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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested.

This seems like it's veering towards a No True Scottsman sort of thing. As in "if women don't want to be around you, it's clear they're not at ease in your presence, which is what trustworthiness means, therefore you weren't trustworthy to begin with". We can generally infer "trustworthiness" by how people act in other areas of their life, if they follow the rules and don't cheat, etc. Of course men could behave differently in contexts that involve women, but we'd generally expect a pretty strong correlation. Yet there are plenty of men who are trustworthy in other areas often don't find much success in love.

Here's my own personal take of what it takes to be successful with women:

  1. Be attractive, and don't be unattractive. This is like 50-75% genetic, but you can put in an effort to change yourself or at least present yourself in the best light. Physical attractiveness is the bedrock that everything else is built off of and if you have it then everything will be far far easier. If you don't, then it will be much harder.
  2. Have the right personality. There's a lot that of factors here, but in a nutshell it's that you want to be the guy who is "fun at parties", i.e. charismatic, funny, confident, spontaneous, has social proofing, that sort of thing.

Being "reliable" isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's an overriding concern most of the time. Perhaps a lack of reliability could be seen as sufficiently negative that a girl who would date a guy wouldn't want to marry him, but I've never seen it be a proactive concern beyond that.