Mate: Become the Man Women Want

by Tucker Max

Spend your money on experiences, not possessions, and your attraction to women will go through the roof.

Avoid runaway workaholism and the cult of speed; slow down and give yourself enough leisure time to build mating skills, to manage your online dating, and to enjoy life and women. Work is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. If you let it define you instead of build you, it will swallow up your time, your identity, and your mating prospects.

Also, women love guys who make things. We have instincts for conspicuously wasteful consumption, but we also have instincts for conspicuously precise and creative craftsmanship. A good alternative to just buying courtship gifts (dinners, roses, cards) is to display your attractive traits by making things yourself.

The best way to be happy and attractive is to spend your money on new experiences, not new things. This is one of the most surprising results from the last two decades of happiness research.

Women pay a lot more attention than you realize to your stylish sexual ornaments, your artistic and musical skills, your appreciation of beauty, and the whole aesthetic dimension of your life: your grooming, scent, clothes, car, music, furnishings, apartment, Instagram feed, online dating profile, and everything else. All these things are reliable signals to women of who you are and how well you’ve cultivated your other traits—especially your mental health, intelligence, willpower, and empathy.

Male creativity and artistic talent are major targets of sexual selection, because they demonstrate so much about how your mind works.

so women could have been selecting men partly for their musical talent for more than one thousand generations.

Successful male artists have both more sexual partners and longer-term sexual relationships.

This aesthetic dimension of product design isn’t just hot air; it’s the reason that Apple is the most valuable company in HISTORY.

Learn to dance: Dance is ancient and universal across cultures, has its own distinctive aesthetic psychology, and is incredibly important to women. Yet a vast majority of men hate to dance and have never taken the time to be anything but horrible at it.

From how men dance, women can accurately judge their physical strength, their conscientiousness and agreeableness, and their tendencies toward sensation seeking and boredom.

Dance classes almost always have a low male-to-female ratio, so they’re also a great place to meet women.

And free computer programs like Audacity offer powerful ways to create your own music without needing instrumental skills at all.

The poet John Ciardi pointed out, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at women and persuade themselves they have a better idea.”

The best way to start getting better at storytelling is to listen to how stand-up comedians and great politicians tell stories. Read classic short stories. Pay attention to how your friends tell stories well or badly. Practice telling your best stories—especially the short version of your life story—again and again, refining the plot, pacing, and word choice based on people’s reactions.

Your audience—especially women, who are incredibly deductive listeners—cares less about what happened than why it happened, when it happened, how it happened, to whom it happened and, most important of all, how you feel about it. Put all that detail into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you’re on your way to not boring the shit out of everybody with the otherwise irrelevant details of your life!

kind of girlfriend you’d like to attract want to see you display? Try things; if they don’t work, try different things. Developing your own best personal style takes time, experimentation, and feedback.

Grooming has deep biological roots; it’s not just a cultural invention. All animals clean themselves—especially primates. The stereotype of the disheveled, dirty caveman is bullshit.

males of every species groom themselves to present their sexual ornaments in the best possible condition.

Women are attracted to guys who take care of themselves. They interpret grooming as a signal of your conscientiousness/willpower, one of your deepest personality traits. If you’re well groomed, women automatically infer that you’re likely to be mature, ambitious, and active. Lucky for you, all the great things that conscientiousness brings in the long term can be signaled to women by just a few more minutes of grooming each morning.

That means washing your hair every morning in the shower with a good conditioner; conditioners have plenty of cleaning power on their own, and unlike shampoo, they won’t strip protective oils from your hair and scalp and promote dandruff (you need shampoo only about once a week).

Remember, conspicuous precision in grooming is a key signal of conscientiousness (willpower).

The best way to have clear skin is to starve the bacteria in your pores that cause acne: avoid soda, sugar, grains, refined carbs, and caffeine. Most skin issues can be resolved by improving your diet and washing your face daily with a moisturizing soap.

Brush your teeth with a good manual toothbrush when you wake up in the morning and with an electric toothbrush before you go to bed at night; dentists say this combination is better than using either alone. Also floss and use a tongue scraper after breakfast and again before you go to sleep.

Washing your hands isn’t just good for their visual appeal; it’s also one of the most powerful ways to protect yourself from colds and flu.

Wear clean socks every day. And for the love of god, when you’re having sex, take them off! Women HATE when you keep them on.

Your body scent has a complicated physiology influenced by what you eat, how you exercise, how much you sleep and hydrate, how much you sweat, and what your hormone levels are. This means your natural scent is a pretty informative signal of your overall health.

Beware: Cheap, nasty, unsubtle scents are added to most men’s toiletries—soap, conditioner, hair gel, antiperspirant, body spray, and shaving foam. Avoid that shit. Buy unscented. Quality women don’t fall for men who use Axe Body Spray.

just clean out your car and it will smell fine.

Women assess your outfit in the same way when you are on a date. They want you to look the part of “cool potential boyfriend.” They don’t just judge how well dressed you are in terms of your style and wealth, however; they also judge how much effort you put into looking good for her. Most young men under-dress for dates, failing to understand that “looking casual and laid back” to them means “looking careless and uninterested” to women.

Fundamentally, whatever you choose to wear has to be clean, well fitted, coordinated, and socially appropriate.

Every outfit, no matter how informal or thoughtless, sends all kinds of signals to every woman who sees it.

Very few women want to date a fashionable guy, but many women want to date a stylish guy who wears tasteful clothes that fit well.

Your clothes don’t have to be tight, but they should look like they FIT your body.

Your shoes matter more to women than you can imagine.

Good leather shoes set you apart from the man-boys still running around in grade-school Nikes or high-school Vans.

“A guest sees more in an hour than a host sees in a year.”

Remember, women code “clean” as “safe,” “mature,” “reliable,” and “responsible”—four very desirable qualities in a boyfriend. Keep your car washed outside and clean inside.

To most women, a tidy Toyota is more attractive than a BMW filled with fast-food wrappers, old gym bags, and used condoms. A small, clean apartment feels sexier and more romantic to most women than a luxury condo with a stinky fr...

Err on the side of minimalism in your decor.

Women have been judging men based on their style, taste, aesthetic appearance, and artistic skills for more than a hundred thousand years.

Even for a one-night stand, a woman appreciates a guy who can play the romantic role and who can emotionally connect with her and eroticize whatever intimacy develops in a few hours of fun. Plus, it usually makes the sex much hotter.

“Take me backstage!” or “Fill me with your tiny babies!”

Feeling invisible, neglected, or taken for granted drives women nuts, and it sparks a lot of breakups and divorces.

Once a woman starts feeling safe around a man and is thinking about dating him, her self-protective instincts flare up, and she wonders, “If we have sex and I get pregnant, will he abandon me, or will he stay and help raise the kids?”

Romantic proof also reveals emotional stability, because depression, anxiety, and irritability distract guys from being able to take care of a woman.

The more the romantic gesture costs you specifically, the more reliable and compelling it is as a signal of your mating interest.

First, you pay attention to the woman. You look at her. Don’t stare like a predator, but smile and say hi. Then you talk to her and listen. This is called having a conversation: you learn about her, and she learns about you.

What’s hot to women about romance novels is the hero feeling much more than he can say, not when he says much more than he feels.

For all primates, including us, gaze direction and mindful attention are reliable signals of social and sexual interest.