friendship episode, we talked about reciprocal disclosure. that happens here as well. And there's an amount of like kind of graduated vulnerability,

I think, or some degree of sharing that you need to get comfortable with, especially like in those initial dates that you go on and all of that and being able to talk openly about yourself and express it without like going over the top. Yeah. I think a lot of people miscalibrate this, especially people have held back for a long time. They're going to figure, oh, vulnerability, great. I can just dump all my shit on this person and they'll like me. It's like, no, that's probably actually the wrong way to go about this. So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about like calibrating vulnerability in here too or? Yeah, it's funny. So vulnerability it's actually quite funny because it's been so many years and I'm like so removed from that industry

now. But the big controversial topic that I was associated with when I was in the dating advice industry was I was the first person who really pushed vulnerability in a dating context of like, hey, especially for men. Especially for men. Yeah. Like, hey, you should be going into dates. sharing yourself. You should be expressing insecurities or uncertainties even as early as the first date. You should be openly talking about some of your past failures and failed relationships, even in the first few weeks. These are not taboo. They're not scary topics. If you can learn how to talk about them in a way that's confident and you can own them, that in itself is actually incredibly attractive to the other person. And again, that's also what builds that confidence,

is you build that evidence of like, I can talk about hard things. I can share my vulnerabilities. The world doesn't end. I can own, you know, all my bullshit. The catch with this, though, is that generally if you're going from a life of repressing and holding stuff in to experimenting with vulnerability, there's, there's kind of a pain period that most people go through. And I think if you kind of imagine it as like, there's all this pent up emotion and mess that's been inside your brain festering for years. And as soon as you like uncork it, it just kind of go spewing everywhere. You just like emotionally vomit on the people. And I definitely experienced this when I was when I was young and I started sharing some things, you know, to women I was dating

pretty early, like stuff would, I would start talking about something and then like 20 minutes would go by and I'd just be like ranting about my ex-girlfriend. And I'd be like, oh, I think I overshared. Yeah. Yeah. I actually remember I was on a date with a girl where like I kind of went on one of those rants and she just kind of looked at me and she was like, I think maybe you didn't need to tell me all of that. Right, right. Well, that's a problem, especially I think for men too, because they do hear that and they're like, oh, good, okay, I can be open and share and this and that. Not even if they're like, yeah, some men are like, this is a tactic, but not even that. It's just men who are just like, oh, great, I get a, I get a, I get to share this. I can dump my shit out. I can dump this. And it's like,

well, no, that's not what women mean when they want you to like open up about your emotions necessarily, right? It's tricky. I think this is an area where as a man, you, you get judged much harsher and than women do. Like, women, I think it's, I think women also need to be vulnerable and open up quite a bit. But I think it's there's more, it's socially acceptable for women to open up and be vulnerable. It's socially acceptable for them to kind of probe into insecurities and stuff. And I think in many cases, men like it. Like I know I like women who are very open and vulnerable just because it's like I, I have trouble being open and vulnerable myself. So when I'm, when in the past, when I've dated women who are very good at it, it's just like a relief. I'm like, oh, good. She's like,

she can get the ball rolling and we can start talking about some stuff. But yeah, men, it's a fine line because I think, and this was something that I used to run into a lot in my work, is kind of convincing men that like you can open up about this stuff without being wishy-washy and whiny and like, you know, being a puddle on the floor that she has to step over. You can open up about it and own it and like own and like express it in confidence. Express it in a way that that doesn't display weakness. It actually displays strength. But it is a skill.

And I think it's a skill that men are generally not excited to learn, but there are huge benefits to learning how to do it. I mean, even Brune Brown herself, who's kind of like the queen of vulnerability in this space, you know, she wrote a, there's a whole section, I think, in daring greatly about how men are harshly judged and especially harshly judged by women if they open up too much about their feelings too soon

or if they open up in a way that's like very out of control maybe like they kind of like you know my story when I like ranted for too long about my ex like the problem wasn't that I talked about my ex and the problem wasn't that I was angry about my ex the problem was I lost control right? So if you if you I think the key is that if you lose control while you're expressing the emotion

that's where there's a problem. I was going to say, I think that makes more sense because I was going to say when you present it in a way it's like, hey or can you fix this for me? But that's also a form of

I don't have any control over this, so you need to fix it for me. Yeah. So I think that, yeah, a more fundamental layer is the control. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, I realize this about myself. I realize this is a flaw or something I did or some issue I have, but I'm working on it. Yes.

Right? And I have some sort of handle on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would include in communication skills, I mean, part of it's just being a good conversationalist.

Yeah. Right. You know, good pacing, good storytelling. Oh, yeah. Humor comes in here too. Again, we talk about with flirting. And this too, there's some, there's interesting research around the humor side where women find the production of humor to be, you know, attractive.

Yeah. Where men find when women laugh at their jokes. Attractive, which doesn't surprise me at all. And that is totally one way. Like, I found this out later, but my girlfriend, she laughs at all of my jokes. I found this out later. She laughs at everybody's jokes. Yeah.

I was just like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think women are definitely better at this than men. Yes. And there's a lot of evidence for that. Like, that's not a, and that's not just socialization, although there is a lot of socialization of communication and conversation with women.

But, you know, women develop verbally sooner in life. Little girls are actually generally about one grade ahead of little boys in terms of verbal skills and language skills for, I think, up until puberty. Yeah. I see this with my friend's kids right now. Like they're at the age right now. It's wild. Girls have little girls have like, I forget what the number is. It's like four times as many conversations or three times as many conversations as little boys do.

So it is, I think women are naturally better at a lot of these skills. men are definitely, you know, sometimes dragging their knuckles and, you know, grunting to try to figure out what's going on. But for that reason, I do feel like this is probably a higher leverage skill for men. I think so too. Especially given how many men out there are like fucking terrible at communicating and sharing what they're feeling or thinking. If you are a man who can figure these things out and you can share these things and you can be open about them, I think to high quality, to really smart women, emotionally aware women, it's going to be very, very attractive. Yeah, for sure.

In terms of how to get good at that, vulnerability disclosure, I mean, the conversation skill stuff, like a lot of that comes back to the social interaction, right? The vulnerability piece, I would actually say the best, if you're a man and you just like really struggle to open up and share what you feel and are generally closed off around people and you recognize that it's harming your life. The best thing you can do is therapy, honestly. It's, if anything, just because it is going to allow you to work that muscle of talking about yourself. In a safe environment.

Talking about what you feel. And then if there's any emotional vomit that comes up, you can get it out in a safe environment where you're not going to be judged for it. Yeah. 100% agree with that. Speaking of emotional vomit, that brings us to our next skill. Emotional regulation. It's the ability to manage internal emotional state so that your behavior is stable, clear, and your intentions are clear as well.

Right. Yeah. We did a whole four and a half hour episode on emotional regulation and the importance of it and how to build it and how to improve at it. Let's just say that this kind of, I think this kind of goes hand in hand with the trust piece in terms of, you know, the worse you are at emotional regulation, the more, like, unstable and unpredictable your behavior is going to be and your reactions to things are going to be. So it's like the more you can kind of get a handle on your own emotions and again, maintain control.

The better things are probably going to go for you. Lacking emotional control is very unattractive. Yes. Like obviously, like if you're erratic, if you're prone to anger, if you're prone to outbursts, if you're prone to like really like your anxiety ramps up very, very quickly, obviously that's going to be very unattractive. being able to handle uncertainty, you know, in which dating scenarios have a lot of uncertain situations in them. When you meet somebody new, you don't know them. There's a lot of uncertainty. So being able to kind of just regulate your emotions. Yeah. Right? And being able to to keep a lid on

them in certain situations. Now, that doesn't mean suppression. Yes. Right? Because that's like that's going too far the other way. But the research does show that, you know, people who can't tolerate that uncertainty under escalating anxiety even too. They're seen as just warmer, safer interaction partners and just more attractive. Yeah. Like that's the research just shows that like they've done all sorts of different like watch, have people watch videos, have them interact with people, a confederate who's acting very erratically versus very calm, all that. Yeah. Ten times out of ten they find just the more emotionally regulated person is more attractive. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting like looking at this list of skills that we're going through.

I feel like there are certain skills that tend to find their own level between people, and then there are certain skills that I think are kind of maybe compensating for each other. But like, for instance, I think generally people of similar levels of self-worth and emotional maturity tend to find each other. Like generally speaking, you don't see somebody who has extremely low self-esteem and poor emotional regulation with somebody who has a lot of self-esteem and high emotional regulation, they generally find each other with maybe just different behavioral patterns. Similarly, people of similar status, and there's a lot of data behind this, but people of similar

socioeconomic status and social status tend to pair up more often than not. And people of similar physical attractiveness also tend to pair up together. What's interesting is that some of these, I feel like, you know, often what you'll see is in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, Successful couples is they'll be like one person with really good social skills and one person with not so great social skills You'll often sometimes see like these sorts of skills Compensating for each other like maybe He's got great social skills and she doesn't have great social skills, but she's super emotionally regulated He's like not emotionally regulated at all

So they kind of like are able to balance each other I generally find that people who end up working well together over to long run they are either the same or total opposite at everything. Okay, so like they're complimenting each other and, or like forming one hole or something. Yeah, they're like either reinforcing each other, or they are compensating for each other's flaws. Okay.

Right. So you tend to see very extroverted people matched up with people who are kind of shy and introverted. You often will see like very clean and organized people with people who are like very unorganized. You'll often see very extremely calm people with people who are like very anxious and and uptight and I think a lot of that is just it's kind of therapeutic to like spend most of your time with somebody who is compensating for maybe like one of the more extreme aspects.

Helping to regulate your own nervous system. Yeah. But I think when it comes to actual attractiveness itself, so status. Okay. Confidence and in a track, uh, physical attractiveness. people tend to find match with people at their own level. Okay. If one person is way more attractive or way more confident than the other,

then it's probably going to be an unstable relationship. Okay, okay. Well, okay, so some of the ways you can work on your emotional regulation as it pertains to like dating and attraction specifically. So we have the whole episode on emotions, go back if like, if you have an issue with that. In case you haven't heard enough of Drew and I's bullshit, there's another five hours of it if you want.

I really like that one. I don't know. As it goes, though, for, for, like, dating. And we talked about this in the emotional episode, too, but cognitive reappraisal is, like, you know, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. This is, like, one of the key tools within that framework. Being able to reframe whatever situation you're in, especially in dating, because there's all these ambiguous, uncertain situations that pop up. Yeah. And just being able to reframe it in a way that isn't so catastrophic will help a lot.

It will go a long ways. Somebody didn't call you back. reframe that is they're busy or they got something going on and it either way it's okay right like that's just some simple reframing you can do around that getting good at distress tolerance too just go back to the resilience episode if you still haven't heard enough of us at this point right another another three and a half hours yeah but um just again there's all that uncertainty and just letting that exist without getting too attached to the outcome with it just that practicing that distress tolerance another thing we haven't talked to i mean we've mentioned it a bunch but attachment

based stuff. That, I think, that's obviously underlies a lot of the emotional reactions you have. So if you are somebody who's like having very strong emotions or emotional swings around your dating life, therapy is a good one for that and look into some of the attachment stuff. But those are kind of some of the more, I would say, robustly researched back ways to up your emotional regulation, which it's an incredibly incredibly important skill. It's going to be one of the more important ones we've, we've. covered. Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like some of these skills are just life skills.

And some of them are very specific to dating, but like some of them just have like extremely massively positive outcomes all across your life. And emotional regulation is one of those. I mean, we've covered that in depth on that episode and it's come up in other episodes that it's just like, if you can manage your emotions well, then you're really ahead of the game in a lot of different dimensions. All right. The last skill. Last skill here. Boundaries. So we also did a four our episode on boundaries last month. I will say in this context, you know, let's say you've met somebody, you're dating, you've been on two, three dates. What I would, I would almost describe this less as boundaries and more just as setting expectations. This used to be a big talking point I had back

when I was a coach is I used to just tell guys, I was like, just set expectations. Like, it doesn't matter what you want. It doesn't matter where you are in life. It doesn't matter what you're looking for. As long as you just set expectations, honestly, she'll decide, like, a lot of women will come along with it. Like, they'll decide for themselves, obviously.

But, like, just be open about what you're looking for and what you're willing to accept in a relationship and what you're not. So if you're looking for something very serious and committed, be honest about that. Tell the person that's what you want because you'd rather find out that they're not looking for that in the first minute rather than month two or three. If you are very religious and you really only want to date somebody of the same religion, like be very explicit and upfront about that. Like don't wait to the fourth date to bring that up. Like it's going to cause a lot of fucking problems.

So it's just it's like being very clear like what. We talked earlier about like that list of criteria and like what are the non-negotiables. Be explicit about what your non-negotiables are. And also just be explicit about where you are in life and what you're looking for. Like did you just come out of a long relationship and you're really not looking to settle down anytime soon? Be explicit about that. And yes, some people are going to hear that and they're going to be like, not for me. But that's okay.

It's better for them to leave now than to like have all this drama a month or two for now because they thought that you were going to be serious and you were actually not going to be serious all along. So the side effect of this and doing this early is that it shows you very, very early on who's going to respect your boundaries and expectations and who's not. Right? So if you say like, hey, this is the sort of thing I'm looking for and this is what I'm interested in, and then they lie to you, that's a huge signal, right? that makes that that makes everything crystal clear of like okay i should not be with this person or um if they you know they pretend to go along with it but then they try kind of try to talk

you out of it and then they try to change you like again that's clear behavior now you know who you're dealing with what type of person you're dealing with and and you know to even go the other way i think women struggle with this more than men and and i think it makes sense you know, if we come back to kind of the two competing sexual strategies, you know, with, with men, you're playing the volume game, right? So if you set boundaries and she, she fails to adhere to one of them, like, kind of don't care. Like, it's not, it's not a huge loss. It's like, okay, well, whatever. She sucked. I'll just go meet somebody else. Whereas, like, with women, the primary problem is discernment. And so if you kind of get down, like, a few weeks down the

road with a guy and you try to set a boundary with him, and he's kind of ignoring it. And, and he's kind of ignoring it. You're like, my God, like, this is the best guy I found in months. I really like him. Like, how long am I have to wait for the next one to show up? Maybe let this one slide. Yeah, like, maybe we let it slide this time.

Maybe we see how it goes. Maybe he'll change his mind, you know, and then you get another month in, and it's like, the bad behavior is just getting worse, and you're like, well, maybe I didn't really want what I thought I wanted. And like, it's, you start getting into this sunk cost fallacy that it's like,

okay, well, I've already spent two months with him. Like, I don't want to waste that two months. So, like, let's try to figure this out. Let's try to fix it. Whereas I think with men, it's just kind of like, hey, this is what I want. Take it or leave it. Right, right. I guess that kind of gets into what we talked about in the boundaries episode, too,

which was like the porous versus rigid boundaries. That applies here a little bit to, I think actually a lot of times what people are calling in early dating stages, especially, what people are calling boundaries are really the rules. Like, we talk about difference between. boundaries and rules. Yeah. And, well, I don't know. Like, what do you think about some of the, some of the rules like, you know,

don't call her for three days or like all the rules, like don't act too eager. Don't whatever it is. I don't know. Don't sleep with them until the fourth, the third day, fourth day, whatever it is. You know, those those are rules, right? And we weren't, like we said in the boundaries episode, we're not a real big fan of rules. Yeah. Because it doesn't give the other person agency for one.

Yes. You're just saying this is how it is. And then not only that, but like, you know, know the three-day rule. I don't even know if that's still a thing or not. I don't know if that's still a thing either. But I mean, there was a huge book for women called the rules. Yeah. I think, first of all, I think rules are stupid. Yeah. Because they don't account for just the individuality of each person that you meet. Yes, the insane variation and uncertainty. I do think principles are good. Like, they're very important principles, for instance, trustworthiness and setting expectations and,

you know, putting your, like taking care of yourself first. Like, these are all very valuable principles to follow, but I think rules like, oh, he only texted me twice and I texted him six times, like, I'm not going to talk to it. Like, it's just, it's stupid. It's really stupid. As you know, I play a lot of poker, and there's a saying in poker, which is you don't play the cards, you play the player. And it's, I think it's true in dating too. It's, it's, every situation is unique. Everybody comes from a different context and a background. Everybody, like, the circumstances in which you meet them is different each time. You can't just apply these rules broadly

across every single situation. But that said, you can apply principles. Actually, I can't believe we've gotten this far into this episode without talking about the principle I'm most known for, which is the principle of fuck yes or no. Ah. No, it's a good time to bring it up.

It is a good time to bring it up, especially around boundaries. So I wrote a piece back in 2013. And it actually was inspired by my friend Derek Sivers. So my friend Derek Sivers wrote a small blog post about an idea he called Hell Yeah or No. And he wrote it in the context of business, right? So it's like if you have an investment opportunity or a work opportunity or like a big career change or a big decision around that, if it's not a hell yes, then you shouldn't do it at all.

Just because it's the enthusiasm is such an important component of like what's going to sustain you through all the stress and the hard work and all that. Great concept. I loved it and I was like that kind of applies to dating too, right? Like it's so many at the time, so many of the people that I was talking to, both men and women, were like their biggest pain point was like, well, he kind of likes me, but he's like not really available. but then he like when he shows up he's so wonderful and we have such a good time but then I don't hear from him for like three weeks and what do I do? Like so many questions like this and I was like wow. Hell yeah or no. It's like it perfectly applies for all this. And so I wrote an article called fuck yes or no and basically the principle was is that if it's not a fuck yes, if you're dating somebody and after a certain amount of time like you feel like you've gotten to know them and and both of your intentions are clear. If it's not a fuck yes, then it should just be a no, because you're just wasting each other's time. There's, you're just adding ambiguity and it, you're, you're going to cause more pain and struggle and problems than you're probably going to solve. Similarly, it's important that

if you're dating somebody and they don't feel fuck yes about you, then it should also be a right, right? Because this comes back to that principle of like, why would you try to convince somebody who's not excited about you to be excited about you? Like, you shouldn't have to convince somebody to be excited to be with you. They should just be excited to be with you. And it's so, yeah, if he disappears for three weeks and he doesn't return texts and like it doesn't, I don't care how sweet he is and nice he is when he shows up, it's clearly not a fuck yes.

You're not a priority. He's got other things going on, maybe other women going on. So like, just move on. And similar with guys too. They're like, like, oh, I've been like texting with this girl for a month and like she still hasn't met up with me and like, how do I get her out on a date? I'm like, don't. Like, don't.

She doesn't want to. Obviously, she doesn't fucking want to. She just wants to have a guy to text with. Like, otherwise she would have come out by now. So, like, stop texting her. That's the side of the law of fuck yes or no that people don't like to hear. Because it's just very, they don't like.

Nobody likes to add more rejection into their life. Everybody's trying to like minimize rejection in their life. So to bring it on yourself is just doubly, yeah, worse. And this is just, this is the counterintuitive component of the school of Mark Manson. is that more rejection is good. And in this case, fuck yes or no, it adds another layer of rejection to your life,

but that layer of rejection adds a great amount of clarity. And it is another one of those filtering mechanisms to make sure that the people who come into your life and that you spend your time with are the people that you're excited about that you love spending time with, that you have really good compatibility and chemistry with. One of the proudest things of my career, by the way,

You probably remember this because you were we were working together by this point Because I think I wrote that article the year about a year before you started Yeah, I think so And and I think it was like a couple years later or something But I remember there was like one day we were looking at our Google Analytics of the website And there was all of this traffic from OKCupid and oh yes, I do remember this Like thousands and thousands of people coming from OKCupid and we were like that's so weird I remember we went to the OkCupid website and we were like looking because OkCupid

actually had a great blog at the time and I remember we were going through their blog posts and we're like, this is so strange like where are people coming from? And eventually Philip, who's our tech guru, eventually he figured it out that it was actually coming from people's profiles. People, primarily women, but people

started posting the fuck yes or no article in their profiles and telling people before you message me, read this article. I got a ton of when I started working with you, I got a ton of street Craig because a lot of my friends were like, oh, he's that guy that wrote that one. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, that one, it's still one of my favorites. Yeah. We use it around the office still too. The fuck yes or no. We do. Is this a fuck yes or a fuck no? We do. Like a lot of our business meetings, it's like,

hey, man, it's not a fuck yes. Let's don't do it. But yeah, no, it does. It kind of clarifies that question I was asking about like the rules, right? The rules go out the window when it's, you know, when you're clear about it is this, fuck yes or fuck no. If I'm a fuck yes about somebody

and I'm pretty sure they're a fuck yes about me, I'm not waiting three days to text them. I'm going to text them right now. I'm going to call them. I'm like, you want to come over right now. Totally. And it's going to be fine.

It's not, I'm not going to scare him off or anything like that. So yeah, it cuts through all of that bullshit. Gets around all the like, is this, is this a rule I'm violating or should I be doing this or not? It doesn't matter at that point.

Yeah. All right. We've been through a lot, Drew. You and I, we've been through a lot together. Oh, have we? You weren't supposed to say it like that. So we've gone through all of the science, the evolution, the different incentives, sexual selection, why men and women approach dating differently, what some of the cultural ramifications are, some of the social pressures are.

And then, of course, we got into the three stages of dating, the ten skills. I think it might be useful. Usually we do an 80-20 at the end of the episode to talk through, you know, what's the 20% of the advice in this episode that is going to get you 80% of the result? Maybe the best way to do it this time is to go stage by stage and just pick what you think is the most important. Pick the top skill. Pick the top skill. Like if you could only develop one of the three or four skills, what should you focus on? Okay.

Well, yeah, let's do that. So in the pre-dating phase, we have appearance, confidence and social status. If you had to pick one of those three, which one would you pick? Yeah. I think that of those three, the most important is confidence.

But like we said, I think I'd start with appearance. Yeah. So this is a little bit of a, I'm going to cop out a little bit on this one. But I do think that ultimately confidence is going to like lay the groundwork for all of this. And that's where like you're going to get the most leverage eventually.

But the way that you start with that, I think is probably working on your appearance in all the ways we talked about. Yes. Right. Yeah. Not just fitness, but clothing, hygiene, grooming, style, context, right? You said, you said the umbrella term really is lifestyle. Yeah. I think that's kind of where to focus first. Yeah. I would agree with you. I think confidence is probably the long term most impactful skill of the three. I do think appearance, lifestyle is the high, it's like the low hanging of fruit. It's the sort of thing that you can take somebody and you can improve their dating prospects pretty dramatically, like within a day or two.

Right. If, if you know what you're doing. Right. And in the short run, that's probably the 8024 confidence is like a little bit of a lifestyle overhaul. You look a little bit better. You get a little bit more attention. You go on a couple more dates and you're like, oh, okay, yeah, I'm starting to feel good about myself. Right. Right. Both of us agree, though, that status is, you know, that's probably that comes, that's further down. It's important. Don't give me wrong. I think more though that like the prestige is is more that comes with the other things that's more of a package thing and you're not going to you can't you shouldn't fake it you shouldn't fake that's not something status should be a natural byproduct of just becoming an awesome person yeah right if you if you

handle all the other stuff if you like build yourself into a really cool person status just will naturally happen as a side of itself whereas if you try to fake status then that actually just makes you look very low status. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that will not get you 80% of the way there for sure. No. What about meeting people? Who on this one, this is a, this is a tougher one, I think, because I think flirting is overrated. Yeah. To some extent, or I think it's overcomplicated it's like we talked about, right? Yeah. Like you just state your intent, you can do it directly. That's flirting. Yeah. Right. Um, that actually might be, if, if that's what you're talking about,

to me, that actually might be the highest leverage one as like clear communication of your interest and intent. Right. Right. I think when you're, yeah, meeting people and asking for dates, that's probably it. Okay. Yeah. What do you think?

I definitely agree. And it's funny because it's this like little cop-out redefinition is actually exactly what I did in models because it's when I wrote my book, I was like, look, the conventional flirting is like very inefficient. Yeah. Right. The whole point of flirting is to sub-communicate interest in a way that it like kind of protects yourself or prevents you from being vulnerable. Whereas if you're just willing to be vulnerable,

then it's so much more efficient and it sub-communicates or it signals so much more confidence and status if you are able to just clearly state your interest to somebody and ask them out. So if we are redefining flirting in that way, I 100% agree. You know, the digital communication stuff, it's fine. I personally, I think you feel the same way. I just think just get off the apps. Like get off, get on, get out in the world. Go touch grass, dude. Like, go fucking meet somebody face to face in person. You're probably, yes, it's going to be harder to meet a quantity of people, but your hit rate is going to be so much higher. Yeah. And then reading people, I think that's more of a maintenance skill. You know, that's a, that's a skill that it makes everything else a little bit

easier, but if it's not present, it's like, it's not necessarily going to undermine you or screw you over. Whereas like, if you really aren't able to demonstrate, interest in somebody. If you're not able to communicate that you're attracted to somebody or signal to them that like you have interest in them, whether it's overtly or subtly, yeah, you're just never going to get a date. You're not going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. You're never going to get it. Yeah. So yeah, I agree with you on that one. Yeah. And like clear communication, clear communication of your intent and interest is a very big pillar of models too. Yes. So in terms of going on dates, we have trustworthiness, conversational skills, emotional regulation,

and boundaries. Which one do you pick? I'm... Oh, man. This is actually a hard one. Really? Yeah. I mean, I think they're all very valuable,

but in like very different ways. I think I'm going to go with boundaries. Okay. Because, and part of this is just an assumption, but I kind of assume that like, if you are able to explicitly set expectations and follow through on those expectations and hold the other person accountable,

to those expectations. That in and of itself makes you trustworthy. Yes. So I'm kind of stealing a two for one here. All right. All right. Because I just feel like if you are able to do boundaries well, that kind of a prerequisite of doing boundaries is that you are trustworthy or consistent in some way. It is, yeah, I, oh, well, okay, is it between that and trustworthiness? Is that what you're saying? Between boundaries and trustworthiness. Okay. Why? What do you have? I would go with emotional regulation. Really? I would say, like, in the dating context, being able to navigate all that uncertainty and the ambiguity that is just inherent in early dating, especially, I think that is a skill, boundaries are a close second for me. Yes. And trustworthiness is obviously important, but like I said,

it's really more important for longer term. Right. It doesn't really spark the attraction early on. It just keeps it going. Important. Don't get me wrong. And to be untrustworthy, that's a deal breaker. I get that. Right. So are the other ones, though, too. But emotional regulation, like, if you can't, if you can't show that you are, you have some internal order going on, I just don't think you get any further either.

It's funny because I, to me, emotional regulation is, first of all, there are a lot of crazy people that have plenty of dates. Yeah. To me, it's like emotional. I think they go on a lot of dates because they don't get a lot of second dates. There are also a lot of crazy people in relationship. True. I would agree with you if we're optimizing for happiness.

Let's say we're optimizing for a pleasant dating experience. Okay. Right. Like a dating life that you don't hate. Okay. I would agree with you that. I would upgrade emotional regulation quite a bit. If we're asking ourselves like just what is most effective.

Okay. I feel and again, I'm like I'm struggling with trust and boundaries because I feel like trust it's more of like, it's more important that it's just there. Like, it's not going to solve anything for you, but like if it's not there, then nothing else is going to matter. Whereas with boundaries, I just feel like it sets you up for success. It sets you up for, boundaries is the filtration mechanism that make sure that like, if you find somebody you like and you're aligned, it's going to last.

Without setting those expectations and setting those boundaries, then like it's going to invite a lot of ambiguity and conflict and miscommunication and all that. stuff. That's true. I guess too, being good at boundaries means you're good at emotional regulation too, and there's maybe a little back and forth there, two-way, two-way correlation there. But they are all interrelated. Maybe we just agree to disagree on this. Okay. Yeah. Finally, takeaways. Mine was really when I got into like the differences between the male and female dating advice ecosystems, that was pretty eye-opening. Yeah. I knew some of that already, definitely, and had kind of poked my head in both camps at one point.

But like that for me just it gives me a lot more empathy, I think, for where women are coming from and men too. Like I got into that. I'm like, oh, this is what men are being taught and this is why and this is where it goes off the rails. Yeah. It just, it gives you a lens to look at what's going on right now and kind of make sense of the absolute fucking insanity that we're seeing.

You're like, oh, it's because this is kind of the starting point for both. men and women and then we just took it and ran in opposite directions. Right, right. And so to me, I hope that people take that away from this episode. I really do because I think that gives you a new way to approach dating and you're a little more empathetic. You're going to let people kind of screw up a little bit more, I think. You're going to be a little more forgiving of people and understand that, oh, this is, they're

acting this way because either this is kind of what society has told them or they are, you know, hearing this online or whatever it is. That was a really, it was reinforcing and a little bit eye opening. Yeah. Yeah. And I hope people can take that away. Yeah. I think for me, the biggest takeaway, and this is, it's a thought I've had before, but prepping for this episode, I think it really solidified it for me, which is just this idea that, like, I think people might be expecting too much from their relationships these days.

Oh, yeah. Okay. And reviewing a lot of the research and history of marriage and courtship and, and, uh, in dates. and romance throughout history, and especially understanding more modern history, especially these last few generations and just all the expectations that are tied up and dating relationships. And combine that with just how disrupted the dating markets become from technology, people marrying later, from women's empowerment. Like there's just a lot of things changing very quickly.

And then you're adding just a whole new layer of expectation and hope. to people's relationships on top of that. It just seems like a recipe for disaster. Like something's got to give, right? And I just studying and prepping for this episode, like drove that home for me big time. It also kind of made me think like, like I remember when I was dating my wife

and, you know, she was kind of dropping hints that she wanted to get married. And I actually struggled with it for a few months. And part of it really was kind of, what I was ripping on people for, which was like 80% of her is amazing, but there's like 10, 20% that I'm like, I could kind of do without.

And that, there was a period, you know, when we'd been together for a couple years, like that, it bugged me. Yeah. I was like, well, what if I could do better? Like, what if there's somebody else out there? But then I'd return to the fact that I'm like,

well, yeah, but are you happy? I'm like, yeah, I'm really happy. Like, do you love her? I'm like, yeah, I really love her. Do you want to, do you see yourself, do you see yourself not being happy anytime soon? I'm like, no, not really at all. I'm like, what the fuck is the problem?

You know, and I just, I remember going in that loop for months. And then finally I bit the bullet and propose to her. But it's like these days, I think now that I'm on the other side of it, I look at it and I'm like, yeah, there's 20, 10% of her that I'm like, yeah, don't, not my favorite behavioral trait in her.

And I know she has things that I do that she's not 40% Yeah, probably Like she's not a huge fan of But it's that's fucking normal That's like totally normal And and I

I do think There is something that be said You know I wrote I wrote a social media post A while back that Got shared a lot And it was It was something like I'm probably gonna butcher this

But it was Love is the result of commitment Not the cause You commit to the person And then through that commitment the feelings of love arise as a byproduct. And I have largely found that to be true. I mean, obviously, you don't just want to commit blind to somebody

without knowing who they are or, like, having some sort of chemistry or attraction. But I do think that there's a bit of a passive mindset out there of people just kind of like waiting for lightning the strike or waiting for Prince Charming. They come sweep them off their feet. or like waiting for the bombshell, perfect 10, the walk through the door. And it's just like, it doesn't work that way. Everybody's messy.

Everybody's got issues. Everybody's got, everybody's going to have at least 10, 20% of them that like you could do without. And I think it's just being very realistic and honest about that. And committing to people despite it is probably an underdeveloped skill in the world. I like that because it teases an episode we got coming up. on love. On love.

So stay tuned more for that. Yes, yes, yes. Drew and I are going to get into it. We are. About love. We're actually going to argue about it, which I'm excited about. This would be very interesting. Coming at you.

We're going to take two opposite sides of a philosophical argument about love, and we will let the audience decide. Who got the better of the other? All right. Anything else you want to add before we set all the single people? I think that's it. We've done the pod and I think we've given people I think those are some pretty good tools. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's the thing about dating advice too is that there are tons of resources out there. So it's like if you want to get better at flirting, like there's

plenty of places you can go get better at flirting. If you want to become a better communicator or work on your body language or you know work on your if you want to looks max like there's just so many resources out there to improve these specific things, but hopefully this episode gives you a roadmap of what's actually worth improving and focusing on and what's not. Also, hopefully, it gives you a rubric to look at yourself and kind of ask yourself like, okay, what am I doing well at and what am I struggling with? And then acting accordingly or improving accordingly. So that's it for this episode of Solved. As always, thank you for sticking with us. We will be back in two weeks with that episode about love.

Until then, be sure to download the free PDF guide. It's at Solvpodcast.com slash dating. And if you want to join the community, a group of thousands of people who every single month work through some of the action items and exercises and talk about the content together, you can join that at community.orgatoppodcast.com. And of course, my dating book, Models attract women through honesty. Check it out. It is, it's almost, it's going to be 15 years old.

Oh my God, really? In July. Oh my God. 15 years old. Still holds up, still sells like hotcakes. So check it out. It's available pretty much everywhere. That's it.

Thank you, everybody. We will see you soon. Bye.