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.
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Notes -
I see some people decrying dating apps and saying that you should go meet women in real life.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I was far more popular with everyone, including women, in high school, and then absolutely nothing after that. But where would those meeting places be? I'm probably eventually going to get a new job in a new city, and I'll need something to meet people at, but I can't think of anything that would provide an environment like high school, where you could meet a ton of people and let your charm, wit, athletic interest, and good grades be on full display to dozens of people. So, where?
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.
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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