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The primary reason for this is that women make their short-term mating choices with a much shorter list of criteria: looks and personality. If you are not very attractive and/or very charming, fun, or funny, you are at a distinct disadvantage to those guys who are.
At a typical party or on an ordinary weekend night out at a bar, you might spend 4–6 hours flirting with a woman. If you’re successful, those hours of effort will probably only net you 20–30 minutes of actual sexual activity.
MEDIUM-TERM RELATIONSHIPS
Blue
LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS
Mating is ultimately about connecting and relating.
You have to be ready and mature enough for a long-term relationship, or else it will fail over and over again.
WHICH RELATIONSHIP IS RIGHT FOR YOU, RIGHT NOW?
Your mating goal is not set in stone. It can change, and, in fact, it almost certainly will change many times over your life.
The empirical evidence shows that most young men are happiest when they’re in the kinds of medium-term relationships with a casual girlfriend that involve lots of sex but not much commitment.
So what’s your mating goal? Write it down. Seriously—literally write it down. Like, with a pen or pencil. Do it right here on this page if you’re reading this in print; and if you’re reading this in ebook, still write it down for real: My Mating Goal Is
You need to clarify your personal mating code now, before sexual temptations and moral dilemmas arise, because the ethical stakes in mating get higher and higher as technology advances.
The sooner you clarify your ethics, the better you can use ethical feedback to refine how you treat women.
The past/future heuristic: Will I be proud of this decision a year from now? If I had to wait a year before making this choice, would I choose to do this?
Clarifying your mating ethics also helps build your sexual self-confidence.
STEP TWO Develop Attractive Traits CHAPTER 4: UNDERSTAND WHAT WOMEN WANT… AND WHY
if you want sex and relationships with women, honest mating effort is the only route.
Think of the human mating game as a literal game. In game theory, a game is composed of players, payoffs, and rules. To succeed, you must understand all three of those elements. If you play without understanding them, you’re the sucker who ends up getting bankrupted by the casino.
WOMEN EVOLVED TO WANT EFFECTIVE MEN
To understand what traits women want in males, you have to understand what benefits women want from males.
In fact, if you look at actual behavior and mate choice, those six words are “Don’t worry honey, I got this”—which means: we face a real problem together as a couple, but I can totally handle it as a man. I’m effective.
You just need to be effective—in all the main domains of life: health, family, friends, work, play, and knowledge—because that is what women want in their men. If you can become effective at these things, you will be attractive to women.
JUMPSTART YOUR ATTRACTIVENESS: REDUCE YOUR INEFFECTIVENESS
Effectiveness is sexually attractive to most women most of the time, but ineffectiveness is sexually disgusting to all women all of the time.
Thus, apart from cultivating signs of effectiveness, it can be even more important to stop showing signs of ineffectiveness.
THE THREE BASIC FORMS OF EFFECTIVENESS
They reproduced by selecting boyfriends who offered as many of the prerequisites for effective fatherhood as possible, which ultimately shaped their mate preferences and their assessment of your mate value.
All female animals, ever since the origins of sexual reproduction 1.2 billion years ago, want to get the best genes they can into their offspring so their offspring in turn can survive and reproduce effectively.
for women, getting a good boyfriend has long been the most reliable way to ensure that your children lived past infancy and reproduced themselves.
so women tend to favor any bodyguard traits that make male protection more effective and reliable.
Our paternal abilities evolved because women wanted to mate with guys who would make good dads and stepdads.
You can have great genes that produce superbabies, but if you flake out at the most critical time, it’s a disaster for the woman and for the child’s survival.
we know from anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies that if a guy abandons a woman or has a fatal hunting accident, the likelihood of her baby surviving can drop a lot.
Every woman alive today is descended from an unbroken chain of successful mothers who raised healthy offspring, usually with a lot of help from good dads.
WOMEN CONSIDER ALL THE TRAITS THAT MIGHT BE RELEVANT TO FUTURE REPRODUCTION
Attraction is an emotional, unconscious reaction to the suite of traits men present to women; it is NOT a conscious decision that they deliberate about.
That’s great news for the average guy: We are members of a species where females are attracted to many different traits that we can cultivate and display, not just one.
The more of your traits you improve, the more joy you bring to women.
There are three primary forms of effectiveness that women consider when assessing your value: 1. Do you carry good genes? 2. Would you be a good partner? 3. Would you be a good dad?
CHAPTER 5: GET IN SHAPE (THE PHYSICAL HEALTH TRAIT)
If you want to get better with women, nothing will do more to increase your prospects and help achieve your mating goals than being in shape.
Visible physical health reveals how many mutations are in your DNA, what biochemical reactions are happening in every organ, what hormones are circulating in your blood. It predicts how effective you’ll stay at life and how long you’ll live. Physical health matters at a deep biological level, and female choice is a deeply biological activity.
Plainly put, good physical health is when the body of a living organism is functioning the way it was designed to function by evolution.
Women are looking for strong and effective men, not men who can’t hug them because their pecs are in the way.
Don’t confuse the guy you’d most fear with the guy that women would most want.
WHY WOMEN CARE ABOUT YOUR BEING IN SHAPE
Like we just explained, when it comes to sex and dating, women generally (and unconsciously) look for hard-to-fake traits that display three kinds of attributes in men: (1) good genes, (2) good partner traits, and (3) good father traits.
Your physical health is the executive summary of your genetic fitness.
So being in shape matters a lot, at both a conscious and an unconscious level.
Being able to have healthy kids is important, but being around to care for them is critical.
IMPROVE YOUR PHYSICAL HEALTH
