In the process of apartment hunting, I found it important to lead with my deal-breakers first, so that I don’t waste my time.  I have a few of these: I need to be able to smoke weed, at least in my room; I need to be able to cook at least a few times a week; I need to be able to bring girls back to my room without consideration of other roommates; I need to be able to fit a queen size bed in the room; I need to be in a certain location to make pulling easiest. This is an important lesson for dating too, particularly as it relates to online dating, though it’s talked about in the community pretty extensively. Don’t try to be everything to everyone, figure out what you want, and work toward designing your game to attract that type of person.

In talking with the people, since the competition is so high, you really have to sell the lifestyle that you are looking for, or at least that you think they are looking for. Job stability is an important element in this, as is savings level. Also, how will having you in their life improve their life? These are the questions you need to answer, ideally before they come up. The reason that I bring this up with regards to dating is because it occurs to me that in the past, I have not done a very good job of painting a picture of what a life with me would be like. Part of this is intentional, I generally like to choose interesting things to do on dates so that we have “fun.” Of course, any way you slice it, this is coming from the wrong place. Something that I’ve started doing lately, at least with my 2nd and 3rd dates, is trying to strike a balance between being “awesome guy” and being “chill guy.” More than that, I have been intentionally designing my dates to work with each other as a means to paint a picture of what life with me would be like. Part of that is going super meta and talking about how masculinity and femininity define each other, but part of this is also toning it way down and just strolling around the park bullshitting about nothing in particular. Maybe picking up some food along the way.

To say this another way, don’t oversell yourself. The more normal you seem, at least from a lifestyle perspective, the more she will be into it. Once you have her attracted, once you have her into you, it’s all about selling the lifestyle that you two would have together, at least if you’re looking for a girlfriend. She’s not looking for a party animal for a boyfriend. She’s not looking for a guy who can pick three awesome dates that are super fun and involved. One or two of these thrown in there occasionally are good, because women do want to have “special” nights from time to time, but in general, err on the side of being normal. Always ask yourself, “what would Don Draper do?” Yesterday I basically just walked around the park all day with a girl for a second date. It went pretty long, and ended up turning into grabbing food and watching a movie, but this is just because we were having fun. In planning the date, I had planned on doing some wine drinking with some miracle fruit, which would be fun, but is also a little ridiculous and unnecessary. Along the way, I just decided that it was unnecessary and that coming prepared with a blanket to lie on would be sufficient. Miracle fruit tastings are decidedly not what Draper would do.

Another point along the lines of not overselling yourself, at least on second and later dates, is that silence is okay. In a lot of ways, the more silence you can get away with without it getting boring, the better. If you guys are going to be dating, you will be spending a lot of time together, and she needs to feel comfortable with that silence.

My online game is super dialed in. There is this ridiculous synergy right now between my profile, my pictures, and my email templates. I’m getting a ton of responses these days, and basically have more numbers than I know what to do with. I’m even getting responses from women telling me explicitly that they do not think we are a match, and giving a reason why like that I’m too high energy or overwhelming or whatever. The implication is that they recognize that I am a high value man that many women will like, but I just happen to not be their type. Very interesting stuff.

I’ve been consistently going on 4 dates a week, at least two of which have been consistently new, and one or two of which have been second or later dates. I haven’t sent out new emails in over two weeks now, and can still fill up my schedule at will. When I say fill at will, I mean literally, Monday through Sunday, working around girls schedules. Now obviously I don’t do that, I would drive myself into an early grave with that degree of sleep deprivation, but I’ve done Monday through Friday, and I’ve done Sunday through Tuesday with other plans on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday as well. Needless to say, I’ve basically stopped going out on the weekends. The two or three times I have gone out on the weekend in the last two months, I’ve consistently gotten numbers that turned into dates and/or pulled too, so it’s not even a matter of using online dating as a crutch, I just prefer it.

The reason for my delinquency, other than the obvious “I can” factor, is that I am pretty much determined at this point to get a really awesome girlfriend, at least for the summer. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had a girlfriend, and I’m sort of ready for that again. I did have a quasi summer girlfriend last year, but she was really not up to par so it never got more serious than her being my primary in a multiple relationships scenario. I haven’t had condom free sex since though, and I miss that.

From this experience, I’ve gleaned some new insight into online dating, and women in general, insight that I will share with you now:

1. Women don’t give a shit if you live with your parents as long as you own it. I suppose it’s possible that I might have even better success if I had my own place, but I have yet to detect any noticeable impact of telling a girl I live with my mom and sister on the progress of that seduction. I think that there is definitely value in having your own place from a self esteem perspective, particularly for new guys, but this is just further evidence that if it doesn’t bother you, it won’t bother her. Period.
2. Dating sites stack the deck in favor of successful men, making them even more successful. I have for a long time theorized that a small percentage of men on dating sites were doing on the vast majority of the dates, even more so than in real life. What never occurred to me, however, is that the online dating sites facilitate this. Sure, I knew that updating your profile or pictures gave you a little bit of an edge, they would preferentially display people with new info in their profiles over people with older info. But it’s definitely more than that. Since I’ve started getting this ridiculous level of success though, I’ve been getting way more winks, interests and unsolicited emails from women. One of the reasons I haven’t sent out new emails in a few weeks, in fact, is because I’ve had enough women initiating contact with me throughout the week that it would just be ridiculous to collect even more numbers. And we’re not just talking about one site. Match.com, OkCupid.com and PlentyofFish.com all seem to be preferentially displaying my profile to women; I suspect that it’s because I am getting more responses than other guys. On some level this makes sense. Hot women are the bottleneck for an online dating site, and the more hot women there are on a site, the more men there will be to date them. Presumably, if more women are responding to you, then you are a higher value man, and so more women will want to hear from you.
3. Most women don’t actually go on a lot of online dates. Unless they were just lying to me, which I have no reason to believe is the case, for a high proportion of the women that I am going out with I am their first or second online date. Mind you, I am often going out with these girls two weeks after I’m getting their numbers, so they’ve had plenty of time to go out with other guys. They just haven’t for whatever reason. I think that in our society that stigma still exists to some extent around it, which is why it’s so important that if you’re online dating you just act totally comfortable with it.
4. Most girls have really shitty game. They really don’t know how to get all of the body language right to really make a guy swoon for them. Since I’ve started this rampage, I have encountered 1, count them, 1 girl with good girl game. Even in her case though, she really fucked it up with me by refusing to kiss on the first date, despite sending all of the signals that she wanted it. I’m about 80% confident that she was a synthetic like me, not because there was anything she did that obviously suggested that to be the case, but because she was really just doing EVERYTHING right body language wise. That combined with her stunt at the end refusing to kiss because she doesn’t “do that on first dates” just screams game playing. I’m definitely going to see her again, but the probability of her getting past fuck buddy status is slim to none. Had she gone the opposite route and invited me back to her place rather than rejecting the kiss, she would have been on the fast track to girlfriendhood, potentially displacing the other 15 prospects I have within a matter of weeks.

Last week, my buddy Lance from Honey and Lance sent me a link to this post which he knew I would find interesting and would want to comment on. Reading my comments on the post, I think you’ll get a pretty good sense of my take, so that’s not what I’m going to touch on here. What I instead want to write about is some more meta-ethical points that relate directly back into this post as well as many themes of the blog on which it lives.

The blog post was written by a chick named Rachel Rabbit White, a self proclaimed married bisexual feminist. I should mention that I have a lot more respect for her now than I did when I wrote my first comment, which was an intentionally douchy response to an intentionally douchy article. Despite my tone, she handled herself in a very mature, open minded way that I have a lot of respect for. It doesn’t excuse her blog based on morally bankrupt concepts, but I want to make it clear that the goal of this post is not to be an ad hominem attack, but rather a critical review of some of these concepts.

Yesterday I was walking around central park with a girl and she brought up a tangential topic, namely, morality in dating, and more specifically, what drives human dating behavior in men and women. My response was pretty long, but at the start of the response, I noted that the prevailing scientific theory in biology at the moment is that of evolution by natural selection, and as such, any discussion of human drives, and by extension human ethics, must have its theoretical foundation in evolution to even be on my radar. I don’t want to get into too much debate about what makes something good or bad, but suffice it to say that any model worth considering is going to be rooted in evolution, and as such is going to agree with the rest of this post.

So let’s talk about “fat positive” for a second, because it came up numerous times when I was exploring Rachel’s blog, and it also came up indirectly in a couple of comments below the post, specifically those by Scarlett. For those of you who don’t know what it is, “fat positive” is a movement with the goal of an acceptance of fatness as normal, healthy and attractive. Now, I understand where Rachel is coming from, as she has a history of anorexia, so it’s understandable that she feels like judgment of female beauty contributes to body image issues, and that this is a problem for the world. But here’s the thing: attraction is not a choice, and is largely rooted in biology, much moreso than people are willing to acknowledge in this day and age. Body fat in healthy individuals is tightly regulated in the hypothalamus. Both the urge to overeat and to undereat fall into this category of “tightly regulated,” and the psychological story that our mind tells itself is reverse engineered from the biochemistry of the brain. As such, if someone is overweight, it means that they are unhealthy, in the sense that this regulatory signaling is getting disrupted, so the body chooses to retain excess fat mass because it thinks that this level of fat mass is a much lower, actually healthy level.

From a evolutionary standpoint, it makes a world of sense that an unhealthy physique would be unattractive. It also makes sense that physique would be vastly more important to men than it would be to women. Biologically, a man is capable of impregnating a woman, leaving, and still having his genetics passed onto the next generation, assuming that the woman is physically capable of giving birth and raising the child without dying. So the minimum investment required from a man is about two minutes or less, and evolution will select for men to be attracted to fit women who will be able to raise their child to self-sufficiency. By comparison, the minimum level of investment required of a woman to have her genetics passed on to the next generation is a bare minimum 9 months and more commonly on the order of 13+ years. Since our incentives are so misaligned, it’s no surprise that our mechanisms of attraction would be so different.

These differences are reality, and to judge individuals on these differences is to ignore reality, to fly in the face of it. As such, it is immoral to judge a man for liking hot women, just as it is immoral to judge a woman for liking power, money, word creativity or anything else that women are attracted to. That is why the “fat positive” movement is total bullshit. Being fat is not normal, it’s not healthy, and it’s definitely not attractive. To deny these facts is to deny reality. To criticize someone for choosing to accept reality is immoral. For this reason, the “fat positive” movement is a morally bankrupt movement.

Still with me so far? Great, so let’s go one step deeper. Now, for the most part, I do not blame fat people for being fat, it is not their fault. They were born into a perfect storm of obesity creation, namely a world in which grains are the base of the food pyramid and are subsidized by the government, and dietary animal fats are demonized and replaced by frankenoils created from the subsidized grains. Still, just because it’s not your fault that you’re not fat, doesn’t mean that you should except that you are fat. Accepting mediocrity is to refuse to strive for greatness, which brings me full circle to the Pussification of America.

Earlier in this piece I mentioned that I am going to do my best to keep things agnostic of your beliefs about morality as long as whatever system you believe in has a basis in evolution. Still, I want to make it clear that my belief is that human achievement is good, and to accept mediocrity for yourself is bad. Regardless of whether you agree with this worldview, it is undeniable that the United States of America was founded on this conception of morality. So anything that serves to make America accept mediocrity rather than strive for greatness is something that results in the pussification of our nation. Look, if you want to accept mediocrity for yourself and have that be sanctioned by the government, there are plenty of other countries in the world. America is supposed to be the one safe haven for ambition. At some point, I may write a blog post on this (hint, government needs to get out of the way on most things, the exceptions being public goods, a bare minimum standard of living social safety net, healthcare because it is not a market good, and education because it is the vehicle by which one learns the basic tools required in order to move from poverty into prosperity), but for now, I’ll try to stay on topic.

The Pussification of America needs to be stopped. It needs to be resisted at every turn. This includes derailing the “fat positive” movement. For all of you fatties who protest, check out Robb Wolf’s site or Mark Sisson’s site, a lot of great free information on both, and both have hugely popular books available in all major bookstores. Now you have access to the right information, and losing weight will be stupid easy for you should you choose to do it. If you don’t choose to do it, well, now that you have good information, you are choosing mediocrity for yourself, and I no longer give a shit if I offend you.

Guys, if it isn’t obvious by now, the phone is dead. If you meet girls out and try to call instead of texting, you are shooting yourself in the testicle. The other day I was talking to a friend of mine out in Colorado who is working on some daygame, and he told me that he just had this revelation. It was a shocker to me, because I’d assumed everyone knew this by now, but then when it came up again today I figured someone needed to say it. I was going to qualify the statement by saying that this only goes for women under 30, but in talking with Lance it seems like we’re probably safe generalizing this to a much wider age range.

Unless you are specifically planning to try to pull some David Shade-esque sexual hypnosis over the phone (and you better be advanced as shit before you even attempt that), you should almost never be talking with women you haven’t nailed yet on the phone. And you should be texting girls at the latest the next day (many will text same night and try to get the SNL). If it’s Monday morning and you haven’t talked to a girl you met on Friday night yet, regardless of whether or not Sunday is Easter, 10:1 you’re dealing with a dead lead.

Honestly, to me it runs almost totally counter to every single “rule” in pickup that I’ve ever heard about projecting value through your first email, but I have had a substantially higher percentage success rate with these types of emails than with any other. Of course, not every girl has a dog, so this doesn’t totally scale perfectly, but lately I’ve been testing new ways to incorporate this type of logic into my online dating game. Will report back as I draw conclusions.

Update – Here are a couple of examples from the last week of what I’m talking about (both really hot and both got positive responses):

Subject: Dog Adventures

Body: <Dog’s Name> is quite the world traveler! What breed is she? – Hammer

Subject: Puppy Love

Body: <Dog Breed> are so adorable! I always wanted a dog growing up, but my mom and sister were allergic. How old is she?

Hammer: Little aj = pain in the butt

AJ: What??

Hammer: All this being sick… Very inconvenient

AJ: I know im sorry

Hammer: So selfish of you to put your health ahead of me. Tisk tisk

AJ: O really? Wow! haha

Hammer: Well make sure you get a good night’s sleep tonight, need you healthy for the weekend

AJ: Dude you leave bruises and marks on me!

Hammer: Badges of honor

AJ: To some extent!

My boy Lance over at Honey & Lance wrote a post yesterday that I thought stood in perfect contrast to the Sinn blog post I wrote about yesterday. He talked about how when you fuck up as a man from time to time your girl will naturally prod your masculinity, and how important/hot this dynamic is. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Going through my RSS, I found a post from Jason Savage that really resonated with me as well:

The action of pick-up takes on the tone of manipulation from a sense of lack. The action of seduction takes on a tone of appreciation from a sense of abundance.

That tone of appreciation toward the feminine is exactly what we’re talking about.

Guess it’s been a while, sorry about that. Well, not really, I’ve been busy, been living life, and things are good. Still, given my 5 month hiatus, I’m probably broadcasting this post out into thin air for no one to read.

It looks to me like Sinn has officially gone off the deep end.  From this post:

Lately I have been cutting girls faster than barbers do. Any little thing a girl does that goes against what I’m looking for right now:
Multiple low maintenance relationships with girls who are above the Mythical 8.5 line have real jobs that are in no way related to modeling, the club scene, or acting or performance art I.E The unemployed.
Furthermore at the first sign of a push for commitment, I am going to dump the girl and replace her. I am not interested in committed relationships, semi-committed relationships or anything requiring more investment than every other day phone contact and once a week hangouts.

I’ve always liked Sinn, and he’s been incredibly influential in the development of my game, both directly and indirectly (I found Captain Jack and El Topo’s blogs through his). When I was new to the community I felt like I could relate to him better than anyone else I read, for a variety of reasons; we’re the same age, we have a similar sense of humor, probably like the same types of personalities in women; I imagine that a lot of others feel the same way. Plus, maybe there was a little underlying resentment toward women that he played to.

I imagine that if you are one of my six readers, you probably looked at that post of his and had the same reaction I did, but for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s this: according to this post, Sinn doesn’t want any feminine elements in the women he dates. He wants a man with boobs and a vagina. He wants a warm body to masturbate inside.

Look, I don’t really care about his personal choices. Clearly he still has a lot of personal growth ahead of him, as do we all. But for him to be teaching guys in a self help industry centered around connecting with women, while underneath it all he still hates women, man, I don’t even have the words. All there is to say is that he’s going to seriously fuck some people up. It’s sad because there are so many men who come into this scene with that underlying level of resentment, and they’ll all naturally gravitate toward him. All that will do is mask the hatred, which down the road will undoubtedly blow up in your face.

Women are sexy. Just because a woman is emotionally stable and generally secure doesn’t mean she isn’t still a woman. She still has hormones that fluctuate over the course of the month, she still sees things from a more emotional and less logical perspective. We like this though, because as men we are attracted to women. The fact that she gets mad at us for stuff once in a while just makes the makeup sex that much hotter. Point is, this is all part of the feminine elements of her. This is the part that we love. The body is great, we see it, it makes us hard, we want to be inside it. But we still want to connect, and it’s that feminine side that we connect with. It’s not apparent to me that Sinn is capable of connecting in that way with women, and as such, has no business teaching others how to do it.

The other day Entropy put up a post about how as his pick up skills have improved, he’s started to feel isolated in his dating life, because it becomes more and more difficult for him to find a woman who meets his standards. This post apparently caused a stir of comments, but at the time I wasn’t one of them because this is something I had been feeling for a long time, and it seemed pretty obvious to me.

Improvement in Skills -> More Options -> Better Experiences -> Increase in Number of Dealbreakers for Monogamy

Seems pretty simple, right? Well yesterday Entropy put up another post in response to the comments which made me realize how different the two of us are in our thinking on the subject. Entropy, I love you bud, but I’ve got to call you out. While I have no doubt that Entropy is worlds better than me at pickup, it is clear to me that he still has a long way to go in terms of inner game, or as normal people call it, emotional security.

In the response article, Entropy starts out by saying that he needs a girl who fulfills his emotional needs. This speaks to a core problem with his identity. Why do you have emotional needs? El Topo and I have spent hours on the phone talking about this very topic, and never once has emotional needs come up. Granted, him and I have both been through highly traumatic near death experiences and as a result have a unique appreciation for life, but as far as I’m concerned in order to be “dateable,” you need to have your shit together to the point where you are comfortable being independent. Entropy understands this idea from a validation seeking standpoint, but he doesn’t seem to quite be there yet emotionally (Side note, this could very well be as a result of depression due to his diet, I’m not sure how he’s eating, but he said he lost thirty pounds this year, which means he’s been dieting. For most people, this usually means eating some kind of calorie restricted low fat diet, which as we all know by now, leads to neurotransmitter problems in the brain that cause depression).

The next thing worth addressing is this idea of your reality being different from most peoples’ and that making it hard to find people who understand your reality. This makes sense on a superficial level, but the fact is that it is your job to bring people into your reality and help them understand it. When Steve spends all this time talking about Compliance Patterns and how they can be used to get women emotionally invested in your story, he’s doing it because his goal is to as early in the interaction as possible get a woman to understand his world. This quickly sets the framework for a deep emotional connection.

Entropy talks about celebrities like Brad Pitt having a very small number of options due to their status and women just not understanding the world they live in, which is why they all end up monogamous, but this is just one possible interpretation. Another possible interpretation is that in order to get to that level of fame you have to be desperate for that validation. In many cases, it’s to the point where you suck cocks or take it in the ass to get fame. This goes for both the men and the women. Once they attain that fame, the need for validation doesn’t go away. Would certainly explain Brad Pitt trading up from Jennifer Aniston to Angelina Jolie. I’m not saying that’s why he did it, just that it’s a possibility. Not that I pay very close attention, but I don’t really get the impression that their relationship is very happy. I get the impression that she is kind of in control and they resent each other for it. Maybe it’s why she adopts a million kids and he sleeps around?

An “obsession with physical beauty” is not something to be ashamed of. It is genetic. A man should never apologize for what he is attracted to. There’s a difference between wanting the hottest woman out there to impress other men and wanting the hottest women out there because you are attracted to it. For example, I LOVE Lady Gaga. She is so attractive in every way, not going into it now because I think it deserves a post on its own (I’ll make it happen someday, all it takes is a shot). But I don’t think anyone is putting her looks at a 10. Maybe an 8. Gaga may not be your type, but there are going to be certain girls out there who just do it for you, the thing is that they are rare. It’s just a fact of life.

I think the point is that there are other things that you want from another person, but there is a point which you can get to where there is nothing that you NEED. You keep people in your life because you want them there, not because they fill your gaps ala Rocky Balboa.

A couple of quick notes on things that I have been doing that have been working for me of late, and then I want to go into what I’m terming ‘hot chick game.’ I’ve substantially lowered my energy level in set. On my 1on1 with Steve one of the first things he told me to do was lower my energy level because it was hurting my game. It took me a while, but at this point my default setting isn’t necessarily super high energy off of the opener, which is progress.

I’ve also started talking a lot about masculinity and femininity in set, and basically stealing a lot of the shit that Steve talks about with women, specifically how masculinity brings out femininity and vice versa, and how most people have a fucked up sense of gender identity and as a result struggle with attracting people into their life who they are compatible with. I guess you can call that the cliff notes version, but the takeaway message is always that I know how to act like a man and as a result women always act like women around me. Then I go into hot chick game which stems from the idea that because of the fact that I know how to act like a man, women act with me the way a beta acts with a hot chick.

Flashes of this have been in the community forever, since David D started spouting his cocky funny lines where you assume the girl is trying to pick you up. More recently, I read something about this type of game in “The Adventures of Brad P” where he talks about how he pretends that he is really good looking and everyone treats him as such. I love talking about how it’s hard for me to find a woman who is real with me because they always blindly agree with everything I say, so I appreciate the fact that she has an opinion. I like to talk about how I have to be really careful at the beginning of relationships because women tend to fall a lot harder for me than anyone should, and it always feels like it’s coming from a place of neediness rather than a place of true desire.

The key difference between this and the old David D stuff is that his stuff was supposed to be cocky funny, whereas this stuff is presented in a totally serious way as if this is my actual reality (it is), and these are actually things that I worry about when I’m dating (they are). I think what makes this so effective is the combination of being able to relate to her dating reality, preselection, and a general non-needy, non-clingy attitude about me that is conducive to casual sex. As with everything I do, there are also substantial elements of framing and embedded commands that are probably at play as well. I find Hot Chick Game to be particularly effective on women who have a tendency to date older men, especially so if you start talking about how older men tend to start out being masculine and non-needy but quickly deteriorate into a needy unattractive mess as a result of insecurities about dating younger women.

Happy to answer any questions you guys have about this stuff, as I’m not sure how clear or useful this post has been to this point.