Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

by Mark Manson

The reality of incompatibility defines our entire strategy of dating women. To base our strategy on anything else is inefficient at best and downright damaging at worst. The world is what it is, it’s our job to simply present ourselves as boldly and clearly to it as possible, accept the reactions and move on the opportunities. Any attempt to control the reactions of others or take some kind of power over the reactions you receive is both foolish and illusory.

Rejection exists for a reason — it’s a means to keep people apart who are not good for each other.

Chances are if you’re reading this book, many of the girlfriends or sexual experiences you’ve had with women in the past only happened because she initiated with you. That’s fine. But just going about your life, unless you are extremely good-looking or have a great lifestyle or you manage to meet women through good social contacts, few women are going to initiate with you and the few who do won’t initiate often. In fact, most women, especially

very beautiful women, even if they’re attracted to you, won’t initiate with you. Remember, women tend to be less invested before sex, therefore, they (usually) expect men to initiate in the beginning. There are also strong cultural pressures on women to wait for the man to initiate.

The Friend Zone typically occurs when a man meets a Receptive or Neutral woman but never makes a move or expresses his interest. Instead, he behaves pleasantly, like a good friend would.

You must indicate some sort of sexual interest early on. Otherwise, the longer you wait, the harder it gets and the more likely she will become Unreceptive to you.

As you can see, Neutral women are where so-called “game” comes into play. Having good game means you can take a woman who is Neutral and incite her to become Receptive to you quickly. You do this by making yourself vulnerable, sharing yourself unabashedly, and polarizing her one way or the other and being comfortable with either result.

The percentage of women who are Receptive to you will increase proportionally to the quality of your lifestyle, your social status, and your looks. The percentage of women that you’re able to move from Neutral to Receptive will be proportional to how good your “game” is, or how well you’re able to communicate and express yourself with women. And your ability to sort through each type of women and meet as many as possible will be determined by how fearless and bold you are when it comes to meeting women.

Our primary strategy with women is polarization. The idea is that the more forthright you are about who you are, how you feel, and what you think, the more this is going to weed out Unreceptive Women from the Receptive women, as well as push Neutral women to get off the fence and decide how they feel about you.

The fact is that sexuality, attraction, and relationships are, by their very nature, confrontational and controversial. You

have to either make the decision to accept being controversial and confrontational or you need to accept that you will go through life with everyone being Neutral towards you.

A man who is highly invested is going to alter his behaviors based on the woman he’s talking to. He’s going to be afraid to tell her that he doesn’t accept her being late. He’s going to be afraid to wear that suit out. He’s going to be timid when he wants to put his arm around her. He’s going to be

unable to make himself vulnerable, express his truth, and will therefore not polarize her.

You’d be surprised how many women will respond with attraction to nothing other than a man who is bold and willing to stick his neck out.

The reason men fear rejection is because they’re operating on other peoples’ truths, not their

own. In fact, men who fear rejection tend to be oblivious to their own truth because if they were aware of their own desires, needs and values, what would they have to be afraid of? Why would they ever hesitate to expose their vulnerability to others?

There are three ways in which we are honest. And those three ways will make up the bulk of this book. The three ways are 1) living based on our values (lifestyle); 2) becoming comfortable with our intentions (boldness); and 3) by expressing our sexuality freely (communication).

The first way of expressing our truth involves developing a lifestyle that makes us happy. The second way of expressing truth is by being courageous and fighting through our fears and anxieties. And the third way of expressing truth is by communicating well and being uninhibited in our sexuality.

Not acting on our desires and asserting ourselves where appropriate is showing more investment in others than ourselves. It is therefore unattractive.

And not communicating our thoughts, feelings, and desires freely and clearly also demonstrates more investment in others than in ourselves.

Lifestyle, Courage, and Communication: I refer to these as the...

For instance, Honest Living, or creating an attractive lifestyle involves really drilling down and understanding what you want as a man for your life and then working to make that a reality. If you’re in a job you hate with hobbies you hate and friends you don’t like, then no matter what you do or how much money you make, you’re going to have a hard time meeting attractive women that you enjoy and who enjoy being with you. This is because the identity you have adopted does not accurately reflect your emotional needs and desires. You

are not living your life honestly, which means you are not investing in yourself, which means you are needy and unattractive.

If your true passion is art and you push paper around at an insurance firm, then you’re not living honestly. You’ve compromised your identity in some way to fit what others have dictated it should be; in this case, you’ve given up what actually makes you happy in order to fit the values or roles of other people in society (having a stable job, working in the corpo...

If those things aren’t actually important to you, then you have a responsibility to yourself to change. Otherwise, you’re always going to be an unattractive man. How so? Because you’re living 40 hours a week, every week, investing your identity in what others want out of you and not what you want of yourself. This is like baseline neediness, and until you straighten this out, you will be needy with every woma...

Honest Living correlates directly with the quality of women that you will attract. The more in-tune you a...

you take care of your appearance and your health, the higher the quality of women you will attract and the greater percent...

I call it Honest Action because it is honesty in the strictest terms. If you see a beautiful woman and have a desire to meet her, to not

take action and meet her is a form of being dishonest with yourself. If you’re standing in a bar, and you see a woman who catches your interest, and you keep looking at her all night because you’re afraid to do something, on a deep level, you’re being dishonest about your intentions and sexuality. You’re being overly invested in her and others’ opinions and are unable to expose your vulnerability.

If you’re afraid to approach a woman, it’s because somewhere inside you are more invested in her opinion of you than you are in your own opinion of yourself.

Overcoming your fear and anxiety will correlate with your overall results with women. The reason being that once a man overcomes his fear of rejection, he’s willing to more or less pursue any woman he wants when he wants.

Socially anxious men tend to have

the third fundamental down very well. They’re good at expressing themselves and are very aware of social norms and what others are thinking/feeling. In fact, in a lot of cases, socially anxious men are too aware of what other people are thinking and feeling and, therefore, have a lot of social anxiety. They’re afraid to speak to new women. They get nervous pushing things forward. They’re scared to ask women on dates. Generally, though, once these men do meet a woman who likes them, they do OK. They can converse with her all night. And if she happens to be attracted to him, he’s not such a mess. But it’s the actual being pro-active and

making a move that scares him to death. These men usually spend most of their time focusing on overcoming fea...

But the second and third fundamentals are intimately connected to one another. Anxious guys are anxious because they’re so socially attuned to others (perhaps even too socially in tune with others), and socially disconnected guys are fearless because they are socially disconnected from others.

The idea is to become socially connected and fearless at the same time and have an awesome and attractive lifestyle. The full package. The Three Fundamentals.

The theory of demographics is simple and easy to remember: like attracts like. You attract what you are.

When demographics don’t match up, then it causes friction. And as we learned in Chapter 3, friction prevents attraction from turning into intimacy and/or sex.

Clever lines won’t change it. Being good-looking won’t change it. Being rich won’t change it. If you hate what she loves and she hates what you love, it’s not going to go anywhere. Period.

Demographics explain why you meet women you just “click” with sometimes, and why, more often than not, you meet these women in situations where you’re having fun and doing what you love.

I always like to tell men, “The only thing all of the women you date have in common is you.” What I mean by that is if all of the women you date end up lying and being manipulative, or if all of the women you date are selfish and treat you poorly, or if all of the women you date are meek and have no personality, then likely there is something in your beliefs and behavior that is naturally screening for those types of

women.

When it comes to age, studies show that men’s physical attractiveness peaks at around 31 (a luxury considering women peak around 21) and that our physical attractiveness recedes far slower than it does for women. In fact, studies have found that the average 45-year-old male is still considered as physically attractive as the average 18-year-old male.

The first is that money/success matters more depending on your age. The older you are, the more money you’re expected to have and the more successful you’re expected to be in order to be attractive. The other finding is that the less wealthy she is, the more important money will be to her.

But the fact remains that women perceive men with money the same way we perceive women with good looks: as social status.

Ask yourself for which demographic of women are looks and money highly important? Women who tend to only value good looks tend to be women who only have good looks and little else to offer. Women who are highly interested in money are going to be women who don’t have other interests or opportunities in front of them.

The more money/looks/success you have, the less attractive behavior you need. The less money/looks/success you have, the more attractive behavior you need.

Another way to think of this is that age, money, and looks are universal demographics, and therefore, an incompatibility in any one of them is apt to cause extra friction everywhere.

It’s all relative. The key is to 1) recognize your personal interests and strengths, and 2) build upon those personal interests and strengths to quickly attract women in your preferred demographic.

If there’s one takeaway from this