Research has revealed the 11 secrets of attracting women

 An interesting article in the UK Times discusses the results of a two-year psychological study on the subject of attraction recently published in “Evolutionary Psychology”.

This research concluded that the key to success, for men, is a certain type of wit: self-deprecation. The anthropologist behind the research, was quoted in The Observer, explaining: “The frequent use of self-deprecating humour in sexual context – with potential mates, established mates or sexual rivals – was astonishing … people who used this humour were considered to be more desirable as mates.”  

But the researcher added that if you are not a high-status guy then this self-deprecating humor will backfire.  If you’re rich, charming, and great-looking, self-deprecating humor just means you aren’t egotistical.  The woman can easily see that you have all these qualities.  But if you have none of these qualities, then it just reinforces the fact that you aren’t worth dating.

And now for what you read this post for: the author’s summary of what the research reveals a guy needs to succeed with women.  The article is so good I’ll just quote it:

In other words, to impress, men need to be hugely successful, but pretend that they are not. And this is only one aspect of the almost impossible balance that needs to be struck. Men need to convey sexual desire without sexualising the person in front of them, need to be authoritative, opening doors, paying bills, deciding where to go and so on (recent research found that 60 per cent of women would consider it a bad first date if they paid), yet treat women as absolute equals. They need to flatter without seeming overly impressed, they need to care about their appearance (but not too much), and when it comes to chatting up, they need to take the initiative, and absorb any humiliation that comes their way, without seeming at all arrogant or pushy.

In short, the early stages of hooking up are more fraught with potential disaster than a stroll through the streets of Kandahar, more political than an episode of Question Time, more unpredictable than Gordon Ramsay on ketamine. It’s no surprise that so many men are rendered incoherent and imbecilic by the pressure of it all – and truly some kind of miracle that any relationship manages to begin at all.

I wholeheartedly agree with his last conclusion: it’s a wonder any relationships ever manage to begin.

I think Commenter Kris (by all means read the comments below the article) has a good explanation for much of the difficulty.  He says that women have so many choices that what should be an easy-going talk over a glass of wine has been converted into a job interview.   Most desireable  women insist that a guy meet all of their 23 bullet point list.  If they find during this “job interview” that the guy doesn’t meet points 12, 17, and 22, they will go back to their computers and bring up another batch of hopefuls.  With men heavily outnumbering women on internet dating sites, they always have a surplus of guys wanting to meet them. 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/article4846940.ece

The American Girl Dating Quandary

Over the last few years, my dating life has consisted mostly of girls from other countries, especially Eastern European states and Russia. I’ve never made it a specific goal to date or marry a girl from outside the U.S., but it certainly seems appealing.

We’ve posted many blogs on here as to the tremendous advantages of dating girls from Eastern Europe, so I won’t go into listing them again. Just suffice it to say, the quality and selection are WAY better than what you find in the U.S. But I’m having a little bit of a quandary right now. You see, I’ve been chatting-mostly online-with a young American girl for a good two years now. She was unavailable when we first “met”, and we were just friends who would e-mail occasionally. Well, she became available a few months back, and the e-mails became IMs which in turn became flirty text messages and photo exchanges.

Here’s the thing: she is very typically American. By that, I mean she meets a standard that seems to exist for all American girls, and once that standard is met, she has no motivation to be better at anything else.

Let me see if I can make this more clear. First off, she is steel-meltingly hot. She’s a model, and with good reason: she has the body for it. But since she has that aspect going for her, she really doesn’t have to, in the American dating market, have much else going for her. She has, by her own admission:

• Mentioned that she has no idea what she’s doing in the kitchen
• Told me that she already knows she’s a pain in the ass to have as a girlfriend
• Admitted that she knows she lets her emotions get the best of her, making her make irresponsible decisions financially and in relationships
• Has hinted that she feels it’s the man’s responsibility to make good money to support a certain lifestyle

I like her a lot. She’s actually very funny; we make each other laugh all the time. But…and I hate saying this: I know I can do even better than her outside of the U.S. Because in Russia or Estonia or Latvia, there is no “cap” on how good a woman can be. In Latvia, just because you’re gorgeous doesn’t mean you can’t go ahead and learn how to cook a decent meal. In Russia, a knockout hottie still wants a loyal, happy marriage with a man she loves, not a man to fulfill her needs in the “competition among her girlfriends”.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’d still like to fly over to that side of the pond again and meet someone. But, I certainly can’t stop talking to my American hottie. I guess the chips will fall where they may.

Hot Eastern European Woman

Roissy posts a video of a hot Eastern European tv reporter getting a slight wound and going back to do her story, and draws some lessons from the episode:

“You surmise, correctly, that given her grace under pressure after getting shot she has the strength of character to sacrifice for her children and perform her domestic duties without whining or running to a divorce lawyer at the first sign of her husband not ‘meeting her needs’.

How can the modern American woman possibly compete against this? Answer: She can’t. Which is why cuntastic femicunts are feeling the heat and worked hard behind the scenes and out of the public eye to pass into law the misandrist International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, designed to make it more difficult for an American man to meet a foreign woman with a more feminine and pleasant disposition than the average American woman.

I hope American men are reading this and absorbing the lesson. Flights to East Europe are always available. You know what to do. So… what’s stopping you?”

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/how-not-to-be-an-american-woman

The Astonishingly Beautiful Women of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia

A friend of mine grew up in Lithuania, one of the three republics on the coast of the Baltic Sea (the others are Latvia and Estonia).  He came here with his family when he was a child.  He still has a great many relatives in Lithuania. 

One of his cousins came to the US for a month-long vacation, visiting New York City, Chicago, Disney World, and several other places in the US.  After his return to Lithuania he was walking down the street with a friend.  After awhile the friend remarked, “You’re acting like you’ve never seen a woman before.”  He replied, “You don’t understand.  I’ve been in the United States for the last month and I didn’t see nearly as many beautiful women as I do on the streets here.”

I’ve been to New York City, Chicago, and Disney World.  I’d say there are a lot of beautiful women in all three places (especially parts of New York City; there does seem to be a strong connection between beautiful women and money).  It really says something if Vilnius, a city of only 600,000 – 800,000, can compete successfully with these places.

A friend of mine has visited Riga, the capital city of Latvia.  He told me that he passed beautiful women on every block.  I’ve read elsewhere that Estonia also has a huge number of beautiful women. 

Why do these three Baltic nations have such an array of gorgeous women?  And more important, how much does a plane ticket cost? 

I’m back.  Expedia shows a round-trip ticket to Riga costs well over $1,000.

If you believe the travel magazines eco-tourism is growing increasingly popular.  I’m guessing that reading magazine articles about eco-tourism is way, way more popular than actual eco-tourism.  It’s one of those things that sounds a lot more fun than it would actually be.  For every hour spent looking at a beautiful pristine view in a remote rainforest, you’ll spend 28 hours fighting mosquitoes and hoping your anti-malaria meds really do work so you don’t end up sweating the moisture from your body in tropic heat, wondering how you’re going to get the energy to bicycle back to civilization so you can fly home and stay in airconditioned comfort.

But I digress.  The subject at hand is beautiful women, specifically their presence in the three Baltic republics.  I do not understand why US guys aren’t doing online dating with women there and planning their vacations there so they can meet these women.  I know a trip there isn’t cheap, but it would cost less than twenty dinner dates with women in the US. 

Which would you prefer: a relationship with any of the 20 women you meet here in the US or one with a woman you’re likely to meet in Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia.  It isn’t only their looks that give these women a huge advantage over US women.  It’s the culture of the two countries.  Women here have grown up in the Oprah-fried culture of the US.  Most of them are thinking, “What have you done for me lately?” (see Eddie Murphy’s hilarious bit on this from “Delirious”).

So what are you waiting for?  Stop reading our site, get your credit card, and book your flight to Riga.  And search for Latvian/Lithuanian/Estonian dating sites.

Have You Ever Noticed…

…that women who are strongly opposed to pornography aren’t ones whom men want to have sex with in the first place?

Pickup techniques, for long-term or short-term relationships

I posted last week some material about Roissy, the psuedonym of a pickup artist who blogs.  He made an interesting response to a critic who lambasted him for discussing the pickup skills that allow guys to meet women, charm them, go to bed with them, then abandon them for their next conquest:

 … the skills that make a player are the same skills that help a regular man find, capture, and keep his dream girl. it’s a lifestyle and a mental state change.

I’ve had this same thought.  A guy can use these skills for either purpose: having short-term relationships with lots of women or having a long-term relationship.   But even if the guy wants a long-term relationship, I suspect he improves his chances of finding one if he uses the skills of the pickup artist.  These skills seem to capture a woman’s interest better than the plain-vanilla alternatives women hear all the time (hi, I’m so and so, what’s your name, do you come here often, etc.).

You can read all about these techniques in Neill Strauss’s book, “The Game” about his time with the legendary pickup artist who calls himself Mystery (the techniques are more fully set out in a book Mystery himself wrote).

I saw an interesting illustration of this at work a few months ago, on the Dr. Phil show of all places.  He interviewed two guys who used something very much like the Mystery Method of pickup, in which the guy and his wingman go up to a woman in a bar and try to capture her interest (without seeming like they want to capture it).  They tried it on several women from the audience.  These women responded to these techniques, even though they had just been told they were being guinea pigs for the pickup artists techniques. 

The women said afterwards that they were intrigued by what the guys were saying and would be much more interested in those guys than the other guys who hit on them.

But back to the main point of this post – if you’re a guy looking for a long-term relationship, you first have to meet women.  It makes sense to use the best method available to meet them.  I’m convinced some of the pickup artists have the best methods.  These methods have, after all, been field-tested.  The best of these pickup artists keep those techniques that work and discard those that don’t. 

http://roissy.wordpress.com/

Online dating provides a huge ego boost to attractive women

I’ve written before that online dating is heavily tilted toward attractive women.  That’s because 1) except for EHarmony, there are more men than women who are members of dating services, and 2) men everywhere are after attractive women.  A moderately attractive woman who posts her pic on Match.com or Yahoo Personals will get thousands of emails or other expressions of interest in a year. 

Here we have confirmation of this phenomenon from another source.  The following interesting discussion appears in The Guardian:

… it’s a super ego-booster. Every evening I’m on it, I have at least 30 men wanting to chat with me and meet me,” says a French senior civil servant, a single woman in her early 30s. Before contacting her, the 30 men have clicked on the “flash” icon to let her know that they find her especially attractive. Before condescending to reply, she double-checks their profile: age, picture, education, income and marital status.

She chooses them like a discerning consumer, and only replies to married men. “For the moment, I am looking for fun, not love. I do a first pre-selection, and send a standard reply to the unlucky ones out of courtesy. As for the selected few, according to their wit and their language skills … I draw a shortlist of perhaps three and agree to meet them…

It’s a simple issue of supply and demand: pre-select candidates, test sales pitch, draw a shortlist, have a face-to-face interview, hire on the spot, dismiss without notice …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2132546,00.html

Attractive women get so much attention online that they become more and more demanding in what guys they are willing to date.  They create the infamous 463 bullet point list of characteristics they insist upon.  And the moment the guy de jour fails to meet one of those 463 points, the woman is back to her computer to bring up another crop of men who might meet her rigid specifications.

Cougars

The following interesting discussion of the cougar phenomenon is found at Roissy’s blog.  For those of you who haven’t heard of this, it’s older women going after young guys. 

… can think of quite a few girls I frequently see haunting the DC nightlife scene who’ve gone from kitten to cougar in just a few years.  Many women of DC’s socialite crowd have crossed the cougar rubicon, yet stubbornly refuse to give up their lifestyle.  When all you’ve ever known is the inside of a club, 37 varieties of martinis, and dancing on raised platforms as horny guys give you your attention fix, it’s understandable you’d find it hard to accept your demotion to has-been hottie.

…  with career-delayed marriages and perpetual dating where she is waiting around forever to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist, the clubs are beginning to fill with women who have missed the boat yet won’t admit it to themselves.

Fascinating point about women wanting to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist.  I’ve noticed the same thing myself, and it merits its own blog post.  With the huge supply of guys made available to women through online dating (and its bad-for-guys male/female ratio), most women seem to have developed huge lists of must-haves.

Read the whole thing.  It has lots more interesting commentary, complete with pictures.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/from-kitten-to-cougar/

I don’t see anything objectionable with these older women chasing young guys.  But they shouldn’t delude themselves that they’re going to be like Demi Moore landing a 10-15 year younger Ashton Kuchter.  The good-looking 25 year old guy will gladly have sex with the 40 year old woman he meets at the club, but for a long-term relationship there are few 40 year old women he will prefer over the young hotties.

And here’s another interesting point from Roissy’s discussion (one that may interest Mr. Practical): “She looks Russian, which means that she will hit the wall sooner and harder than most women her age.”  Is this true? 

Speed Dating Reveals What Guys and Girls Want

I wrote a day or so ago that the best way to determine what guys or girls like in a date is not to ask them, but to look at what decisions they make.  Economists and psychologists call this revealed preference rather than stated preference. 

We recently looked at online daters’ revealed preferences as set out in a study done on Match.com users.   We now have another piece of research that reveals daters’ preferences.  Two psychologists in the Psychology Department of the University of Pennsylvania conducted an interesting piece of research on preferences of speed daters.

For those of you  not familiar with speed dating, it’s an activity in which equal numbers of men and women are recruited.  They dress up, smile, and sit down for three-minute sessions with every member of the opposite sex in attendance.  At the end of these three-minute sessions each participant gives each person he or she has met a thumbs up or thumbs down, on a dating sheet.  These sheets are compiled by the organizers of the event and if two people gave each other a thumbs up, email addresses are sent to each and they can meet.

Here is a link to the writeup for this study: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/PLEEP/pdfs/2005%20Kurzban%20&%20Weeden%20EHB.pdf

I wish I could mention some surprising findings of this study.  But I cannot.  Almost nothing of significance it reveals is unknown to the careful observer of dating behavior.

Women liked men who were tall, good-looking, fairly young, and fairly big (not necessarily fat, but with a BMI of around 25).  The overwhelming thing men were drawn to was slender women. p. 234. After that, their next strongest preferences were for attractive faces and younger women.   This should come as no surprise to observers of dating.

Another obvious finding was that the most attractive people got the most thumbs up from other speed-daters but said yes to them more often. For men, being good-looking, a bit large, and making good money caused them to be more selective. p. 236.  For women, being slender allowed them to be more selective. p. 236.   Women tended to say no more often when they were thin and the male daters were older. p. 237.  Again, nothing you couldn’t figure out on your own.

All of these findings support the market value theory of mating: people like pretty much the same qualities in a date, but they realize they can only get someone with these qualities if they themselves are high in qualities wanted by the opposite sex.  This phenomenon is expressed memorably by the scientist Stephen Pinker, “Somewhere in this world of five billion (now six billion) people there lives the best-looking, richest, smartest, funniest, kindest person who would settle for you.”

One of the findings that might surprise some of you is that women are, in general, much more selective than men.  Women gave fewer thumbs ups to men than men gave to women. 

Another is that the different sexes are willing to adjust their expectations down based on different things.  Women will lower their selectivity if they are fat, but not if they are older.  And men will lower their expectations if they have unattractive faces, but not if they are older or shorter. p. 241. 

Another settling feature is that divorced men will settle for chubby women more often than nondivorced men.

More conclusions about online dating

Two weeks ago I wrote a post discussing some interesting findings regarding online dating.  These findings were from a fascinating study of online dating performed by three researchers lead by Dan Ariely of MIT.  This post continues my discussion of this study’s findings.  The researchers were able to get access to Match.com’s computer records for their San Diego and Boston markets, and could tell exactly which profiles other people found interesting, sent emails to, talked with, met for a date, etc.  The idea is that these preferences revealed by people’s actions more accurately showed their true preferences than a survey or poll would.

Many of their conclusions were just what you would expect.  For example, men generally try to avoid women who are older or taller than they are, and women “have a particularly strong aversion to shorter men.” p. 27.  Also, women place almost twice as much weight on income as men. 

Also, men have a distaste for women who are more educated than they are, while women try to avoid men who are less educated than they are. p. 27.  If this trend persists it may make it more difficult to find matches.  Women now make up considerably more than 50% of college admissions. 

One intriguing part of the study is speculation that many of the similarities between couples in such areas as education, religion, and income could be attributable to the fact that the social institutions that bring people together usually group people according to these attributes.  It is therefore easier for people to meet and become couples if they match in these areas. 

Online dating, in contrast, lets people search for another person who has exactly the sort of characteristics they want.  If you want a medium-tall, slender, brunette who makes at least $50,000/year and attends Catholic Church on a weekly basis, you can easily search for one.

One of their conclusions is one that you would guess: [O]ur fate in love and marriage seems to be driven by factors such as looks, height, weight, and income, that are hard or impossible to change … (and) factors such as personality traits apparently only allow us to partly make up for deficiencies in good looks or wealth.” pp. 30-31.

So, as I discussed in a previous post regarding the findings of this study, if you want to be successful at online dating, first email a lot of other people, and then, if you’re a man, be very good-looking, tall, beefy, straight-haired, college-educated, work in a favored occupation, and make a lot of money.  If you’re a woman, be good-looking, slender, and not too tall.

The full text of their report is here:

http://designogselvfremstillelse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/dating1.pdf