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by vidarh
4 days ago
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I went down a rabbit hole of reading some of the "pickup artist" material many years ago, and it was fascinating because there was a whole range from the really ridiculous "one trick" peddlers who in some cases probably were proto-Andre Tates - isogynists who looked for all kinds of underhanded tactics to trick women and saw it as justified because they saw things as stacked against men - to people who were just a hair shy of more mainstream selfhelp of making yourself better to be more attractive. On the extreme end you'd see NLP, hypnosis and in some cases coaches trying to legitimise things that'd easily cross into assault. On the "near mainstream" end you'd see people pushing meditation, exercise, and mainstream authors on getting better at social situations (e.g. Dale Carnegie). The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out. I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick. |
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Though what helped me most was a mix of being more assertive, meditation and a strong sense of playfulness.
I always went the improv route, so while I read a lot of mainstream pickup stuff back then, I was too lazy to use it. Also, when it was clearly mean then I didn’t do it either (such as negging). It was fun to get some skill in being cocky and funny, but ultimately I fell in love with being playful. Communicating that way is so much fun, and it’s fun to go balls to the wall creative. Yep, I am in love with a communication style and way of looking at the world. So there’s that (I also was in love with learning Italian for a while). But my default mode is looking at the world in an analytical and data-driven/empirical way (while not noticing my irrationality).
The more reasonable dating coaches are still out there. They simply aren’t part of the mainstream advice.
The current mainstream advice about dating sucks. Though, to be fair: the mainstream pickup artists from back in the day also sucked. It’s a lot like mining: you dig through a lot of advice that is plain dirt so you can find the gems of advice that are sparsely scattered around the dirt.
I gave some dating advice to some HN’ers. If anyone wants some, feel free to message me. My email is in my profile.
I am married nowadays (after a few relationships).
What I do find interesting is: I can turn this part of myself off and then no woman sees me. Mostly because I lack initiative and look at the world too seriously. It’s handy because I never get into weird situations like a certain woman liking me at work, for example. It also helped when I didn’t know how to break off contact with someone who I knew wasn’t for me.