Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Part 1: Actual Response To Your Question
First, you're thinking far too specifically about "where" to meet women instead of the general "how" strategy. If your total approach is to go to physical spaces that are disproportionately women and then just hang out, your odds of success are low. Women are not fish, there's a lot more to it than a raw numbers game.
The beginning and end of all "game" advice is that heterosexual dating is a sexual marketplace where men's primary (not only) value driver is their social esteem. If you don't have that social esteem / social proof, it almost doesn't matter what you look like. If you're movie star level of handsome, you'll be fine. If you were that, you wouldn't be asking this question in real life.
So your strategy should be "how" based. And that "how" is simple; have a good and dynamic social life. With everyone. Don't just go to Yoga studios to try to pickup chicks. This is anti-social and weird. Don't just play DnD in your buddy's basement. This is anti-social and weird. Don't just
post on The Motte and culture war harddiscuss issues of the highest importance with the smartest people on earth. This is anti-social and weird. Instead; do all of these things. Can you think of a thing that involves other humans that you enjoy doing? Do it. Then, once you are doing this thing, find ways to build social connections with people. Fast forwarding the tape, eventually you will have a circle of friends who do things and (social things). They will invite you to these things if you aren't anti-social and weird (see above) and, quite often, there will be other people whom you have not yet met at these things. You can repeat the same process to become friends with these new people. Keep repeating this now compounding process! If you do that, with intent and regularity, eventually some of these people will be women. In fact, they will be women you find attractive and fun and interesting and and and.But now you have what we were seeking in the beginning - social esteem. When people say "Yay! oats_son is here" when you arrive at the thing you are all doing together, the people who don't know you (yet!) will naturally be signaled (memed?) into believing you are a person that causes other people to be happy when you arrive. This is a massive, massive super power.
Part 1 TLDR: Go make friends (male and female) who do things you like to do. Be their friend for an extended period of time.
Part 2: Where I am less snarky, but more directly cranky
Treating dating like a problem to be solved, a system to be designed, an achievement to be unlocked is pretty much a guaranteed route to misery at worst and a particularly perverted version of the hedonic treadmill at best. If you try to setup such a system, you may be successful in "getting laid" and you'll be successful directly in proportion to your anti-social capabilities and the emotional frailty of the other party.
Okay, okay, so you're not a committed pervert, you just want to, ya know, casually date a cool chick or whatever. This is just a less salacious version of the same problem in the first paragraph. Specifically define the desire you have. Is it a need for emotional support? Maybe work on doing that yourself or with the help of a professional (who is also aware of the problem). Involving another human being casually - and under the pretense of romance and possible sex - is a pretty shitty thing to do, don't you think? Perhaps the need is to stave off loneliness. Totally reasonable. Why does this context have to be romantic?
Now let's say you're really in it for life - you're searching for a wife. If this is the case, then take all of my points above about meeting women through your social circle and multiply them by 10. There is nothing more effective than weeding out poor mate matches than a well bonded social circle of people who share a values system. And you not only want this filtering mechanism, you probably need it. Love is a hell of a drug and it clouds our judgement. Having multiple people who can offer you multiple different perspective on your prospective beau while sharing your essential value system is a big freaking deal.
"So you're saying I should let me friends pick my wife for me?" Yup. Preferably your parents and family provided you don't have some sort of horrible relationship with them. But, failing that, yes, your friends (note: I do mean close, good, committed friends here, not your drinking buddies).
Part 3: In which I relent and my inner Bro gives you that sweet sweet dope you crave
Don't go to structured environments with lots of women to try to pick them up. Dance classes, yoga, etc. This is because the people going there are going there on purpose, it wasn't spontaneous or organic. This means they want to do the thing and not have to deal with a guy thinking he's being slick. Instead, go to more broadly social and public events; farmers market (Superbad was right), First Friday Style events, harvest festival things (seasonal). Think of a totally outdoor or large space format that has a lot of different stuff around - booths, restaurants, whatever. The benefit here is that quick and casual conversations are totally fine because they can be quickly exited without hurting anyone's feelings. Example: You see a nice looking lady inspecting, I don't know, artisinal almonds at some booth, you walk up, inspect the almonds for a second and the make a comment in her general direction, "I though the ones with chocolate were as fancy is it got! a har har har har!" If she laughs back, okay start a conversation, if she doesn't (or does the exhale through the nose thing) she can simply drift off. No harm, no foul.
Don't ask for a number, ask for a date. In today's attention economy, it's really hard to get people back to re-focus on you after you've broken contact. The idea that a girl is going to give you her number, be excited when you text (because nobody calls anymore), and then get re-excited enough not to ghost on a date has to be balanced against the fact that she's probably receiving 20+ matches per day if she's on an app and, if not, getting semi-approached by random guys with enough regularity (assuming living in a metro area). If you ask for a date, you'll get, generally, an honest response. "Um, sure!" = "Eh, maybe. I'll probably ghost you!", "Definitely" = "Maybe" , "Yes! I would love that" = Okay, looks like you actually got a date, guy. The point is you're soliciting higher quality information and, therefore, not wasting your time or getting your hopes up. I think it's funny that guys have this image in their mind of slow texting a girl for weeks (!) before asking her out as if she's pining away for him. The connection should be pretty quick and pretty powerful. If it isn't, why bother? Dude, because she's hot! moronic.
Ignore everything in this section and re-read Part 1 again.
I agree with 99% of this, great advice.
The fast-forwarded bit is actually really important. Turning people from activity acquaintances into contacts and casual friends is a skill that should be consciously considered and practiced. Become the guy who proactively gets people's contacts, the guy who creates the groupchats, the guy who says "let's do X", the guy who picks the bar when people are vacillating. If you want to go to the next level, become the guy who founds things and runs events (I've had multiple women get very interested in me after watching me in charge of an event, even though there were no-shit movie star handsome guys there too).
This is good advice to a new guy who doesn't have the radar, but if you're looking to stay casual you can also just pick the girls who aren't emotionally frail and refrain from sleeping with the ones who are.
Re: Part 3, I just don't believe in those "day game" style meet-cutes at all. They probably work pretty okay if you're confident and play the numbers, but not enough to convince me to broil myself at a summer farmer's market talking to innumerable women in the hope that one is single, into me, and not a pain in the ass when we properly meet. If you want the dark arts to getting laid, it's very simple: find the right bars, learn to stay up till 2am without nuking your sleep cycle, and learn how to stay in a bar till then without getting too drunk (and, obviously, do not take advantage of girls who are way too drunk, you're looking for the ones who are there for the same reason you are). If you don't want to do that, stick to the apps or, I would suggest, serious dating via the social circle you're building.
Yes, you've put to words a lot of concerns I had here. Hitting up people at a farmer's market is not my idea of a good time, and probably not very likely to make anything happen. Who even goes to those kinds of things alone? That's just not how it works. I'm not looking for any casual fun here, I want something serious that ideally turns to marriage, because I'm 28 and not getting any younger. Actually, it would be better if we didn't have sex at all until we were engaged at least, but is there even any place for my sensibilities in today's sexual marketplace? I thought "getting a life" would be my best chances of keeping these values, because I doubt most women on a dating app would be understanding, even if I did get good photos somewhere and they overlooked my Norwood 7. Also yes, I had good friends in high school, but until I started doing sports, I didn't really see them much after school, and even then, I never did anything with them outside of those things.
Church. That's it. Otherwise you should expect that waiting for engagement/marriage will weird a woman out and make her concerned about your sexual compatibility.
The advice I gave on "getting a life" as a distinct skill that needs to be considered and practiced is the most important thing. Xenophon's Socrates speaks often of the art of making friends (and of making good friends) as the most important of the arts, and he's right. It will serve you with women, but it will also improve everything else about your life. You will get a great deal for yourself out of it, and you'll also get the satisfaction of altruism. Once you let go of your hangups about it being a skill, you can apply yourself to it with the diligence people use to learn to code, and you'll likely find that the people around you are excited to have someone with that skill in their lives. 28 is a fine age to start, you can learn faster than a younger man. But you have to be pragmatic, reflective, and focused on improvement, just as with any other skill.
I appreciate your advice, I just have to comment on the sexual compatibility thing. Where the hell did that line even come from? It feels like an excuse to have a ton of sex before you get married. If you hadn't had any sex before getting married, wouldn't you both just figure it out with each other and there wouldn't be such a thing as compatibility? The modern world is kind of fucked up. I was surprised to learn in high school that even the preppy valedictorian had sucked at least one dick, and this is in a rural area. I'm pretty sure she was religious, too.
I'm gonna necro this a bit (I mean, it's only been a week) to say, as someone in a 10 year relationship getting married in a few months, sexual compatibility is a huge deal. There are people who, after the initial honeymoon phase of a relationship ends (2-8 years or before first kid), will want to have sex 3-5 times a year. There are people who want to have sex once a day. There are people who prefer a more reasonable 3-5 times a week. There are people who are only interested in sex when they are in a good mood and after substantial foreplay. There are people for whom sticking it in is the foreplay. There are people whose sexual interests are dominated by one or more very specific paraphilias. There are people who just don't like sex and are only doing it because they don't want to be alone. There are people who don't give a shit about any of this and enjoy sex but experience no real FOMO or distress when they don't have it for long periods of time.
There are gender distributions to this traits, but none of the groups I mentioned are smaller than 10% of the population. People vary extremely wildly on this dimension. Unless you're one of the take it or leave its, you need to be on the same page about this to have a marriage-length relationship. That doesn't mean having sex before marriage, but it does mean talking about the subject in more detail than a lot of people are comfortable with. "Figure it out with each other" is a strategy that works maybe 50% of the time, and the other 50% either dooms you to eventual divorce or one or both parties perpetually being unsatisfied with whatever compromise you end up with.
I have been doing some more thinking, and I think the "no sex before marriage" thing was predicated on a lot of things: that people got married really early on, that parents could much more closely watch their kids to ensure nothing bad happened, and that they could not easily get divorced. I think evangelical Christianity misses some of the nuances, and unfortunately, male evolutionary psychology also doesn't appreciate that people tend to have more sexual relationships now, on average.
Yeah, that probably describes me. Thanks for writing this, helps me feel more normal. I've been thinking about sex a lot more lately now that getting married seems possible for me, but I do still want it to only happen with someone I'm fairly serious with. I just don't know how long I should wait once the relationship starts, or how long the particular woman will tolerate.
At the end of the day, getting married is a leap of trust. Some people figure out they are aligned in values and take the plunge early, trusting in mutual commitment to make it work. Others move as slowly as my fiancee and I did, and the official commitment is just recognition of a trust and commitment that already exists. At the end of the day, all you need to figure out is when you reach the point that you believe the two of you are on the same page about what a life together should look like, and how much you are willing to work and compromise in order to bring that dream into reality. The appropriate timeline for you will be greatly dependent on the potential spouse you are considering. Don't think about when you need to leap into bed as an answer you need to have worked out, but as a chance to build or test that level of trust and communication you need to develop to make a marriage work. If you wait too long and she dips because of it without giving you a chance to fix the issue, well, marriage wouldn't have worked out anyway.
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Well, for instance, from a male perspective, some women can orgasm easily, some it's yeoman's work to get them there if they even can. Some women love giving head, some will never enjoy it. Some women have a death-by-dehydration sex drive and some have a big fat zero. I'm sure they have similar questions about us. It might seem nice to say that you'll just figure it out (figuring out a woman in bed is also a skill that can be learned), but you're basically rolling dice on not ending up in an /r/deadbedrooms situation.
Based off the testimony of friends, I do think that religious courtship, where you're expected to be overwhelmingly horny for each other but restrain it out of belief in moral duty, can establish that without going all the way. However, if you're doing it out of hangups over sex, she has a pretty good reason to suspect something might turn out wrong, and women are extremely risk-avoidant in these things for obvious evolutionary and pragmatic reasons.
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There's forms of incompatibility that are just 'figure it out' and whatever you get, you get and that becomes your expectations. There's also forms of incompatibility that have massive mismatches in desire that don't care what each partner's expectations are, or where one partner has such limited desire that it's obvious to anyone who can look at other families and do math, so on. And then there's forms where a couple literally can't have penetrative sex to completion, either because the guy's pushing rope the entire time, the woman's gone to such an extreme level of vaginismus that no level of stretching is going to solve the problem without blood, or one person's only comfortable position is another person's snapped frenulum (you don't want to know).
Worse, there's a reason deadbedrooms is such a horror show, and it's not because I think anyone's going to die from blue balls (blue ovaries?). Even the traditional right-hand rule solution to the biological problem can leave the other partner wildly demoralized, and the bonding that most people get from sexual behavior papers over a lot of things that would be extremely frustrating in a roommate or a long-term guess.
There probably are alternative solutions to this problem, but very few of them are compatible with social conservative interests (even those used historically!), and many of them have other downsides.
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N = 1 but I just got married, and we waited until marriage. It definitely happens even now. I am personally acquainted with at least three other couples that were the same.
Caveat: we are all religious though. I don't know if there are non-religious people who would be interested in waiting, but I would think it's very rare at this point.
I'm not religious anymore, but I see the good effects it has, and I also believe that you can probably make yourself believe anything if you give it a try, forgetting about Epicurian trilemmas or God of the gaps writings (as long as we're not into fantasy territory like with Young Earth Creationism). I was raised fundamentalist and the only times I went to church was when I was with other family members, which was like, twice total in my youth, so I would have to adjust to whatever church she went to.
Uh, what are the churches with actual young people?
I didn't meet my wife at church, but I've visited both a PCA Presbyterian church and a Southern Baptist church that had really substantial cohorts of 20somethings. For a while I attended an EFCA church (kind of a small, rather interesting denomination) that had only a handful of young women, but they were, for some reason, all staggeringly beautiful. I did successfully ask one of them out, but the date was kind of lame; but we parted as friends.
A related phenomenon: now that we're married, my wife and I don't have to try to find a church with young people, so we just go to the local church I like best. We are one of four couples below the age of 40; I can think of two eligible single girls there and one young man. It's a bit grim but we're trying to do outreach and things to make young people think it's worth a visit.
The more I think about this, the more extremely conflicted and broken I feel about everything. I was taught to not have sex before marriage, and so even the thought of a blowjob is gross to me, but I was never raised in the church and my family existed almost outside of the community entirely, and then I went and got my liberal education and lost my faith, because I could not longer believe that the earth is 6000 years old, because I could no longer believe that God would damn someone to an eternity of hellfire for being born in the wrong place. When I was 16 I started masturbating and dabbled in watching pornography. I feel like either traditional relationships or liberal ones, I would be very out of place in, and it feels like it's already too late for me. I am also disgusted by the results of liberalism leading to the death of Charlie Kirk. I might have to make a new post tomorrow in Wellness Wednesday about this, but it's obviously going to be super personal and uncomfortable. I now remember one reason why I never dated in high school.
Man, it's not that hard to find a church that doesn't screw these things up.
Is it? As someone who took religion seriously enough on its own terms to be turned off by its falsity, it seems like a central problem that no religion has solved, by virtue of them all explicitly saying false things.
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I know it isn't, but I have to be honest, I was raised in that kind of faith environment for 15 years. If a church shifts their stance on things because they feel they had to, that's going to feel like a softening to make way for what we've learned about the world in the 2000 years since the New Testament rather than the Divine Word being something for everyone eternally. In short, I am just as confused spiritually as I am sexually. I guess I really do have to make a Wellness Wednesday post, because I bet most therapists wouldn't even understand the question.
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I would be very skeptical that you are more debauched than I was. Even when I decided I didn't want to live that way any more, I still was quite determined not to marry and had no interest in children. By the time I started coming around to the idea, I thought I was too old.
I'm married with kids now, and much, much happier. It is almost certainly not too late for you.
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I would by no means tell you to go to church again if that's not something you're interested in; but I would note that at least according to my understanding, there's no expectation of perfection. I've had my own challenges with masturbation and many other things. We confess that we're sinners in every Sunday service, and we do mean it. All of which is to say, I doubt that you're actually too fucked up to succeed in a relationship. Those of us that are in them are very flawed, come from many weird and conflicting backgrounds, and make various compromises. Even the most perfect-seeming trads deal with all kinds of doubts, inner demons, and guilt about things they can't go back and change.
Anyway, you can continue changing and growing. I didn't marry until I was 35, and if I look back on it, I think that's the way that it had to be for it to work out for me. I had to find my own resolutions to some things which felt irreconciliable.
Hope you do post in Wellness Wednesday, will be looking forward to it.
I am touched by your looking forward to me posting. I will post, but it's going to take a while, because it will have to be long and extremely personal.
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Haha I like how you've written this. This is good advice. Yes, my question was more about creating a social circle. I haven't had one that isn't digital in a long time. The digital ones go pretty well! People think I'm funny and I have a pretty good amount of social capital, and I've really gotten a lot more confident about talking to random people about whatever the hell I want to talk about or what I think they'd be interested in. But they're all men and they're all around the country and they can't help me. Same for my family. I also live in a rural area that hemorrhages successful young people, and my brother is a loser too, and my mom isn't in any social circles that have any young single women, and my dad's crazy and far away and a loser too, and my grandma is only friends with other old women.
I went on some language learning apps to try to get some practice talking to actual women, and it seems many of the conversational skills transfer over, but there's still a lot I don't know, and there's so much that isn't conveyed that it would be pretty difficult to meet someone and marry them that way. I thought it would be easy, but women apparently don't think coldly about the benefits of American citizenship like a man would, and international college-educated women with interest in languages are similar to American college educated women, in that they don't even know what they want, and marriage isn't even on the radar until later in their lives.
I'll pop in a week late to say he's giving excellent advice up there on the general strategic level. And the only way to get better at the tactical level is to do it, over and over again.
The "Get a friend group and stick with them and build until you start running into attractive single women" is a workable strat, and avoids the main miseries of the current dating market. Pre-screening women before actually investing in them saves much grief.
There's a couple failure modes to avoid:
(1) Selection effects rule everything. Notice if the friends you're hanging out with are 'losers.' If your other friends aren't in relationships, or actively and successfully dating, or at least managing to bring women around to your social gatherings, and its usually just you all hanging out with each other... your hunt is not being served by sticking around. Indeed, its pulling you off course, and you'll get into a bad comfort zone that will be harder to leave the longer you stick around. Worst case these guys sabotage your attempts to find a mate out of jealousy or somesuch.
(2) The opposite problem also arises sometimes. If your male friends actually pair off and get married, the friend group will disintegrate. Its just what happens when a guy gets a serious relationship, can't do as much socialization (doesn't need to either). And I can say that being the sole single dude with a bunch of married or seriously dating guys kinda sucks. And unless those guys are still actively trying to get you hooked up, it will again start to run counter to your goals, since those guys aren't aligned with your goal of socializing with single women.
Basically, you may have to remake the social group a couple times as some members pair off and drop out or it becomes clear that they're dead weight. And unfortunately the longer a group persists, it can tend to be the losers who stick around b/c they can't pair off and they don't have much else going for them. You'll notice they're the ones who ALWAYS show up when you suggest something to do, as they don't have anything better going on, ever.
(3) Once you find someone attractive DO try and get a date relatively quickly and then ask for exclusivity relatively quickly after that because holy cow the friendzone does exist, and you can find yourself there without even knowing it happened. I define it mostly as a relationship position where any attempts to advance it romantically and/or sexually is 'awkward' due to the lack of sexual tension and overfamiliarity with the other person, and yet cutting it off feels inappropriate since neither party has done anything 'objectionable.' And then of course the girl in question might show up with a new BF without much warning and now you're in a pretty tight spot, emotionally speaking.
My only advice on that is definitely try to remain 'mysterious' as well as displaying your value and competence. Don't let a girl ever think she can just call you up and ask for favors, or do 'buddy' things with her (go out shopping, do brunch, binge watch shows without intending to bang), or understand your true motives. You want to remain in a superposition of "I could ask you out at any time/but I don't want to" until YOU make the decision to collapse the waveform.
(4) And a parting thought: If you have a good group of friends, don't ever leave them because of a woman. If both you and she are integrated in the friend group, and you break up (for relatively innocuous reasons), don't just let her have the friends and you move on. SHE will have a much easier time plugging into a new social group, so stand your ground to the extent you are able. And if your bros won't back you in that play, they're probably not your bros (or you did something horrible).
If this sounds like a lot of work, yes. It is. But its generally fun and rewarding and the skills are cross-applicable. It won't rip out parts of your soul like online dating or other rote relationship-seeking strategies.
Wow, this is good advice! I saw some notifications and thought "damn, the AAQC must have brought more attention to this embarrassing thread", but thanks for the input.
I have had friend groups composed of "losers" with no cross-sex appeal, and I also saw possible friendships locally and watched them go by because they were with "losers". I get along with losers, but if I'm going to be friends with losers, they may as well be the most maximally entertaining to me, and I already have maximally entertaining losers (they're not really losers, they just can't really help me) in my online friend groups.
My generalized advice for finding a friend group: learn to fight.
That's your best chance at finding physically fit, socially active, yet potentially nerdy male friends out there. 28 is a fine age to start. That's where I found the core of my current social group.
Online friend groups can be great but you really need to be having gatherings in physical space, where a woman can actually see you in person and you can actually monopolize her attention for a while if you want.
I'm speaking as someone who has had to completely rebuild/reform friend groups like half-a-dozen times over the years, and may have to do so again soon, since most of the dudes in my current group have gotten into stable relationships and... predictably, are putting less time in being social. And the guys who are still around are, unfortunately, the ones who've had bad luck with women.
All that is to say that it will work, but you might have to be the guy who does most of the hard work up front.
I don't know if I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm not looking to date right now because I still have not moved out yet. I got a job and paid off all my debts, but I have not moved out yet. That said, more practice making friends quickly will be helpful, so I will be re-joining the gym soon, both for that and also to lift weights diligently because I gave up learning languages and find that I have a ton of extra time. Also I'm going to be trying both the social connection strategy and the dating app strategy at the same time, because they complement each other.
I don't know if I like the advice to start martial arts. I took Tae Kwon Do from 10 years old to 16 years old. When I was a kid, Tae Kwon Do was simple fun, and you got McDonald's afterwards. But starting at about 15, my brother and I were the only adult males in the class; all the other postpubescent males had quit in the years previous. Whenever we sparred, it was him and me; I discovered the first incidence of male rage in these sparring matches. If I took a direct blow to my (padded) head, or experienced some other minor ass-kicking, I found that I was so angry afterwards that I could not speak, otherwise I would reveal the tears that had involuntarily welled up in my throat. This was how it was in most tournaments. I do not like this feeling. I felt the same feeling playing baseball in my senior year, when I was 18; I never even played catch with anyone before, so it was a sharp learning curve, and I don't think I did poorly in those circumstances, but I failed a lot and continued to misplay for the admittedly pretty bad baseball team, and every time I was the source of a bad inning, I would get very mad. I remember more than one game, we would all get in a circle and take a knee, and my face was involuntarily contorting itself in sheer rage. No tears that time, though.
I dunno. Maybe I'm mature enough to handle it now. I don't get mad at Tarkov or DayZ like I might have, and those fill me with adrenaline. But I do get mad and start shaking due to nerves if I break up my dogs fighting and one of them bites my arm in the chaos, though it doesn't help that I consider their continued fighting to be an unresolved serious issue creating tension in my life.
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