I'm seeing a trend in the replies here of the parent that might show an implicit bias towards a particular feeling of powerlessness in getting sex + companionship. If this is you, then know the following: in most cases, one is able to get an abundance of intimacy [1]. I know this because this was one of my life goals in my mid teens to early twenties. It was my first big achievement in life, for me anyway, I worked hard at it.
Don't believe me? Checkout Sean Stephenson (RIP). If you think he dated the women of his dreams because he's wealthy, my experience suggests it's his charisma. I've learned that a huge part of it can be trained. The funny thing is, no one would call me charismatic, yet, I found my voice and a way to expose my personality in an attractive enough way to the women I want.
I simply know the pain and if I can help other people not experience it, yea that would be an amazing use of my time.
The average woman judges me to be a 6 by looks at best. My target group of women almost never praise me for my physical features but my personality instead.
Judge for youerself: I'm tall, super skinny (most often the skinniest), have a very atypical face, so yea not in the top 1%. It took me 5 years to learn what I wanted to learn. And now I'm now I'm happy in that area of my life. For the past 8 years, I've had no issues related to lack of intimacy.
If you need any dating advice, I'm by far not the best dating coach, and I am by far not the best seducer. But I'm a HN'er so, and I struggled a shit ton with this and learned a lot of it consciously. Also, my peak moments have been borderline insanely awesome. So there's that.
Shoot me an email (see my profile) and I hope I can help a bit, any gender is welcome to email (I've seen some overlap in issues and approaches). In most cases, I've noticed, I can't help [2]. I wish I could share online resources, but it's a bit of a mine field since it really depends on how you learn and how you perceive the world.
Or just do what I did and simply Google "how to get a girlfriend/<word_for_intimate_partner>" and go on a wild adventure that will lead to your future love life. When learning this on your own, remember to be: respectful, full of empathy (both cognitive and affective empathy [3]), playful, confident and kind (preferably, in that order). I know, it's a lot, I never said this would be easy ;-)
[1] Intimacy being defined here as a mix of sex and companionship. Also, I say "most cases", since I know how terrible I was, but I also know that there are people even worse than me. In most cases, these people wouldn't be capable of applying any sort of logical thinking, so I suspect this isn't you.
Also abundance: the feeling of "yep, I'm good :)"
[2] I'm not a coach, just someone who wants to help. What I am struggling with when helping my friends is that: in general my friends didn't dare to experiment enough on their own. In some cases, this was even the case when I was able to give them exact counter evidence, tailored to every whim. So yea, if you at least aspire to want to be able to self-experiment, I might be able to help somewhat. I've done it :D
[3] Cognitive empathy: you're able to understand why someone goes through a certain situation by understanding it logically. Example: someone falls, therefore they must be hurt, therefore they will appreciate help.
Affective empathy: you're able to understand why someone goes through a certain situation by understanding it by feeling their pain. Example: someone falls (you feel it as well), by feeling their pain, you can feel that the person landed hard on his knee and by looking at their face and "feeling" their facial expressions, you feel their are in a huge distress. You now know that you need to calm them down and make sure their knee is cared for.
> My target group of women almost never praise me for my physical features but my personality instead.
Women do this in general because mentioning physical attractiveness among women is taboo. This is why a personality-focused, zero pictures version of Tinder would utterly fail. Do you think women would leap to such an app, finally being able to judge people by their wit and conversation skills and empathy? Of course not. They want photos.
> Judge for youerself: I'm tall, super skinny (most often the skinniest), have a very atypical face, so yea not in the top 1%.
Height gives an enormous advantage. The rest I can't comment on, but I suspect you're underselling yourself. If you're white and have a conventional appearance (even if not chiseled or model like), you're much more acceptable to a woman (and her friends, and her family) than a 5'6" Indian guy.
What I've noticed is that any guy can fall to rock bottom, but not every guy can float to the top. There's a lot of privilege to go around. When people try to take credit for everything in their life, whether it's business/dating/athleticism or whatever, it's just trying to deny privilege and ascribe some fairness to a world that we all know is not. I know I'm privileged in some ways that hot guys are not. I mean Tucker Max is in therapy today.
I know a pretty small Indian/Surinamese guy (used to be a Dutch colony). Surinam is a bit of a melting pot, FYI but his family line has remained relatively purely Indian. In all fairness, he's good looking. What he also has: the best accent and voice tonality I've ever heard. He says it's his biggest strength and most of that is totally teachable. He taught the best Dutch accent I've ever heard entirely himself and he lowered his voice.
So yea, I do have those advantages, but they are overcomeable. It's simply a lot harder. Also, you don't need to rise to the top. One needs to rise to a level that they feel content with, and in most cases that isn't the top.
With that said, I had the advantage of being tall and white. That's true. Not that it mattered, compared to the amount of disadvantages I had, but I do agree that it would be harder as a starting point if those 2 points also would've been against me.
Sean Stephenson is supposed to disprove a repeatedly-demonstrated, aggregate trend? I know a black person who has never experienced racism too.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that you overcame challenges. We all have. I bet 90% of your dating experience is determined by how you were born, not how you have chosen to behave. Your main advice is "be tall, be white." Your post follow the classic formula:
BRO. Bro. Physical attractiveness doesn't matter. I may be a [6'1" white guy / mid-20s female in a large city] but I can confidently tell you that it's entirely possible to be wildly successful on dating sites if you're ugly. It's all about your personality and how funny you are and how kind of a human being you are. You know what's really unattractive? Your INSECURITIES. If you could just be confident then people would be swarming your profile with unsolicted visits and date offers.
I knew this one guy in high school who looked like a shorter and Indian-looking Danny DeVito with tertiary syphillis but he had an amazing demeanor so he bedded one different girl a month every month. Oh what about the other 50 ugly Indian guys? I dunno I only remember this one. I'm sure they must have been successful too.
All the non-white friends that I have are way better seducers than me and are just as happy in their relationships. The vicinity of Amsterdam is pretty multicultural, so any open-minded person ends up with a good chunk of multicultural friends. Currently, I'd say that my friendships are 30% Dutch, 20% international (white) and 50% non-white. They're almost all male though.
My closest friend is non-white and when I met his extended family (all non-white as well), I could tell you that all family members were better seducers than me. That also includes for all the non-white people I have in my own extended family.
This means I'm the worst seducer of all the non-white people I know within my vicinity which basically includes 1.5 families and a few friends. Most of them are better looking than me (it's not that hard), shorter and more socially capable. They all get better results.
And yet, the rhetoric that the winner gets all and therefore you get nothing is simply not true. If you want to work for it, then the winner gets all and you get what you want despite not being the winner.
I've approached over 10000 women. My success rate in attracting them is about 0.1%. I'm more than content with that. People that don't have success and haven't at least done 1000 approaches, they haven't put in the work. It's brutal, for me it was. So a shit ton of motivation is needed.
I've seen a few cases (white only) who did put in the work. All of them had really low intelligence, frankly speaking and I have the suspicion that they required some professional help with that.
Wow. Respect, I guess, but I definitely never had the motivation to approach 10,000 women. That would indeed be brutal as all hell, and it's hard to see women as being worth that sort of trouble.
> and it's hard to see women as being worth that sort of trouble.
I now see it as mining. You're mining for an amazing intimate connection.
This idea doesn't have to pertain to only the intimate realm of human connection, I think it's a good idea to multiple forms of human connections.
It also depends on your background and beliefs. I was 100% convinced I'd die alone as a virgin around the age of 80. So I was willing to do whatever it takes.
It's not hard. The whole "pick-up artist" thing did work. The classic book, by the way, is "Scoremanship", by Frank Grey. He was a salesman who'd had formal sales training, and realized that standard sales techniques could be repurposed for dating. That's less silly than the later stuff like "The Game".
I found it hard, but in all fairness, I haven't used sales tactics that much.
I also didn't do The Game or The Mystery Method. I basically took another dating book's question "how can you find the women of your dreams with just your personality?" and took that as far as I could.
Long story short (for me personally): use assortative mating theory to its fullest and most extreme.
With that said, I have met other people who found it easy. It's definitely not an uncommon experience.
Thanks for the book recommendation! That looks like such an old book (1969!), I'll take a peek.
Don't believe me? Checkout Sean Stephenson (RIP). If you think he dated the women of his dreams because he's wealthy, my experience suggests it's his charisma. I've learned that a huge part of it can be trained. The funny thing is, no one would call me charismatic, yet, I found my voice and a way to expose my personality in an attractive enough way to the women I want.
I simply know the pain and if I can help other people not experience it, yea that would be an amazing use of my time.
The average woman judges me to be a 6 by looks at best. My target group of women almost never praise me for my physical features but my personality instead.
Judge for youerself: I'm tall, super skinny (most often the skinniest), have a very atypical face, so yea not in the top 1%. It took me 5 years to learn what I wanted to learn. And now I'm now I'm happy in that area of my life. For the past 8 years, I've had no issues related to lack of intimacy.
If you need any dating advice, I'm by far not the best dating coach, and I am by far not the best seducer. But I'm a HN'er so, and I struggled a shit ton with this and learned a lot of it consciously. Also, my peak moments have been borderline insanely awesome. So there's that.
Shoot me an email (see my profile) and I hope I can help a bit, any gender is welcome to email (I've seen some overlap in issues and approaches). In most cases, I've noticed, I can't help [2]. I wish I could share online resources, but it's a bit of a mine field since it really depends on how you learn and how you perceive the world.
Or just do what I did and simply Google "how to get a girlfriend/<word_for_intimate_partner>" and go on a wild adventure that will lead to your future love life. When learning this on your own, remember to be: respectful, full of empathy (both cognitive and affective empathy [3]), playful, confident and kind (preferably, in that order). I know, it's a lot, I never said this would be easy ;-)
[1] Intimacy being defined here as a mix of sex and companionship. Also, I say "most cases", since I know how terrible I was, but I also know that there are people even worse than me. In most cases, these people wouldn't be capable of applying any sort of logical thinking, so I suspect this isn't you.
Also abundance: the feeling of "yep, I'm good :)"
[2] I'm not a coach, just someone who wants to help. What I am struggling with when helping my friends is that: in general my friends didn't dare to experiment enough on their own. In some cases, this was even the case when I was able to give them exact counter evidence, tailored to every whim. So yea, if you at least aspire to want to be able to self-experiment, I might be able to help somewhat. I've done it :D
[3] Cognitive empathy: you're able to understand why someone goes through a certain situation by understanding it logically. Example: someone falls, therefore they must be hurt, therefore they will appreciate help.
Affective empathy: you're able to understand why someone goes through a certain situation by understanding it by feeling their pain. Example: someone falls (you feel it as well), by feeling their pain, you can feel that the person landed hard on his knee and by looking at their face and "feeling" their facial expressions, you feel their are in a huge distress. You now know that you need to calm them down and make sure their knee is cared for.
^ These two examples are quite simplictic.