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I'm not in Jesusland, but my experiences are similar to yours, so I don't think it's a regional thing. I think it's that there's two general groups which I'll call Type A and Type B. Type A people generally are who they say they are, are generally honest, and are trying to make meaningful connections. There is always going to be a certain amount of bad behavior and game playing, but it's minimal, understandable, and manageable. Looks are obviously important here, but personality, intelligence, and compatibility are more important factors in overall attractiveness. Aside from certain ingrained cultural norms like the guy proposing the first date, etc., men and women tend to act similarly. Type B people see relationships and dating primarily as an extension of some kind of seduction game. Hookups are common, cheating is common, suspicion is common, possessiveness is common. Physical attractiveness is an overriding factor. The men are aggressive and the women capricious.
Generally speaking, people date within their lane. If a Type A guy sees a Hinge profile of a Type B girl, there are subtle hints that direct him to the skip button, and if this system fails and he sends a like anyway, there's a backstop in that the subtle hints on his profile will prevent her from matching. If the mismatch goes any further, and a Type A guy ends up on a date with a Type B girl, it usually ends up in the "Funny Dates from Hell" story archives. The problem arises when Type A people inadvertently send Type B signals and invariably end up on a tragic series of dates with Type B people, causing them to become disillusioned with the process. With men it usually results in their friends remarking that they sure know how to pick 'em. With women it results in a series of loser boyfriends whom their male friends never accept into their circle and who snigger at him behind his back. With men it's easy to write this off, at least for a while, because there's an implication that the guy made a conscious decision to prioritize sex over anything else, though after a while people start to suspect that he might just have bad luck. Women get more sympathy, usually along the lines of "She's such a nice girl; it's a shame she always ends up with such bad boyfriends. If only I knew a nice guy to fix her up with."
I blame bad dating advice. By which I mean most dating advice. Romantic problems aren't exactly uncommon, so there's a vast universe of books, internet articles, Reddit posts by unqualified morons, and other stuff out there, in addition to what is reinforced by TV and movies, that purports to reduce romantic success to a series of easy-to-follow tips. While generalized advice isn't necessarily bad, once you start closely following the rules of the game, the only people who are going to follow along are those who know how to play. And Type A people don't play games. This may sound odd coming from my because I gave out Hinge advice a while back, but Hinge itself is an app and totally is a game and I can tell you how to filter for and attract Type A people. But I made it clear then that once she walks through the door and sits down, you're on your own. At that point you're no longer trying to outcompete some guy on an app but you have her undivided attention, and it's all on you.
Consider the below advice that the guy should send sexualized messages between setting the date and the day of, and to unmatch if a favorable response is not received. Now, I have neither sent such messages nor received any, but I have a lot of Type A female friends who have and say it's a turn-off. I have no desire to send such messages, and if I were to receive one I'd consider it a red flag. If I already had a date planned I wouldn't cancel it due to principle, but I wouldn't go into it with high expectations. Then again, I'm probably already filtering for women who wouldn't send unsolicited sexts to strangers. It's worth keeping in mind that women can follow similar rules if they want to. In fact, there was an entire movement around it in 1996 called The Rules, a thin book of dating advice by two women who would tout its supposed advantages on Oprah and other such shows.
Though the authors never stated it explicitly, The Rules were driven by a strong undercurrent that feminism had been a disaster for women's dating prospects and that what was needed was a good dose of old fashioned traditionalism.
The truth is that nobody is qualified to give advice on how to obtain a long-term relationship. If you're looking for a wife, would you take advice from a guy who's been married five times? If your goal is to simply find a wife, then this guy is evidently good at convincing women to marry him, but few would say that he's any good at relationships. A lot of people on this site would find that idea appealing. What they wouldn't find appealing was the actual rules themselves. They suggested that women should play hard to get, that men should always pay for everything, and that women should basically play all kinds of games designed make the guy practically beg for their attention and should be prepared to cut bait the minute he got a little out of line. In other words, they're basically the female equivalent of the rules @SSCReader gives below. The book was absolutely savaged by feminists, not only because of its retrograde nature but because it treated men like toddlers who are only interested in a toy that somebody else is playing with.
What both positions boil down to is basically fear. Yes, it's true that the person who is less invested has more power in a relationship, and it's also true that some people don't appreciate what they have until faced with the prospect of losing it. What these sets of rules do, though, is see these things as ends in themselves that are to be exploited. On the one hand you have a guy who is in constant fear that his girlfriend isn't that interested and is on the verge of leaving him. On the other hand you have a woman who is only acting the way she is because she is secretly terrified that her boyfriend will dump her if he finds out she actually likes him. Does this sound like the foundation of a healthy relationship? If rules like this have any value, it's that they prevent interaction between members of the opposite sex who are playing by similar sets. A Rules Girl will never have to worry about the SSCReaders of the world, and the SSCReaders will likewise never run into any Rules Girls. But that's as far as it goes. Intelligence isn't reverse stupidity, and landing the kind of person who has nothing better to do than sit by the phone waiting for your call isn't exactly triumph.
Actually my wife is Type A girl. My "rules" only really work for online dating and are there to short circuit the sheer volume of matches and interest women get, to ensure you are able to keep interest romantically not platonically. No sexting involved just sexually charged flirting. Those are very different things. If you were aiming just to hook up you wouldn't need those rules at all.
Its only useful for a Type A man trying to keep the interest of a Type A woman who is getting potentially hundreds of matches and messages.
I was dating to find a wife not to hook up and indeed succeeded. I aggressively filtered out women who were not seriously looking for a long term relationships (Type B's in your parlance I guess).
I would give very different advice for non online dating. Its a high volume platform by nature, so you have to adapt. Someone who is not messaging you much when interest and mystique should be at there highest right at the start is sending you a signal.
All i can tell you is that almost all my dates were with what you call Type A women. Witty sexually suggestive flirting works pretty well.
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Well, if roystgnr nominated me for an AAQC, I nominated you. While I'm not certain the difference between players and connectors is completely discrete, they probably do cluster bimodally. And of course players aren't immune to long-term commitment for the right person, though I do worry about the foundation that game playing lays for the future of a relationship.
Perhaps that goes to explain my own experiences at the party school. Where, of course, I ultimately met my match (that sounds more ominous than I intended), but not before feeling confused and played by the young woman I talked about in my first comment. When I look back on things, I think she was surprisingly honest, but presumed physical closeness without an invitation of intimacy functioned as one. You could think of this as a shit-test, but perhaps more truly it was a Type-B signal that my Type-A brain read correctly as loading all the risk in my direction, because that's how the Game is played according to the Rules.
On the other side of the fence, one of the strange problems of being a geeky Type-A man dating geeky Type-A women is that, through whatever correlative associations (autism, neurodiversity in general?) drive it, geeky women are often not merely demisexual but asexual. Or they may be confused about their sexuality, which may be a little weird, in the same way in which male geeks are just a little weird.
But an "I'm totally autistic, I have way too many hours in Baldur's Gate 3, my life goal is to pet as many cats as I can, my hobbies include making my own cosplay, I geek out over anime and manga" girl who decides the cutest pic of herself consists of her in a piano-keys themed skirt -- yes I'm thinking of someone I know in particular here -- well, that kind of girl exists, and sometimes she would like a man to have sex with her. (And sometimes girls like that write tentacle porn fanfiction, but we're not going to talk about that right now.) And if Skulldrinker could become legible to her not just as charming bartender but as geeky charming bartender, I'm hopeful.
Often a girl like that is chubby, though. It comes with the territory. "Doesn't get out much, plays video games all day, not outdoorsy, not into foreign travel"... this kind of person would be described as "having a sedentary lifestyle," and the medical literature describes that as a pretty strong correlate of metabolic disorder. The only people I know like that who aren't at least a little chubby have a medical condition or some kind of eating disorder. So it really, really narrows the pool to focus on weight to the exclusion of personal compatibility, and bland dates with thin people who do nothing for you can often be the result.
And yeah, they're often politically liberal. But sometimes not. The more common configuration is politically moderate, doesn't like Trump, cares more about treating people well than solving political problems. Liberal women are what they are, and it is humorous if a little alarming to hear a date say "I would never trust a white man" while she's staring into your white-ass eyes with longing, and even funnier when she subsequently makes a joke about something looking like Trump's hair and then apologizes for getting too political, as though making fun of Hair Force One is more controversial than racial bias.
For what it's worth, I think the tension between Type-A women and Type-B men is what contributes to a lot of the "I'm trying to avoid the redpill creeps" stuff you hear from young women nowadays -- it really is not a fun time to end up attached to a strategically withholding seducer as a basically honest person looking for a meaningful connection.
But the challenge, as always, is that people with a large enough amount of power -- and the attractive, dashing, and beautiful have a great deal of power within their sphere -- are always tempted to play by the rules of the game by which they win, and it strikes me as a real fact about the dating world that the most attractive cohort of people are more likely to withhold and hold out for a 'better deal.' I've never had specific interest in the 'hot girls', but maybe my impression that they're not looking for something meaningful says more about my place in the looksmatch pyramid than any inherent fact about the attractive.
Every piece of relationship advice suffers from survivorship bias. "Just be yourself" became such a big piece of advice for two reasons -- first, that putting on an act, while possible, is extremely psychologically expensive, and if you're trying to reassure someone nervous, telling them to stop looking at themselves from the outside and instead try to inhabit the moment from the inside is a much more fruitful piece of advice that might actually result in chemistry and charisma. And second, because the best and happiest relationships result from connections where "just be yourself" really is the method of making an impression. Someone who finds you charming for who you are is far more likely to find you amenable over the long term, and history is written by the winners.
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