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Over the course of the last 13-1 months (Recently found myself in a committed relationship), I essentially committed to grinding on dating apps & making myself more attractive.
I went on about 80 first dates during that period, and I'd say about twice that amount in total dates. I lost about 20KG over the period (and it was definitely a seachange from doing that), revitalized my style and took on a ton of 'practical experience'.
Honestly my biggest piece of advice for a guy trying to date in the modern sphere aren't super complicated. Firstly, Lose weight/Hit the gym, it'll massively expand your pool of potential matches. I'll admit I was an outsized beneficiary of doing this, as my baseline characteristics (6'4, White, blonde, muscular, ex-athlete, medium-autistic, symmetrical, 'good job') were all things I was somewhat wasting by being below the minimum level for consideration via obesity. It's way easier to operate in the space when matches & leads aren't scarce, especially as it means you can afford to experiment, build your skillset, and girls frankly like the aura that a guy isn't super desperate about them in particular to start off with.
The actual playing of games is a weird space. I met my partner on a dating app, but she's also in a very quantitative space (and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that) and we prettymuch immediately clicked together into a space of communication and mutual desire. But I also spent months of my life learning and embodying a complicated normy socio-sexual world of response times, Instagram stories, flexing and jealousy bait.
Increasingly I feel like the whole space has just gotten way out ahead of people, especially as the social media/texting games get so convoluted and byzantine upon themselves and the nature of dating somebody you've met over an app, in which you've got very low potential of just kinda bumping into eachother and rekindling something by happenstance, has combined disastrously with Feminine sexuality being rather 'Ick-driven'. Then again chatting to female friends and having them downright weeping about how some guy who they've left on 'K', heart react and then read in 3 separate texting attempts has stopped talking to them also blows my mind a bit.
It’s supposed to by Byzantine. Part of the game is learning how to play the game, much like most other social networking games. The basic idea is weeding people out, making sure they aren’t tripping alarms about themselves and their suitability. Requiring that a person “figure out” that they’re supposed to be generally healthy tends to weed out those only doing so for dating purposes and who will generally be fit enough to be useful later in marriage. Requiring that a person figure out the cues of texting and other social interaction means that this person knows how to interact in polite society. Even stuff like hobbies having a status factor you need to figure out is kinda a hedge against faking— if I could give you a list of hobbies that you “should” have to win at dating, then everyone simply has those hobbies and doesn’t have the bad hobbies.
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That does a lot for you. A foot shorter and autistic...and one of the better outcomes you could have would be someone three times your weight. Want someone thinner? Good luck with meth heads and crazy motherfuckers in and out of psych wards.
Very aware of my privilege in this regard, my heart bleeds for friends who don't have the same combination of attributes and I feel kind of bad for not developing my romantic skillset earlier
Yeah. Hopefully you can get them good lawyers and home health aides, if they need them.
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This can't be overstated. Men in Anglo countries are largely sold a bill of goods about how to attract women. Appearance is massively more important than is generally communicated. When you ask a woman what attracts them to a man, they don't answer the question honestly. What they tell you is what criteria they use to differentiate between men they are already attracted to. The good news is its really not a mystery. Height, physical fitness, being neurotypical, and being white are the biggest attractors in western countries. (female mate selection is the last bastion of full blown base racism and will never not be) Don't panic if you don't fit the immutable ones like height and race, we all do the best with what we have. Try not to dress like an idiot either; i categorize this one under 'neurotypical'. Once you've made yourself the most attractive version of you, learn to notice indications of interest from women. They are subtle, but when they are into you and you know what to look for its obvious.
Finally, looking for someone can't be your primary motive in life. The Sigma male people take this to an extreme but they are fundamentally correct. Worry about you first. Internalize the reality that you might not meet someone, and that's fine.
Scott, from the Fourth Meditation on Creepiness:
It is not mean. It IS A FEATURE, not a bug.
You've been, as the term is nowadays, RLHF'd.
"As an AI (Autistic Inchling), I cannot have decent relationships nor deserve to"
I mean. Be remarkable, or decide where you want the ambulances. It is that simple. This has always been the way of the world for unattractive people, men and women. The women are just the ambulance patients.
So too, creating real risk is also a feature not a bug. If one autistic manlet in a thousand did hard time or died for being presumptuous...well, that's a feature, not a bug. Remember that the most masculine thing a man can do is to go to war. Real attractive masculinity is made up of shit that makes the red pill look like a Sunday school.
You can probably be happy riding shotgun in ambulances with your partner as the patient. Beats being the patient.
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But the purpose of that feature is mean.
How so? Unattractive people are expected to know their place. Men and women.
And any form of "_____ should know their place" is mean.
This is an application of a more general principle: "If you find yourself advocating things which would not seem incongruous coming from the villains in a young-adult dystopian novel, step back and take a long look in the mirror."
I mean. I consider myself unattractive, for what it is worth. Or, I once was. The thing the disability theorists call desexualization applies to an awful lot of things. I'm not even all that sure that it is a bad thing, although I will say that this idea is rather mean and that the process could be done in a much kinder way if we had celibate life paths. The reason I'm not that sure desexualization is all that bad is because I believe that there's a small but significant chunk of the population that does not make good partners. Much of this is no one's fault: the schizophrenic that can't hold down a job might have been a kind, caring Boy Scout before his first psychotic break freshman year at Ohio State. I will concede that the feature is mean, or at the very least kind of ugly - but I do not know if this is the least bad way to deal with this shit in a modern, Western society.
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