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.
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Notes -
Has anyone successfully paid a third party to run a dating profile? I really thought this would be a well-established market but I can only find a handful of extremely sketchy looking services I don't trust at all.
I am a loser who photographs poorly and I'm not good at talking to girls online, but I have a fair bit of money, so I'd pretty happily trade someone who's good at this a few hundred dollars per actual date who shows up (subject to sane constraints--no pros, not homeless girls, no one too old to have kids, not morbidly obese, etc.). I'd rather kill myself then ever swipe again, but I tried for six months to meet girls offline and got nowhere...so it's tinder or die alone like a pathetic loser.
What makes you say this? I'm not trying to give you an internet pump-up speech along the lines of "you're probably pretty great!"
No, I will accept at face value that you fucking suck, loser. Now, let's identify the problem.
Are you short and skinny? Do you smell and dress bad? You say you have a fair bit of money. Did you earn it or did someone die an leave it to you?
The point is that getting out of loserdom is really just a project like anything else. Identify what is lacking, create plans for compounding improvement, execute those plans, track and log progress, adjust along the way.
Here's a generalize bullet list that 99% of dudes benefit from:
I'm a physical loser ---> Go to the gym. There are a million beginner lifting routines. Do one. After six months, add a competitive sport. Doesn't have to be MMA / BJJ, just something where there is a definite winner and loser and people take it seriously. Don't do beer league softball.
I'm a social loser ---> Get good at small talk. Start by making short observations at checkout lines. Try to make simple jokes. If it goes poorly, you're in a checkout line and the interaction will end in literally seconds. You'll know you're getting good when it becomes almost second nature and you can get a chuckle most of the time. Next step, start going to bars and doing this with the bartender (doesn't matter if they're male or female). Most of their day is spent making small talk to medium talk (i.e. bullshitting with regulars about their jobs or whatever). They're pretty much on autopilot and also paid to be nice, so they'll help the conversation along even if you still kind of suck. This will help you get better at developing a few quick "lines" into full on conversations. An option but not really recommended step is to do this at strip clubs. Again, I don't recommend it but have great stories. I digress.
I'm a loser loser, meaning I have no confidence in myself ---> Paradoxically, one of the easier ones to solve. Confidence comes from exactly one process; demonstrate competence in a difficult task. You will pick a medium term task or project that seems hard, and then you will do it. Build a website, build a birdhouse, organize a party, train for an complete a 10k, something that takes around 90 days. Pick it. Do it. Write about it as you are doing it in a journal style. At the end, after you do it, read the journal, relive the emotional journey and realize "I did it even though it was hard along the way." Boom, confidence.
I'm an internet loser. This is guy code for "I watch porn." It's easy - stop.
I am an introvert. Note, I am happily married and do not need any dating advice, but this one sounds to be a bit like: "want to get strong? It's easy - start with bench pressing 300lbs and then do it every other day for 6 months and you'd be golden". I'm sure for some people that sounds like a reasonable advice, to me it looks so remote from my world and my character as a proposal to take a nice quick walk to the moon. I suspect it'd sound the same to many other introverts. My problem with it is not that it might not work - some people do bench 300lbs, so it might work for them - but that you make it sound like it's trivial for every normal person to do it, so when a person for whom it is not trivial reads this, they would only think it's because they are some kind of special extra-hard strength loser that go below even normal definition of loser. And that's just not the case.
It depends.
My husband and I are both high openness introverts, who are now raising high openness introvert children. One of the children did spontaneously strike up a conversation in the check out line today with a little kid sitting in a cart. On the other hand, the response rate for cute little girls smiling and waving at a store is something like 1/20, and I would expect for a non charismatic grown man to be significantly worse (and occasionally actually negative, whereas for the kids it's at worst neutral), so that's a pretty low value situation.
The strategy of just showing up somewhere and seeing if anyone looks friendly works pretty well, even for introverts. Either way, we'll have seen a thing, wandered around, and that's fine. Or maybe there is someone friendly there, and that's even more interesting! Lots of people all over the place are more outgoing than we are, so we've had a lot of interesting experiences this way. We just have to go take a nap afterwards. But we are all very high Openness in the Big 5 sense, so ymmv.
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