mr_engineer

The question is - 'What do women want in a romantic partner?' (Not in a sexual partner, in a romantic partner. To get laid, game is enough, I'm not denying that.) The answer is - Women want a man who is more successful than their (her) boss. It's not just enough to be the best on their level, you have to be the best on a level above them. This is why dating sucks when you're a young man. And most men in their 20s are content just sleeping around. It's not because they only care about sex, it's because they have low standards. Because they can't afford to have high standards, because this is what the modern woman wants. They talk about feminism raising the standards on men's behavior and 'respecting women', that 'women don't have to put up with your shit' and 'this is what makes you angry' (lol, nice gaslighting-attempt). What they don't talk about, is that the standards also get raised financially. And this is what's really disillusioning a lot of young men. Does this change anything about the patriarchy?! Nope. This is why they don't talk about this. Because, if they did, the whole independence-ideology would collapse. Can the men who are on this level of success have 'toxic masculinity'? Yes. But, it will be excused. Because, the bigger priority that women have in dating is just not talked about, which is that they have this level of success. It is a shame that decoding female behavior is so exceptionally hard. If women were just straightforward about this, years of men's lives would be saved.

Did she have an alternative for you? If not, she's full of shit and you need a new therapist.

As long as it's not dangerous, you could find girls who are into that shit.

Just don't do pick-up, then. Practice meeting women through your social-circle. Pick-up may not be for you. You need a very thick skin for rejection if you're going to do pick-up. You have to see women as a number and nothing more than that until they date you. You have to be very pragmatic. I don't feel intuitively guided to have this attitude towards dating and women. I would like to have more information about a woman before I make up my mind about her too, I would like things to go more 'naturally' for me. Pick-up really does feel like I would be forcing the issue, which is precisely why it primarily attracts players who want to use and throw women. Maybe that's what disgusts women about you cold-approaching them, that this may just not be your attitude towards dating in general, and you're committing to a process that you're not authentically on board with. Basically, what I'm getting at is that you need to have a 'player-frame', it should appeal to you. Then you will succeed in pick-up. To me personally, I find the player-frame very disgusting. And it doesn't align me with my goals, it feels like a big distraction, to become so cold-hearted towards women just so that I will have stories of sexual escapades to talk about. That's the only benefit of casual sex, really. (And, by the way, having a player-frame does not make you more 'loving' towards women, it makes you less 'loving'.)

Yeah, but how do you define the technique without theory?! Why should you believe in a certain technique, if there's no theory giving you a reason to believe that it will work?! You don't find the technique out there, you have to define it yourself and discover it for yourself. I don't even know how you define 'practice' without theory. What is it that you're 'practicing'?! Practice with theory is called 'deliberate practice'. I really don't see the point of demonizing theory. Isn't that because they need better theory? And better research that improves the theory? Keep in mind that what a doctor's degree ultimately means, is that they know theory. That they have taken theory-exams, passed them and gotten their degree. If they didn't have their degree and just said that they know what they're doing, you wouldn't believe them.

It can turn into a cult if the 'cult-leader' demonizes those who question them. If they can properly answer questions, then it can be consensual. And, the 'consent' being mindful, willing and uncoerced.

By meeting them through your social circle. The fact that pick-up has such a low success-rate is not an accident. The reason for it is that women don't trust people totally detached from their social-circle. I believe more in going through your social-circle than cold-approach.

This analogy is wrong, precisely because there is a tried and tested path to get good at playing a musical instrument. There is no debate about what it means to be good at it. Whereas in relationships, everyone disagrees on the theory. So, figuring out the theory is exceptionally hard work. There are certain 'high-yield techniques' to get good at anything. With musical instruments, because the consensus is strong, it's easy to just go to any music teacher and ask them what the technique is, they'll tell you. And that technique is universal, because no matter who you are, you're playing the same musical instrument. But, that's simply not the case with relationships! It's very personal. So, you will have to discover that high-yield technique for yourself. Based on your vision for it, your strengths and abilities, your resources. And, if I tell you what mine is, you may dismiss it and say 'no, that's invalid, mine is the only right one'. But who are you to say that about my high-yield technique?! Yall really need to get out of your illusions of the right way to go about this and wake up to the very real issues at hand. The biggest one being, the lack of theory. Stop denying the need for theory, it's very much needed. Religion has totally fucked up people's minds on the issue of relationships, so much so that atheistically minded people are running from relationships. That's why the divorce-rates are going up. Because your belief in God is how you create belonging, it's God that decides where you belong in this universe that it created, who you belong with. So, in order to create belonging, a shared belief relative to God is a must. This is why religions prefer to get people married within the religion.

@CARDOZZO I've read 'The Anatomy of Loneliness' by Teal Swan. Out of all the material I've seen out there, that book I take the most seriously.

"Do or do not. There is no try." - Yoda. When you go for it, you're not supposed to leave the possibility of failure open. It is essential that we nail this. Because the consequences of screwing this up could absolutely ruin our lives. This is not a game of house. Lives are on the line here. I DO NOT CONSENT TO GOING THROUGH 2-5 BREAK-UPS. Period, the end. Why the hell should I get my heart broken so many times, when I can just learn from the mistakes of others and not make them?! And they're really elementary mistakes, by the way. They seem really elementary and avoidable to someone who understands the theory, because most people don't know the theory of making relationships work. Doctors who went to med-school 40 years ago didn't learn a thing about genetics. So, they literally don't understand genetics. Now, though, students who go to med-school study huge books on genetics. So, they just know better about genetics. Better than doctors with 50 years of experience. Similarly, there was no social-media 40 years ago. So, Gen-X'ers know less about social-media than Gen-Z'ers. Evolution is a thing that you're not factoring in. Decades of experience isn't everything. A similar thing is happening on the relationships-front. Not so long ago, compromise was king when it came to making relationships work. That's simply not the case anymore. Now, it's all about compatibility. And personalization. The rules of the game have completely changed. And, everyone disagrees on the right strategy to win the game. Why does med-school have books, then?! There is a reason the best surgeons write books. It's for future surgeons to learn surgery. And, if you're not reading the big names in your field, you will cause a lot of suffering. Inevitably. A newly educated surgeon knows the theory of surgery, so they're fit to start doing surgeries. So, no, they do not have a 100% rate of killing you.

You mean, someone who screwed up 2-5 relationships?! That's a huge red-flag for me, actually. If you're going to screw things up, why not take baby-steps first?! When you say 'someone who's been through 2-5 relationships', I hear 'someone who's been through 2-5 break-ups' and I mentally dismiss that. I don't want 2-5 break-ups. Do you?! Or, it could be because the senior developer is so senior that the languages of their time don't exist anymore and they didn't keep up with the times enough to understand the languages of our time. I'd trust the person who only knows theory. At least, there's a possibility that they won't screw it up. But, someone who doesn't know theory, who's just slashing you with a knife, will, for sure, screw it up. Then, they'll be like 'I have a lot of experience dismembering people's organs with my knife. My body-count is 11. What's yours?!'

If it's a shitty textbook, I do, in fact, have to read another one and another one until the subject-matter makes sense to me. Then, I get to 'doing the math'. In fact, the process of finding the right textbook is a huge struggle in something as complicated as relationships. You have to make your own theory, actually. Cuz in math no matter who you are, 2+2 is still 4. But, relationships are very personal. Yeah, but that training doesn't show up as a W on their CV until they get it after 2 years. Also, until they have their first W, do you really know whether they were 'thinking and theorizing' or 'training'?! Socializing, speed-dating events, spending time with family, going to community-events and participating in them, connecting with women, making masculine/feminine dynamics work, going to salsa-class and figuring out the cultural obstacles in the masculine/feminine dynamics, doing trauma-work with therapists, having shadow-work groups in which we did trauma-resolution together, etc. Takes some observation but you can learn a lot just in everyday interactions with people, it's not that big of a deal. The thing is that whatever little experience I've had, happens to contradict what people who have been in fifty-year marriages say. Most people are utterly deluded about relationships. There is a severe lack of theory on it. In fact, when people like you say that it's not even needed, I find that ridiculous. I'm going to theorize based on whatever little experience I have. No, I'm not building castles in air. You don't have to believe me. But, I will not let you take away my right to make sense of the mind-fuckery that today's relationships are. He's more of an expert than a 1600s doctor who's done a lot of so-called 'surgeries' by doing blood-letting. When a new paradigm comes along through the new generation, this 'lack of experience' argument is a very common one that the established status-quo uses to discredit them. Relationships today are a shitshow. And it's all because there's no proper paradigm to make sense of them. Yall can sit on the sidelines and do nothing about this and say that 'this is an impossible problem to solve'. But please, let me do something about this.

People train for a couple of years before entering a ring. People go to college for 4-5 years and just study theory before getting their first job. It works out fine for them. You have to learn a lot of theory to make a relationship work. You have to know and understand what 'compatibility' means as a concept, what 'love' means, what 'masculinity' and 'femininity' mean, what 'protection' means, what 'teamwork' means, what 'belonging' means, what 'community' means, what 'family' means, what 'emotional needs' are, what 'significance' means. Even though I haven't jumped directly into a relationship, I have practically seen and observed how these concepts play out in real life. That's what my modelling is based on. I'm in the process of creating something that doesn't exist yet. You don't just 'get' relationships in the marketplace by paying money for it, you gotta create it. And it takes a lot of thinking to get it right, to make it work. Calling this mental-masturbation is like saying that 'Thomas Edison mentally masturbated in his lab for 50 years, failing to make the lightbulb work for thousands of times, before he made it work.' And, don't underestimate the negative consequences of getting into a relationship with the wrong person. That's not smart, actually, it could destroy your life. Your health, your money, everything could go down the drain with the wrong decision. Your advice basically sounds like 'when you're starting a business, don't think about the problems that could come up and how you're going to solve them, oh no. Just go for it, just invest everything you've got into a business, no matter how bad the idea is. If you lose everything and you die in the process, well, at least, you learned something! And don't talk to anyone about the practical difficulties of having a business, don't have a plan, just take action. If you die, we will have a great time cremating you.' Even Cinderella has a 'prince charming' in it. It's mostly kings, princes, CEOs. The only times I've seen a female-focused movie show a man with subpar success is when he's either the butt of a joke, or to demonize him as a 'bad deadbeat husband'.

Is this just condescension for its own sake or is there a point to it? What could go wrong if I think about this hyper-logically? I'm talking about the rom-coms pitched to women, not to men. The ones pitched to men do, in fact, show 'love triumphing over materialism', where the skinny nerd gets the girl over the jock, cuz 'love triumphs over materialism', 'he's more sensitive and loving than the jock'. But, in the ones pitched to women, they show a well-set, well-built, financially stable guy who also happens to be emotionally sensitive (lol, that's just not the reality for most well-set guys, you gotta be a ruthless killer to be that rich, unless you have a contribution-based Life-Purpose, in which case the protagonist/superhero is the man and not the woman), who takes her on expensive dates/vacations/they meet at a party in Miami or something where he's the host/very close to the host. And, the plot is about some emotional drama that happens with his ex, where his ex and the female protagonist are making each other jealous and then, he sees how much she loves her, how 'authentically feminine' she is, as opposed to the shallow ex who just wears push-up bras to look hot/who has a rich background herself.

That's the textbook definition of being dumb. If this isn't dumb, I don't know what is. You gotta roll with what you know, right?! Being dissatisfied with what I know and saying that 'I have a severe lack of information' takes away from my self-confidence and my game. I'd rather take pride in what I know. *@something_else is on a date with a woman* W - What kind of relationship do you want? @something_else - Oh, relationship?! I don't know, I'm clueless, I have a severe lack of information. W - Why are we on a date, then?! @something_else So that I can get information to figure it out for myself. You're just a number to me anyways, I'm just collecting data about women. Who are you, anyways?! Why are we on a date to begin with?! I don't know anything, I'm clueless. W - Aww, that's so sad! Go live with your mom, that'll teach you about women. It's relatively straightforward to see who the modern woman respects. And I'd rather be respected in relationship than not. When you say 'it can't be mapped out logically', this is a limiting-belief that complicates the whole process. If you just set the rules and work accordingly, things become very simple and straightforward. Also, if you don't map out compatibility logically, how do you justify the terms and conditions for your commitment? What's important isn't how they think, what's important is what they actually want. And who they actually fantasize about with their girlfriends. If you read romance-novels, they always talk about the 'rich client/CEO who came to meet their boss'. There are plenty of rom-coms in which they're flirting with a man who their boss is treating with respect in a professional setting. They see those kinds of men as hot shit. I'm talking about proper LTRs, not these situation-ships in which they meet some broke musician in a party, fantasize about them for a while, then they talk about it with their girlfriends, the girlfriend asks how much he makes, she can't answer it and she moves on cuz her image is on the line.

Yeah. I did Mechanical Engineering in my undergrad. And, I did a year of grad-school in Applied Math. So, yeah. STEM proper. Everyone is a nerd these days. That level of intelligence is the norm now. When I say 'intellectually smart', I mean, someone who is not an NPC, someone who has a mind of their own. That's much rarer. And, most of the people in the degenerate party-environment would be NPCs. Precisely because they're going there to tune out their emotional-issues. The party-environment is a giant coping-mechanism. Booze, sex, drugs, loud music, you name it. It's a shitshow. I've met some really amazing women in Boulder, Colorado. Everyone's crazy about physical fitness there, there are a lot of spiritual people, lot of psychics. Before going there, like everyone else, I just wanted a hot-looking woman. But, when I met women who were more spiritual, when I saw that there's more to relationships than what meets the eye, my ideas of what's possible in relationships expanded. So, if you're asking me whether what I'm saying is realistic or not, it absolutely is. If you go to a New-Age event and you tell people about your Life-Purpose, you will hook the hot women instantly. I may not have been in a relationship because of my level of readiness, I may not have engaged in casual sex because of my values, but I do know what hooks women in which environments. I'm not insecure about my level of game, given where I am in life. Women do this thinking with their girlfriends all the time. Why shouldn't we get to do this thinking?! Why should we have no standards, think with our dicks and just help each other with our game and nothing else?! I get the feeling that PUAs greatly underestimate the power of compatibility and being with a compatible woman. The quality of sex-life that's possible if we figure out compatibility.

No, not all women. Women whose authentic priority is relationships, who are intellectually smart, who are feminine, who have been raised to be 'independent', who don't fundamentally hate men in terms of mindset, who are ambitious, who have some self-awareness and who have healed trauma around men controlling them behave the way I'm describing. Those whose authentic priority isn't relationships will have loose attachments and will date loosely. They're better for friends-with-benefits arrangements than LTRs. Those who aren't intellectually smart are better for one-night stands than LTRs. Most 'club hoes' fall into this category, there's no scope for companionship with them. Those who haven't been raised to be 'independent' probably just don't go out enough cuz their family traps them at home doing home-making, so you don't bump into them outside. Those who aren't ambitious are going to cut the wind from your sails when you're being ambitious and they won't respect your dreams, so things won't sustainably work with them. Those who aren't self-aware will not tell you what they really want, they'll use manipulations to get their way in relationships. Not trustworthy, the relationship-environment will turn into an anxious minefield. A relationship with such a person will spiral out of control due to arguments and fights, even if the transaction somehow works out. And, those who haven't healed their trauma/who fundamentally hate men - you just stay away from them. They're not worth a single brain-cell of yours.

I'm sorry, I don't see women as walking talking holes. Also, I want the sex within the context of relationship, not just for the heck of it. Meaning, the relationship is more important to me. So, I must worry about long-term relationships.

Well, you talk about relationships like they're candy-bars. 'Just go and have one or two, then you'll know what they taste like. Then you talk about the taste'. You don't sound like you know much about relationships either. So, this whole point of 'you don't know about relationships' sounds very rich coming from you.

Yes. This is me setting those goals. I did some pick-up, saw what hooks women and got disgusted and disillusioned with the whole hook-up scene. It's very shallow and objectifying towards women, I never wanted to get into it. I just couldn't ignore it because of how normalized it's become. I am very scared of casual-dating, actually, because of the possibility of learning the wrong patterns with the wrong women. If you fall into the habit of 'not being logical' and 'not thinking about the consequences of your actions to yourself and to others', if you just 'go with the flow', this does not improve your selection of women. The biggest advice PUAs give is to 'let go of rejection' and to 'not take it personally' (which, by the way, contradicts the advice of working on your game and getting better with women, which implies that rejection is personal) and to approach indiscriminately. What this will do, in the best-case scenario, is it will attract low-quality women. Because, when you do no selection on your end and you have no standards, you give off a 'douchey' vibe yourself. So, the high-quality women will pass. Fine, congratulations, you got laid, but at what cost?! Selecting high-quality women and making things work with them takes a lot of brains, from what I've seen. These women don't settle, they're not in the casual dating-scene for entirely logical reasons. They have relationship-visions, strategies, foundations, plans, execution, positioning. They know their worth, they think very hard when it comes to selecting men. So, why shouldn't we think hard when it comes to selecting them?!

I'm 27.

I stand by what I said when it comes to LTRs. And 'talking to girls' is very different from being ready for an LTR. Again, fine, you can talk to girls on the side and sleep with girls on the side. You don't have to neglect your needs.

No, and this is why. I'm just not old enough for it yet!

This doesn't read like someone whose priority is relationships has written this. And, I disagree that artists need isolation-time. I'm an artist and I create the best when I'm teaming up with compatible people. They shouldn't clash. And you sound like you haven't put in the work to make sure that doesn't happen.

Right. So, your priority wasn't relationships. You're not the woman I'm talking about in this post, in that case. I'm talking about women who are fully ready for relationships, whose priority is relationships, who understand the gravity of commitment. Also, artistic growth can happen while being with the right man. It doesn't have to come at the expense of relationships. In fact, it can happen because of being with the right man! You have the luxury of talking in abstract terms like 'wanting to love and wanting to be loved' cuz your priority is not relationships. Those of us who value relationships don't have that luxury. How we go about this really, really matters to us. And we don't waste time prioritizing other stuff over relationships, relationships are it for us.