For decades, women like you have been wondering, “Where are all the great guys?” You’ve been asking yourselves that, and anyone who will listen, because frankly guys have no fucking idea what they’re doing. Not when it comes to sex and dating and women, anyway.
Here’s the thing though: it’s not their fault. Our culture has failed them (and you in the process).
They’ve been fed a bunch of bullshit by parents, priests, professors, and politicians trying to tell them what to do, usually in service of some kind of selfish agenda that had nothing to do with their (or your) health, happiness, or mating success.
They haven’t been taught a fundamental truth that sits at the heart of mating success and your frustration: to be successful in sex and dating, you simply have to become the kind of man that women have evolved to want.
This is not a revolutionary concept; it’s an evolutionary one. To quote the great Ron Burgundy, “It’s science.” To quote actual scientists, it’s a biological process called “female choice.” Like all clever creatures, human females choose their mates according to certain criteria and preferences. If guys fit your criteria, you’ll consider giving them the time of day (or giving them your number, or giving them head). If they don’t, too bad, so sad, buh-bye.
This is where the real problem lies with modern sex and dating: neither of you, especially when you’re young, have the first goddamn clue what those criteria actually are. At least not consciously.
For you, these are mostly unconscious preferences. You can feel them in your instinctive response to strange new guys, and if you sit and think hard about it for a while you can get pretty close to articulating them. But for guys, your preferences are like a Rubix cube locked inside finger cuffs wrapped in the plot to Game of Thrones. It’s a giant, scary, thorny ball of WTF??
These criteria break down into 9 basic areas: physical health, mental health, intelligence, willpower, kindness & assertiveness, social proof, material proof, aesthetic proof, and romantic proof.
I am going to lay them out and describe them here, so you have a better understanding of where those weird (at least initially, when you’re younger) or strong preferences come from and so you can articulate just what is lacking from the men circling your vagina like planes at an airport waiting to be cleared for landing.
Physical health: A good body and good skin will always be more attractive than a bad body and bad skin. But thanks to modern media, a lot of guys think this means they need six-pack abs and the ability to curl a truck, so they hit the gym like they were born on Jersey Shore. Or, if they’re out of shape, they sit back in their little video game den resenting you for being superficial because you’re more attracted to someone who isn’t a doughy piece of shit. In reality, the female preference for physical health is anything but superficial. Physical health is the outward indicator of how well your whole body works as an organic system. It reveals how many mutations are in your DNA, and predicts how effective you’ll stay at life and how long you’ll live.
Mental Health: Crazy isn’t sexy. I tell guys this constantly, and a lot of times they don’t believe me because they see guys who are clearly not totally mentally healthy do really well with women. This is especially true when you’re younger and you mistake obvious cues to poor mental health as something more benign. He’s not a psychotic obsessive, he just really, really, really likes me! He’s not a depressive, he’s just sensitive and passionate. He’s not bipolar, he’s just exciting and spontaneous. The big obstacle all the normal, great guys have is that they are generally quieter and less confident, and you don’t notice them right away (or at all) because all the crazy dudes who bring the drama are sucking up all the oxygen in the room.
Intelligence: Smart guys lose their fucking minds when I tell them how important intelligence is. I’ve got a 4.0 and I’m going to an Ivy and I’ve never even seen boobs in person!! Girls pretend I don’t even exist! There is a lot of truth to that, but what those Mathletes don’t understand is that academic intelligence is only one kind of intelligence—and the least important, on top of it all. Social, emotional, verbal, and practical intelligence are far more important. Those are the types of intelligence that are often on display when you have found yourself attracted to a frat guy who is a total academic underachiever but can work a room, put you at ease, hold a conversation, and fix the tap when the line for the kegs backs up at a party. That dude is SMART, just not in the way that is going to get him on the Dean’s List.
Willpower: You know how a guy will say he’s going to do something and two days later it’s still not done? Or he’ll promise to change some behavior and it never happens? That’s willpower—or a lack of in this case. If this sounds a lot like the guy you’re dating, and you get in fights over this stuff, recognize that it’s not that he doesn’t care about you or respect you or even listen to you. It’s that he fundamentally lacks willpower. Guys who show some follow through—they do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it; they show up on time; they keep their shit clean—are always more attractive than the other guys in their group. It’s almost always a function of this underlying trait of willpower. A lot like good mental health, many younger women don’t fully appreciate its presence until they deal with guys where it’s not there at all. Fortunately, willpower is something that can be developed, like a muscle. So if you really, really like the guy you’re dating now except for this nagging lack of willpower, just understand that there’s hope.
Kindness & Assertiveness: At some point in their dating lives, most every guy has either tried to be “Mr. Nice Guy” or “The Asshole”, and neither strategy has worked for them because they’ve been doing it all wrong. When they’re the nice guy they act like spineless doormats; when they’re assholes they act like raging douchebags. One of the reasons they struggle with this is because women don’t know how to describe what it is they’re looking for with this set of traits. It’s not that you want someone who is right in between—this isn’t a spectrum or a sliding scale—it’s that you want a guy who is capable of being both, but at the right times. Specifically, a guy who is kind to you, your friends and family and pets; yet assertive to the outside world in your defense when necessary. It’s kind of like your version of guys’ preference for ‘a lady in the street and a freak in the sheets.’ If you can recognize this evolutionary based preference it will also help you falling for and sticking around in relationships with guys who play the asshole all the time because that’s who they are.
Social Proof: We are a social species. No one likes to hang out with loners who have no friends, let alone date them. That’s why it’s important for guys to cultivate a strong social group and the ability to operate comfortably in a social setting. There are a ton of benefits to dating a guy who has a good group of friends, which is why those guys are among the most attractive and why guys in frats tend to have a leg up in that regard compared to non-Greeks (the social group is built in). If you are trying to figure out if a guy you are attracted to is a good dude, one of the best places to start is by looking at his friends: a) does he have any? b) are they good people? c) where does he fit in amongst the group?
Material Proof: The bitterest of single guys think that all women care about is money. You can attest to the fact that this claim is utter bullshit, considering the number of broke dick dudes you have hooked up with in college. Sure maybe you didn’t date many of them, but who wants to eat ramen every night? It would be a lie to say you don’t care about money, so don’t do it. What’s important is to understand WHY money is important to you. For most women, the data shows they care less about money itself than what it represents about the guy who has it/made it. Financial success is a powerful indicator of the presence of all the other more important traits that you find attractive. Sickly, ill-disciplined shitbirds aren’t pulling in six-figures, and probably neither are their parents.
That’s why most of you good women don’t actually care about a BMW as a car, or a managerial position as a title, or a condo on an upper floor as a living space. You care about them as signals of their underlying traits. Their possessions are not “superficial” status symbols — they are material proof that these guys have the positive traits needed to be effective and care for you the way you want.
Aesthetic Proof: If there is one place where guys sabotage themselves the most with women it’s in thinking that dressing well, grooming, style and taste are only things that gay guys and metrosexuals like. You know who else likes that stuff? HOT GIRLS LIKE YOU. Obviously, you’re never going to turn most American dudes into European fashion models, but that’s not the point. And it’s not even like this preference for beauty and style is anything new—you’ve been selecting guys based on those criteria for hundreds of thousands of years. Many animals do. It’s why it’s so often the male who is the pretty one of the species: the male peacock has all the pretty feathers, the male lion has the big mane, the male cardinal is the bright red one. These conspicuous displays evolved to signal to female eyes and brains that the male who possessed them was so fit, strong, and capable that he could easily afford to spend his energy lugging around all this risky, unnecessary bullshit just to get their attention. The same principle applies to well-fitting clothes, a good haircut, a well-appointed room or apartment, and slick accessories. Don’t let media or bitter dudes convince you that stuff is gay or metro if it’s something you like—own it, because evolution sure has.
Romantic Proof: I just went through all the evolutionary preferences coded into your DNA and all the criteria you use to look for great guys, but once that’s all said and done you still need one more thing from them—you need guys to express their interest in you and display their romantic intentions toward you individually and specifically. You need to see, hear and feel that the guy you are interested in is going to marshal all those resources and positive qualities for your benefit. Whether that means PDA, gift-giving, setting up romantic dates, or choosing you instead of 10-cent wings in front of his bros, is really up to your personal preference. There isn’t a right or wrong set of behaviors, within reason. This seems totally logical and reasonable, right? What makes it tricky is the potential, however slim, that you might reject their advances when they make them. Guys are desperately afraid deep down at an animal level of being sexually humiliated by a woman in public. That’s why romantic proof is the area guys have some of the most trouble with. It’s why you can send them every obvious signal in the book short of wearing a tank top that says “PLEASE ASK ME OUT AND THEN TOUCH ME IN MY BATHING SUIT PARTS”, and yet they still won’t make a move. It’s frustrating as hell, which is why it is both the biggest initial stumbling block to getting together and the last big piece in escalating between the different stages of a relationship.
To answer your original hypothetical question, great guys are all around you. They’re just not as loud or obvious as the less stable, less interesting, less great guys. Or they’re still young—guys mature much slower than women and are essentially retarded until they’re 30—and they are slowly growing toward being effective, great guys. So for the guys you like, give them time, give them a little encouragement, and give them as clear an understanding as you can of what you want.
In the meantime, I will handle the rest of the guys out there with our new book, “Mate: Become the Man Women Want.” If you don’t want to have the conversation with the guys you’re seeing, buy them this book and tell them to read it. If they won’t, then hit them over the head with it..
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