My sense is time and place. Not settling for one while waiting for the other. Wanting both dependent on time and place.
There are horny men and women who go to certain bars that they know are frequented by those interested in an uncomplicated several hours of decent sex and who go there hoping to find someone attractive enough to them who finds them attractive enough. They present themselves accordingly. There are online apps that have reputations for the same.
These same people may at different times or even at the same time agree to meet someone through relatives and friends or via house of worship with a longer term relationship in mind. Or use an app with a different reputation for meeting people.
One my adult sons has shared how has used both sorts of apps in today’s world, meeting hook up partners when he was otherwise unattached and meeting his now committed partner (and he knows how lucky he is to have her chose him) via a different one.
Do people present themselves differently in those different contexts? Very likely so. They think of the audience and they are selling themselves. Not simplistic rules, maybe just by trying to put themselves in the other person’s head and highlight the aspects of who they are that sells best to that mindset. For some that empathic skill (that many of the best salespeople use all the time) comes naturally. For some it does not, and they may look for coaching, for rules instead: when is eye contact good even if it scares you, and when does it get creepy and scary to the other person even? Really some don’t know.
And they may find people who coach them. Or people who will scam them.
About some peoples’ – those who consider all relationships to be a competition. The rest of us don’t just wind up with ‘scraps from the floor’; we may well getting the best meal, because we get to have relationships with people who aren’t thinking like that.
There may be some natural skew;; but it’s the way it is in large part because many women are afraid to act otherwise: because they’re afraid of being attacked if they let the wrong man get them alone (with no way of being sure who may be the “wrong man”) and/or because they’re afraid of societal censure for being casually sexually active.
Change those things (not easy to do, they’re pretty deeply embedded) and a lot of men would find it easier to get laid. Acting like predators acts to help keep it difficult.
Yes. Which is why, I think, some people get so insistent that there must be rules, that there must be a code, that there must be some secret which if they just knew it would allow them to attract Everybody/Anybody/Generic Human of Desired Gender.
And there isn’t. What’s necessary is to try to put oneself in the individual other person’s head and highlight the aspects of themselves that best mesh with that person – genuine aspects, not faked ones.
But that requires thinking of the other person as an individual. Not as a category. And accepting that what turns one person on may turn another right off – and that the pool of those one can fairly succeed with is the pool of those who are turned on by what you actually have to offer.
But that pool may be a lot larger than the person thinks. Finding an adviser who can help get that across, and help the advised show what they have to offer in a fashion that won’t come across wrong, can indeed be useful. But finding somebody who only reinforces the idea that Women (or Men, for that matter) are a generic category on all of whom one secret Key will work is a serious danger, for multiple reasons – one of which is that it’s exactly that attitude which may be turning most people off.
I could never be sure which rules to apply when. That’s the same flaw that got me when I tried math past Algebra 1. Hell, I can’t maintain eye contact (or focus on anything visually) for very long under the best of circumstances. Even if I knew when to do it I couldn’t. That isn’t to say some type of coaching wouldn’t benefit some people.
Not trying to be argumentative here but some people really don’t have much skill at that.
I’m not labeling them all as being autistic spectrum, but use that as an example. Teaching kids with autism the skill of putting yourself in another individual person’s head is often not even attempted any more. Instead Applied Behavioral Analysis is considered state of the art ( in the US at least) and its goal is to teach the behaviors instead, basically by the rules, by way of conditioned response learning. Less intensely there are social skill training groups for those of the population that explicitly teach rules about eye contact, turn taking, what different gestures and body positions usually signal, appropriate personal space.
You speak as someone who has empathic skills and for whom relating to people by those skills is default. Use those skills to imagine yourself as someone who relatively lacks them. Hungry for relationships romantic and other as well but not understanding how to express it or how to clearly understand what is actually meant in the complicated communication process both verbal and nonverbal.
Easy to take advantage of people like that, and I am sure many of these programs do that. But maybe some actually did similar to the rules based approach of social skills training used for autism with those who just needing coaching? At least one poster here says it did for him anyway.
Empathy I’ve got just fine, in the sense of sympathizing with somebody else’s pain or joy, or mix of those with each other or with other emotions for that matter. Social skills, which are not the same thing, I have learned the hard way, inch by inch and gesture by gesture, “the complicated communication process both verbal and nonverbal”, from the outside, over 70 years. I was entirely incompetent at social skills as a child, and not a hell of a lot better as a teen, though at least by then I was no longer hiding under the teacher’s desk at recess.
I think I understand some of this stuff better than people do who can do it by instinct, because I did have to learn almost all the social signals consciously. (And therefore one of the things I know is that even the right amount of eye contact, for instance, depends on both the individual and the social group.)
I’m not saying some people don’t find it very hard. What I’m saying is that it is not helpful to people who find it hard, is in fact harmful and dangerous to people who find it hard, to encourage them to think that the solution to their difficulty is to find out some secret rule or rules that will magically get others to bend to their will; and to encourage them to think of people of a different gender as a category rather than as individuals – which last is also harmful to the people who are so treated.
There are some of us who would need someone telling us in real time when particular signals are being given. And it’s mostly that one particular subset of signals that I’ve never been able to get. I’m very good at seeing how students react in different situations with different people, which is one reason teachers come to me when deciding which class to put kids in when they’re moving up. I’m good at helping kids find that one area in which they can really excel. I notice the kid who can’t sit still when I’m reading a book to the class but he never takes his eyes off of me. I recognize the “I’m done listening to you” look in people of all ages. In the workplace I get along with pretty much everyone. I may not agree with them, but I listen sympathetically and they know I’m hearing them. I really wish I could help people who suffer like I did for the first 30 years of my life, but honestly I can’t. Standing by the beer keg at a librarian party when someone walked over who was looking for somebody just like me was what did it for me. I never got any better at reading signals, and the anxiety would no doubt still be there if I were trying to date. Making a marriage work has been hard at times, of course. It’s taken a lot of effort from both of us, and my extreme insecurity has come into play at times. I married a patient woman, though.
It sounds like you’re actually very good at reading people. Is your only deficiency not being able to tell when a woman is interested in you?
If so, you might consider reframing how you think of yourself. The truth is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to tell with any certainty when someone is interested in you romantically, unless they’re willing to take the risk of being explicit (e.g. by asking you out and thereby making themselves vulnerable to rejection.) For every guy like you (and my husband, incidentally), who practically have to be dragged by the hair back to a woman’s cave before you figure it out, there are ten guys who are certain that hot chick over there wants to bang them, when really she keeps looking over because she can feel his eyes boring into the back of her head and it’s making her uncomfortable. Trying to ascertain someone’s romantic intentions when they’re trying to maintain plausible deniability is at least as hard as trying to determine whether someone is lying. If there were any obvious “tells,” the person would become aware of them and learn to suppress them.
I think there’s reason why a lot of societies provide a lot of help at getting marriages arranged. Ours may be odd in the extent to which it leaves that mostly up to individuals.
I have plenty of deficiencies, as well of strengths, but when it comes to reading people yes. Lucky for me someone dragged me to her cave back in 1995.
I would also submit that PUA largely apply their “selling” on the car dealership’s lot. That is to say, 90% of it seems focused on bars and nightclubs where a significant percentage of women are also probably there just to hook up with some guy. IOW, Barney Stinson doesn’t sleep with a lot of women because his game is so good. He sleeps with a lot of women because he hits on the sort of women who are looking to get laid by someone like Barney Stinson and will accept the thinnest of pretext to go home with him.
Once out of college I’ll agree that’s likely the case. College-era socializing (in whatever venue) is an interesting mix of overnight meat market and people simultaneously looking for a real relationship. In that mileau a PUA mentality risks being applied in circumstances where the women are not as much, or not as many, looking for the same thing as the PUA man.
I also wonder how much a PUA type might choose to employ the same sorts of tactics on that woman they noticed in the frozen food aisle at the groc store or on Jane from Accounting?
As the women of this thread keep reminding us, their big complaint w the PUA mindset is it’s about treating the target as just that: a target not a human with real feelings and real agency. ISTM that that attitude would be pretty full-time among the men who bought into that stuff. All the more so for the men who thought, rightly or wrongly, that it was working for them.
College and grad school were a dating nightmare for me. That’s when I realized that my problem wasn’t my appearance. I don’t like to use words like disability likely, but I feel like that’s what I had (and likely still have; I was fortunate to finally meet someone who wasn’t totally turned off by my awkwardness and insecurity).
From that Mystery show, it seemed like PUAs have different “game” they run for different situations. “Frozen food aisle game” is different from “nightclub game”.
I would imagine if done effectively, a woman doesn’t recognize it as game. They just see a guy being charming.
As the PUA, you’d certainty want the woman to not notice it’s game. Which of course is easier for the man if the woman hasn’t read Cosmo recently and been clued into the games out there being played in her direction.
I can imagine that for certain men with the right gift of gab and the right ruthless mindset in the right social mileau, these techniques were initially very effective against a naive prey populace to use the ecologist’s terminology.
The problem was that prey populations don’t stay naive for long, and especially not if they can speak, read, & write.
And yes ladies, considering women as prey is disgusting. It’s certainly not my attitude, now or back when I was a young and very frustrated buck. But clearly it was the attitude of the PUA boosters and the PUA adherents we’re talking about. Best IMO to call their spade for what it was. And apparently for some young men, still is.
And it may very well be the major marketing approach taken by those who sold the products, and the mindset of many who used them.
Still I am chagrined to have had deaf ears to some in this thread who used the products, like @Mijin, who have been telling us clearly that there is some meaningful number who used the products without that mindset.
There’s little question that the first striking up a conversation is a very intimidating thing to do. No one can decide that they find you attractive for any other aspect of who you are (reliability whatever) if they decide to not bother to get to know you at all, and see you in a more comfortable state.
I’m no longer convinced that most who used these products were predatory game players looking for scores. I’m guessing more were awkward lonely guys who like many here looked away on first contact, or kept looking to the point of being perceived as creepy, wanting help to get past that first eye contact to hello and conversation, and who were hoping for concrete guidance on how to do it.
And apparently some learned that from these products despite how they were marketed. Enough that they were willing to try and fail without giving up enough to actually have enough experience to really meet people.
Is it intimidating for a man to strike up a conversation with a man?
(Yes, I know it’s intimidating for some people to strike up a conversation with anybody.)
Which is why, as I said earlier, it’s dangerous to have these PUA scammers out there preying on them. Some of them will pick up the attitude along with the advice.
And, of course, to the extent that the attitude is precisely ‘how to get somebody into bed with you who wouldn’t go there if you didn’t use this specific set of tricks’, it’s inherently tainted. Let alone when it starts saying things along the lines of ‘she’ll have to be attracted to you if you do this, she won’t have a choice.’
Advice on ‘how to get a conversation started that may or may not lead to anything else, and why the conversation on its own may be worth having’, and/or advice on ‘how to increase your chances of getting no-strings sex with somebody who’s explicitly looking for the same thing, both of you being honest about it’ would be something else. Whether there was somebody many years back who called that advice on being a ‘pick up artist’ I have no idea. But it clearly isn’t what the term came to mean.
But again, for many people the dichotomy is not between talking to men and talking to women.
It’s between everyday conversations and flirting, which is taken to be something radically different and requiring a different set of skills, primarily “confidence”.
(I would say confidence is important, but “be confident” is still bad advice in isolation, IMO)
I think likely the men who bought the product also often had trouble starting conversations with other unknown men that were not specific task or activity related. Not only flirting. For those other sorts of conversations there are rules that more of us have learned over childhood. We don’t start those conversations by empathy; we follow the social rules we know. Maybe they don’t result in deep connections but they are fine.
Now neither your nor I have actually attended one of these seminars or bought their videos and books. I do however know that how something is advertised is not always what the product is. What is advertised is what the marketing people think will get people through the door.
The person here who has used the product has been telling us that the actual product was in fact not what was the splash on the package but much less flashy basic social skills training (that wouldn’t sell as well as the flash of sex).
I see no reason to disbelieve him despite my preconceptions having initially led me to not accept (or really even hear) what he was telling us.
Confidence is gained by having experienced success. Success is usually achieved after multiple failures.
I therefore argue that confidence isn’t so important. It results.
Being willing to get back up from canvas one more time than you are knocked down was more important.
(Personal vignette: socially I never got to super confident or great at reading cues but in med school freshman year lived in what was called International House which had social mixers and dances to get the various graduate domestic and international students socializing. Went up to two women and asked one to dance. She said no. Asked the woman she had been speaking with. She said yes. Our youngest, the fourth, is in her senior year of college now …)