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This has always been amusing to me. Online discourse is profoundly rife with "alpha fux, beta bucks" and "no man can get dates finder is a hellhole" but all my male friends seem to have as much sex and dates as they want.
Admittedly, my social sphere leans towards white collar yuppies downtown, so there's lots of fish and no one is answering "flip burgers" to the "what do you do" question.
But even my childhood friends, who are not yuppies, still pull?
One guy works like 2 days a week (smokes weed the other 5) and lives in a shitty apartment but always has a new girl, and they're bartenders/bottle girls/etc (one time a stripper lmao) so they're attractive, if messy.
Another is decidedly not conventionally attractive, works a non status job, and churns first dates enough he had to stop posting Instagram stories of sunsets because he was getting worried someone would notice (it's his first date move).
Im not sure how to reconcile these two realities.
Possible that they're extraordinarily charismatic and kind of...retired from the high-reward, high-stress lifestyle that you get when trying to monetize that. Like a guy with a math degree from Princeton undergrad working the counter at Subway, or the former investment banker working as a chef or cook at a small resort.
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I wonder if it’s basically shared knowledge. The thing about dating is that nobody will tell you how it works. If you’re lucky in your social circle, you and your friends figure it out in your late teens and pool your shared knowledge and experience. If not, your only option is people who are incentivised to lie to you: priests, gamer girls, masculinity influencers, MeToo journalists, etc.
For various reasons, all these people tell you what they want you to believe, not what’s true. For high-conscientiousness men especially this is a killer.
People flock to those like themselves, so you have all-male groups who collectively have no idea how to get dates and have male hobbies as an alternative, versus mixed groups like yours who all date constantly.
I think that might explain what you see.
I'm confused, how do you figure priests are incentivized to lie to people about how to find dates? I wouldn't go to a priest for marriage advice (for obvious reasons), but plenty of priests dated (and yes, even had sex - priests are sinners too) before joining the clergy. For example, the pastor of my parish is a pretty young guy who was engaged before he decided he was being called to the priesthood, so he could probably give decent advice about attracting women (if you're in Brazil where he's from).
There are priests who are good at this and priests who are bad at this, IME.
Obviously if you ask your priest how to get laid on a first date he will answer ‘dont’. But the better ones are fine people to listen to. Few of them are popular on the internet.
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Essentially along the lines described below by other posters. I would expect priests to be disproportionately virgins or bad at dating for the obvious reasons, and they are also often older and regarded as pillars of the community. Finally, Christianity has certain ideas about what women and dating are like and how they should work (as do feminism, PUA, etc.) and priests are sort of expected to uphold those values.
As such, it's not that priests are incentivised to lie to you exactly, but I think to some extent they are motivated to lie to themselves and also they will not necessarily tell you all their own private thoughts. Some very self-aware exception will exist, as with any other creed, but I don't think institutional authority figures in general are very helpful in this sphere.
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Priests and especially Protestant pastors, influenced by feminist tendencies, often tend to push misandric, gynonormative ideas, even though Christianity as a creed is unreservedly and unquestionably patriarchal.
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It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.
Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.
I was going to say that churchgoing women outnumber men, so yeah maybe. But, now that I google it, articles say young women are attending church at much lower rates than previous generations. So much lower that it flipped to more young men than young women who regularly attend church.
Sorry young guys, you missed the boat on that one.
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It's simply the 'alpha fucks, beta bucks' phenomenon in action. And what you and @rae are generally describing are the 'I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon' effect in action.
But what I'm saying is that my friends really aren't too 5% Giga-chads and those last two example friends are extremely not that.
So if I know lots of non-alphas who are fucking, what's up?
Yeah I guess my thinking was if below average men in the looks/earnings/status department can get laid regularly, anyone can
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At the risk of being circular, one answer is that if your friends are getting loads of dates / sex with reasonably attractive girls, they are in fact giga-chads because that's what being a giga-chad is. Whereas if someone is rich and handsome but can't get girls interested in him, it would be odd to call him chaddish. Some men seem to have It, a strange factor that impresses other people, and much of the verbiage spilled here and elsewhere is working out what It is and how people who don't have It can get It.
That's a fair point
I guess my thinking was if they can do it, anyone can. But thinking about it more today, one dude is extremely forward and the other is nominally shy/introverted but he does play the numbers game.
I guess for the "shy" one, I'm still suprised he pulls as much as he does (given internet discourse) as he uses tinder, etc and isn't that hot. So the narrative "tinder only works for the hottest men" falls apart a bit.
Also both of them are more than happy to date women that aren't perfect (one literally dated a stripper). So they're also realistic about standards.
That seems sensible. I know a fat, short dude who's fun but not good looking by anyone's standards (think fat Gimli) but he has a happy marriage with a lovely girl who he essentially seduced away from a much handsomer and richer dude; he's as forward as that sounds.
I think that it's partly that dating is heavily subject to virtuous cycles - even if you're dating on tinder, if you've got photos of yourself with affectionate women, if you're obviously comfortable with women, if you know how dating works and how to take the lead and make people feel comfortable, that makes up for a lot. Which is encouraging in that it suggests that datability can be improved, it's just that from a certain starting point it's hard to see how in an easily actionable way. @kky had the right of it when he talked about tractability. Also mixed friendship groups probably help a lot.
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