You're right but I think there are some subtle points worth bringing up.
Confidence is internalized social status. If you take ecstasy then your effective serotonin rises... and you're way better at flirting. Same thing when you win a contest (like a fight) or get a lot of positive attention.
I know that's not what it feels like. I assume it feels like a man knows what he's doing, knows how to solve or prevent problems, and can defend what's his. He feels solid in a sublime way.
And... the word "confidence" doesn't really help young men understand what women want in men. I think there are a few words that don't translate well between the sexes because our experiences are too different. I would say something like "women want dominant men but dislike domineering men".
"women want dominant men but dislike domineering men"
That's a good way to put it. I like "confidence" because it's more broad. Perhaps there are translation issues.
I used competence and pride in one's abilities as examples of confidence. The advice to get good at something, or to redirect one's focus to being proud of what they already know themselves to be good at, would be one way to attain more self-confidence.
re: the translation issues, see, I would've thought "dominant" still sounded too aggressive for what I'm trying to describe. If someone would've told me "women like dominant men," I would've probably argued a bit to tease out their meaning of the word first before agreeing. Like, technically it is correct, but when people use the word "dominant" to refer to men, it's not usually said in a positive way, at least currently or in most contexts.
Yep! That’s most of why I distinguish between dominant and domineering. A dominant man will say “wear the blue dress” but won’t have a problem if you wear something else. A domineering man will get aggressive if you wear something else.
Could also be described as the difference between a leader and a tyrant.
Dominant is really not a good word here, so easy to misunderstand. It sounds like an obsessive winner. Better call it competence and courage. And the courage part is not so important, we are living in civilized times, defending yours is not a thing because what is yours is never attacked.
Dominant as opposed to submissive. I agree that it doesn’t fit well because of the connotation. Unfortunately there isn’t a word with the right denotation and connotation. But that shares a cause: our culture gaslights (or at least lies about in face of evidence) men about what women want, which also means altering language.
As praxis though… I think your terms are excellent. Telling a young man to be competent AND courageous will give him a path to finding love that will actually work.
Confidence isn't always internalized social status, because oftentimes incompetent people are overconfident about their skills. It's the whole Dunning-Kruger effect thing where once you start getting good at something your confidence in what you're doing plummets (because you're now able to more effectively recognize your insufficiencies) and doesn't rise as high as it was when you were an incompetent jackass again until you achieve some level of mastery.
What's more, sociopaths and narcissists are extremely good at mimicking confidence, which is probably the reason we're stuck with them in the first place; these personality disorders, though very antisocial, can be genetically adaptive.
Aside from these caveats, I think you're mostly right that confidence is internalized social status, though, which opens up some interesting questions about the various systems we've developed in recent times that advantage women over men.
In contexts in which women are systemically being given a leg up over men, social status is being bestowed upon men based on their capabilities and accomplishments less than it used to be, and that's probably throwing a significant wrench into the gears of relations between men and women.
Add to this the way that many men's capabilities are less and less obviously visible in the digital age, and things get more thrown off balance and confused between men and women.
Then toss general social atomization and the normalization of corporate dating apps into this mix and you get a paradigm in which men who are capable of expressing narcissistic/sociopathic traits are severely incentivized to do so.
And I guess I haven't even touched on the way that the social justice people spent years throughout the 2010s and early 2020s doing everything they possibly could to try to demolish the sexual/romantic confidence of ordinary men. Maybe that's a topic for another day.
For some weird reason, I think you might be really good at this writing about women thing.
A lot of "dating advice" that proliferates on social media is less focused on what women want and more on what turns them off- so the stories that are amplified most are those where women get grossed out by guys who are *too* dominant, too creepy, too faux-macho. But otherwise well-meaning men miss the forest for the trees and assume that "if I'm nice, then I should be better than those guys". This admittedly isn't helped when (some) women tack on the "Dating isn't hard, guys, just don't be an asshole like XYZ I dated last week and you'll be ahead of 90% of guys" line, which only strengthens the man's belief that being nice is *all* he's got to do to attract a woman. After all, a Real Woman said being nice wasn't hard and most of the guys she dates are assholes who can't even clear this bar! And yet despite being nice, he ends up striking out anyway. Which again feeds into the "women don't know what they themselves want" framing when this ends up backfiring. And everyone loses, except the people who write articles about how horrible the other gender are.
I am sympathetic to women in this regard though, because- it's hard for me to phrase this, but let me make an effort- it feels like if you hold up any particular virtue that women supposedly value in men, it also provides less freedom for women to retain the right to reject them on other grounds? If you say that men should be nice, then it's that much harder to find reasons to reject nice men. If you say that men should be vulnerable, then it's that much harder to find reasons to reject vulnerable men. And if you say that the perfect man is someone who's nice, vulnerable, yet strong, rich, has a dog, speaks Spanish, etc., and someone comes along and checks all those boxes, but he still gives you the ick for some reason? Ultimately, I feel any Rule for Dating, no matter how intentioned, is inherently adversarial to Rule #0: Sometimes a woman just won't like your poor dumb ass and there's nothing you can do about that. But then again, I suppose part of what separates a child from an adult is learning how to internalize that fact without becoming a simp or an incel.
And about confidence, let's throw a firebomb out there: Confidence is one of those things, like money, that's incredibly easy to gain when you already have it and incredibly difficult to gain when you don't. Yet we feel much more comfortable pointing this structural inequality out when it applies to money and not to approaching women. The implications are left as an exercise to the reader.
It's interesting you mention that stating affirmatively what women do want could make it more difficult to reject them on other grounds. I actually thought about that in regards to confidence. I thought about a guy I dated just after I graduated high school, so I was maybe 19 or so. He was a really confident guy for sure, and after hanging out a few times, he seemed really cool and like we had common interests. We dated for about 6 months total. Turned out that despite having all the confidence in the world, we were simply just a bad match. We're actually still friends all these years later, but as a couple it just wasn't going to work. I don't honestly remember what I told him, but I'm hoping that given my age at the time, it was honest and not a dumb, confusing excuse.
But yeah, sometimes people just aren't going to gel no matter how awesome each person might be in whatever way. There still has to be room for chemistry to matter. That ex and I did not have it, lol. In fact, the more apparent our intrinsic differences were, the less attractive he became to me, physically. That's why "Chris" and "Wil" were exceptions and I usually didn't date guys until I knew them better, because my initial impression of how they look is so easily changed by actual personalities, in either direction. The craziest things can become attractive to someone you didn't even find appealing before, once you get to know them and are charmed by them in whatever other way. Of course someone's appearance is often the precursor to getting to know them better, but being friends first helps, at the risk of bringing up "friendzone" discourse. One guy I dated that took me YEARS to get over (I talked about that relationship in my older post about a blind date on election day) was not someone who was even on my radar at first. He was a coworker that I found to be... snobby. Like, so confident in himself and his intelligence that it backfired and completely intimidated me. So maybe confidence can sometimes be too much, but that's more about how you use it. But "smart and snobby about it" pretty much became my "type" after I broke through that shell and we dated for two years. I think it was 2012, ten years after we broke up, when I sent him the last drunk "I love you and miss you so much" text. He had a girlfriend and definitely did not return my feelings anymore. Mortifying lol.
I know what you mean about confidence. It's hard to say exactly how to gain it when you're starting from zero. That's part of why I tried to stress how wide-open the options are. The driving thing in particular kinda cracked me up back in the day. Like, driving? That turns women on? Sounds ridiculous if true, but from my own experience and conversations with friends, it's absolutely true — at least it was when we were teenagers. I don't know if driving has done it for me recently. Music, though, remains a constant. Thank goodness my husband is tolerant of my insufferable obsessions with some of these artists, lol. He is a musician himself, so he acts like it's cute and says he remembers girls acting the same way when his old band was touring. But dedicated hobbies are one of the best ways toward more confidence, I think.
I agree with you that maintaining it is difficult if it's not coming from a sound place, which is really tricky. I know male and female confidence are different beasts, but I've struggled with having fragile self-esteem that is easily shattered with certain kryptonite (if someone so much as insinuates that I look like a boy, my middle school self emerges immediately and I need to immediately go put on more makeup or change my clothes or something, lol), although the older I get, the less those things tend to matter. I ALMOST said something along the lines of "fake it till you make it," which could ostensibly work during those times where the confidence level has dipped for whatever reason, but honestly it felt too contradictory to other things I said, like how some guys are really just bullies in disguise and trick you into thinking they're confident, and I didn't want my message to be all convoluted.
Bookmarking this to reply later because you bring up a lot of great points but typing long comments on a tiny motorola is not going to be a recipe for fun.
I hear ya there. I have about 3 comments and messages I have been waiting to reply to for the same reason. Regular keyboards are superior to touchscreens for long-winded people like us ;)
(sorry for the lateness on this one, it took a moment to write, and I guess reading it will explain why.)
I understand your reluctance to bring up the friend zone. It's something people on both sides of the aisle have instinctive, tribal reactions towards (even though I have confidence you're one of the few people who could write a brilliant piece on it given the chance). There was a writer on here who wrote a really good article on explaining the friend zone in a way that really captured the pain of hearing "let's just be friends" in a way that wasn't misogynistic or horny, but unfortunately it was before I realized Substack had a bookmark button and I can't find it any more.
Anyway, your experiences with past dates and your honest impressions of liking and not liking them at different points have been really helpful to read about, and I think one reason why it's so hard for most people to talk honestly about this stuff (in co-ed public discourse and not amongst groups of same-gender friends) is that, well, the heart wants what it wants, and at the end of the day, there's an exception to almost every dating rule out there. (This includes even seemingly obvious rules like "don't beat her up", as some celebrities have sadly shown.) There are, of course, literal billions of dollars' worth of books, websites, podcasts, and courses on dating advice out there, so it's not like people aren't trying, but one gets the sense that a lot of the advice in there isn't particularly, well, novel or groundbreaking.
(This next part will stray slightly off topic, but I think it's relevant...eventually.)
Early in college, I remember a conversation I had with a similarly-nerdy classmate when we were commiserating about our respective (poor) love lives, and I remember him claiming that most articles on dating could have been written by a virgin.
Part of that was probably him just blowing off steam, but I think his point was more serious than it had a right to be, because we both knew full well those articles exhorting us to be ourselves, wear clean clothes, demonstrate interest in her questions, don't stare at her sternum, etc.- none of it was wrong, but also nothing was in there that we didn't know already from doing our research and making the radical assumption that women generally don't like dates who are lecherous, boring, or stinky.
Honestly, looking back, I think we could genuinely have written a dating advice article and submitted it to a blog without anyone discovering we were virgins. Step 1: Don't be rude. Step 2: Dress nicely. Step 3: You get the idea. Of course, we'd likely be found out if anyone ever actually asked follow up questions, but even so.
At the end of the day, dating is one of those things you Just Can't Learn from a book, no matter how well-written, and the reality is that you can do all the basic things right and still lose, because most women want a date that goes beyond just hitting all the basics, but most dating resources seemed reluctant to mention that inconvenient fact. Any honest dating resource would have to account for the fact that humans are emotional and capricious and contradictory in all its beauty, and in doing so, such a dating resource would have to admit its own fallibility. I guess it’s easier for a lot of us to pretend that there’s no dating obstacle that can't be overcome through hard work, because admitting that some people just won’t gel with you feels like an inherent diss against your character that’s hard to dismiss, as illogical as that sounds to someone with healthy self-esteem. It would be nice if there was a blueprint you could follow that would 100% guarantee you a date with any person you want, but then again, if you reread that sentence, would you truly want to live in such a world? From such understandable human wants does dystopia spring.
As Ozy Brennan pointed out in that good feminism and dating article from a while back, dating is just complicated, bro. (Or sis.) There's a lot of room for hurt and charity in either direction, and I understand the impulse upon being rejected by someone to dehumanize them if only to render their hurtful opinion of you less hurtful, and the impulse to label them hypocritical or lying if they fail to conform to the well-meaning script you set up in your own head. Still, it bears realizing that dating rules are sometimes contradictory not out of any grand conspiracy of women but just because humans are complex and people fall in love with people, not attributes on a check list. Of course, that does little to stem the very real feelings people feel when they fall short for whatever reason, and as far as I know, there isn't much we can do to make the process of striking out any inherently less of a blow to one's self-esteem unless one's self-esteem is already reinforced with steel. Going back to me and my classmate, I'm sure some people would look back at us and call us entitled for being hurt by the fact that women weren't lining up at our feet just because we met the bare minimum of showering, being polite, and not sending dick pics, but there wasn't really an accepted cultural language or framework for expressing the complex sense of feeling unwanted in a way that manages to not come off as piteous or hateful. Or maybe there was, but in the midst of hating ourselves, we couldn't find it in time for people to avoid blaming us for the problem in the first place.
---
There's an obvious tie-in here to the discussion about men and authenticity/vulnerability in literature; if I want to explore men's interiority in an authentic way, an honest way, and I pull from my own emotions to do so, am I going to write a protagonist who after getting rejected for a date for the twentieth time gives a cheerful smile, does some vipassana, and brews a cup of chamomile? I suppose I could, if I wanted to signal the healthy masculinity that "good" men should have, but this feels slightly performative in the same way that women resent being told by men to smile just to make the people around them feel better.
A common accusation against the male authenticity in fiction thing I've seen is that it boils down to male authors "just wanting to call women whores", and I have no doubt some do, but there has to be a charitable middle ground between "men just want to write gross incel shit about women and get rewarded for it" and "for all the talk about the patriarchy teaching men that anger is the only acceptable emotion, people don't seem interested in providing cultural scripts for men to truly grapple with hurt, pain, self-doubt, negativity in a way that feels affirming, agentic, and non-performative." I don't know if such a cultural script can come from men writing more honest literature, or men (or women) stepping up to mentor the younger generation, but what is abundantly clear is that the existing institutions we have aren't working, and all of us- in literature, dating, and life- are worse off for it.
"Dating isn't hard, guys, just don't be an asshole like XYZ I dated last week and you'll be ahead of 90% of guys"
This should be read like "don't be an asshole like him but have all his good traits, courage, confidence, competence, height, muscle mass, social skills and everything else I can think of"
I've been married for 20+ years now, and there's a lot of truth in what you're saying.
I've always told people, you'll find a women—when you're not looking for one.
It seems that people are at their worst (game or what have you) when they're “trying.”
Perhaps it's because they allude the essence of confidence—when they’re *not* trying.
When people aren't nervous, they generally seem confident. Think of a cab driver. They just drive the car, they aren't discussing with you how they are unsure how to operate it, or that they are unfamiliar with that particular car. If they did, you'd probably wouldn’t want them driving!
To simplify, people who are nervous, or otherwise uneasy, make the people around them nervous and uneasy. Considering that most people don’t enjoy a state of nervousness, they tend to avoid nervous people.
It’s why a lot of women check out married guys—before they realize that those men are married. Well, hopefully before they realize they are married.
I was once at a bar with a coworker, and he says to me, “Why are you cockblocking me, you’re married?” But I wasn’t cockblocking him, I was just talking with the female bartender about one of the videos that was on just on Chive TV. I was in-no-way flirting with her, but my coworker noticed that she was digging on me.
Why was she digging me? *Because* I was not “after” her. She was comfortable, and so was I, so there was no awkwardness.
He’s not awkward around women either, he’s just worried about first impressions, as most younger people are. That makes him appear nervous and women can smell that from a mile away. Conversations should flow, people can sense when you’re thinking too much, and they pick up on those cues. Most of the time we do it subconsciously, but we all do it.
So, from my experience, it’s not the douchebags that get all the women, it’s the guys that make the women feel comfortable—by themselves, being comfortable.
Confidence, I suppose could be used as a descriptive term, but it’s more that neither person is nervous, then they can pay attention to other cues.
La Rochefoucauld: "Only those who have the strength to be wicked should be praised for being good, because every other kind of goodness is just laziness or lack of will."
There is this line of thinking, I guess a version of slave morality: "I am too afraid and weak to hurt people. I don't hurt people. Therefore I am Good."
This type of person really does not do bad things, but also does not do good things, basically just does not do anything.
The problem is, this kind of person is really boring. And I think a lot of Nice Guys are of this kind. And they think they deserve praise for lacking the strength to be wicked.
People who do things are interesting. But doers will never 100% just do good things because they are not actually the saints the non-doers claim to be, they do good things like writing and photography and bad things like stupid fights.
There is probably a ratio. Like, one can have a relationship with someone who does 10 good things for 1 bad thing they do. Or something.
But it is not the bad thing that is attractive - that is merely tolerated.
The other problem is that confidence is indeed internalized social status as malloc points it out, and in my childhood status was assigned very viciously, those who beat up others were high and those who were beaten were low. To stay out of it, be a non-aggressive boy, and yet not get beaten and not get low status was impossible. This really did made assholes more confident and normally cooperative boys less confident.
What you said about Nice Guys not really "doing anything" is an interesting theory.
Also, I'm never more grateful for being a woman than when I hear stories about boys not being able to avoid fighting as kids and sometimes adults. I barely managed to not have to get into any real ones as a kid (not because I was mean, but because other kids were) and that was terrifying enough.
...I just read a diary entry from my junior year in high school ('00) where I talk about how sexy it was to watch a guy I liked smoke weed for the first time. lmao. See?
You have to win *some* status game, I think. Doesn't necessarily have to be the fighting one, and for your general welfare it probably shouldn't be. Could be money, could be brains, could be muscles. Of course it depends on the woman, and intellectual women such as yourself are more likely to go for smart guys; an athlete wants someone who can keep up with her physically. A wealthy woman may want someone who brings more to the table financially (and may be worried about gold-diggers and alimony).
You have a few to choose from, but a lot of guys aren't going to be able to win any, almost by definition. One of the side effects of equalizing money between the genders is many men no longer have anything to offer--the whole 'work on your emotional literacy and be supportive' rejoinder isn't going to work for more than a small fraction of men. A lot of guys aren't good at that to begin with, and anyway the number of women looking for a supportive partner is relatively small from what I've seen--the alpha female usually wants a double alpha plus male.
I will say lots of women who avoid guys who get into real fights were still looking for guys willing to do the kink thing, so likely there is some sort of animal attraction to savages, and the smarter ones are smart enough to find a workaround.
You're right but I think there are some subtle points worth bringing up.
Confidence is internalized social status. If you take ecstasy then your effective serotonin rises... and you're way better at flirting. Same thing when you win a contest (like a fight) or get a lot of positive attention.
I know that's not what it feels like. I assume it feels like a man knows what he's doing, knows how to solve or prevent problems, and can defend what's his. He feels solid in a sublime way.
And... the word "confidence" doesn't really help young men understand what women want in men. I think there are a few words that don't translate well between the sexes because our experiences are too different. I would say something like "women want dominant men but dislike domineering men".
"women want dominant men but dislike domineering men"
That's a good way to put it. I like "confidence" because it's more broad. Perhaps there are translation issues.
I used competence and pride in one's abilities as examples of confidence. The advice to get good at something, or to redirect one's focus to being proud of what they already know themselves to be good at, would be one way to attain more self-confidence.
re: the translation issues, see, I would've thought "dominant" still sounded too aggressive for what I'm trying to describe. If someone would've told me "women like dominant men," I would've probably argued a bit to tease out their meaning of the word first before agreeing. Like, technically it is correct, but when people use the word "dominant" to refer to men, it's not usually said in a positive way, at least currently or in most contexts.
Mars and Venus indeed, sometimes, lol
Yep! That’s most of why I distinguish between dominant and domineering. A dominant man will say “wear the blue dress” but won’t have a problem if you wear something else. A domineering man will get aggressive if you wear something else.
Could also be described as the difference between a leader and a tyrant.
Dominant is really not a good word here, so easy to misunderstand. It sounds like an obsessive winner. Better call it competence and courage. And the courage part is not so important, we are living in civilized times, defending yours is not a thing because what is yours is never attacked.
Dominant as opposed to submissive. I agree that it doesn’t fit well because of the connotation. Unfortunately there isn’t a word with the right denotation and connotation. But that shares a cause: our culture gaslights (or at least lies about in face of evidence) men about what women want, which also means altering language.
As praxis though… I think your terms are excellent. Telling a young man to be competent AND courageous will give him a path to finding love that will actually work.
Confidence isn't always internalized social status, because oftentimes incompetent people are overconfident about their skills. It's the whole Dunning-Kruger effect thing where once you start getting good at something your confidence in what you're doing plummets (because you're now able to more effectively recognize your insufficiencies) and doesn't rise as high as it was when you were an incompetent jackass again until you achieve some level of mastery.
What's more, sociopaths and narcissists are extremely good at mimicking confidence, which is probably the reason we're stuck with them in the first place; these personality disorders, though very antisocial, can be genetically adaptive.
Aside from these caveats, I think you're mostly right that confidence is internalized social status, though, which opens up some interesting questions about the various systems we've developed in recent times that advantage women over men.
In contexts in which women are systemically being given a leg up over men, social status is being bestowed upon men based on their capabilities and accomplishments less than it used to be, and that's probably throwing a significant wrench into the gears of relations between men and women.
Add to this the way that many men's capabilities are less and less obviously visible in the digital age, and things get more thrown off balance and confused between men and women.
Then toss general social atomization and the normalization of corporate dating apps into this mix and you get a paradigm in which men who are capable of expressing narcissistic/sociopathic traits are severely incentivized to do so.
And I guess I haven't even touched on the way that the social justice people spent years throughout the 2010s and early 2020s doing everything they possibly could to try to demolish the sexual/romantic confidence of ordinary men. Maybe that's a topic for another day.
For some weird reason, I think you might be really good at this writing about women thing.
A lot of "dating advice" that proliferates on social media is less focused on what women want and more on what turns them off- so the stories that are amplified most are those where women get grossed out by guys who are *too* dominant, too creepy, too faux-macho. But otherwise well-meaning men miss the forest for the trees and assume that "if I'm nice, then I should be better than those guys". This admittedly isn't helped when (some) women tack on the "Dating isn't hard, guys, just don't be an asshole like XYZ I dated last week and you'll be ahead of 90% of guys" line, which only strengthens the man's belief that being nice is *all* he's got to do to attract a woman. After all, a Real Woman said being nice wasn't hard and most of the guys she dates are assholes who can't even clear this bar! And yet despite being nice, he ends up striking out anyway. Which again feeds into the "women don't know what they themselves want" framing when this ends up backfiring. And everyone loses, except the people who write articles about how horrible the other gender are.
I am sympathetic to women in this regard though, because- it's hard for me to phrase this, but let me make an effort- it feels like if you hold up any particular virtue that women supposedly value in men, it also provides less freedom for women to retain the right to reject them on other grounds? If you say that men should be nice, then it's that much harder to find reasons to reject nice men. If you say that men should be vulnerable, then it's that much harder to find reasons to reject vulnerable men. And if you say that the perfect man is someone who's nice, vulnerable, yet strong, rich, has a dog, speaks Spanish, etc., and someone comes along and checks all those boxes, but he still gives you the ick for some reason? Ultimately, I feel any Rule for Dating, no matter how intentioned, is inherently adversarial to Rule #0: Sometimes a woman just won't like your poor dumb ass and there's nothing you can do about that. But then again, I suppose part of what separates a child from an adult is learning how to internalize that fact without becoming a simp or an incel.
And about confidence, let's throw a firebomb out there: Confidence is one of those things, like money, that's incredibly easy to gain when you already have it and incredibly difficult to gain when you don't. Yet we feel much more comfortable pointing this structural inequality out when it applies to money and not to approaching women. The implications are left as an exercise to the reader.
It's interesting you mention that stating affirmatively what women do want could make it more difficult to reject them on other grounds. I actually thought about that in regards to confidence. I thought about a guy I dated just after I graduated high school, so I was maybe 19 or so. He was a really confident guy for sure, and after hanging out a few times, he seemed really cool and like we had common interests. We dated for about 6 months total. Turned out that despite having all the confidence in the world, we were simply just a bad match. We're actually still friends all these years later, but as a couple it just wasn't going to work. I don't honestly remember what I told him, but I'm hoping that given my age at the time, it was honest and not a dumb, confusing excuse.
But yeah, sometimes people just aren't going to gel no matter how awesome each person might be in whatever way. There still has to be room for chemistry to matter. That ex and I did not have it, lol. In fact, the more apparent our intrinsic differences were, the less attractive he became to me, physically. That's why "Chris" and "Wil" were exceptions and I usually didn't date guys until I knew them better, because my initial impression of how they look is so easily changed by actual personalities, in either direction. The craziest things can become attractive to someone you didn't even find appealing before, once you get to know them and are charmed by them in whatever other way. Of course someone's appearance is often the precursor to getting to know them better, but being friends first helps, at the risk of bringing up "friendzone" discourse. One guy I dated that took me YEARS to get over (I talked about that relationship in my older post about a blind date on election day) was not someone who was even on my radar at first. He was a coworker that I found to be... snobby. Like, so confident in himself and his intelligence that it backfired and completely intimidated me. So maybe confidence can sometimes be too much, but that's more about how you use it. But "smart and snobby about it" pretty much became my "type" after I broke through that shell and we dated for two years. I think it was 2012, ten years after we broke up, when I sent him the last drunk "I love you and miss you so much" text. He had a girlfriend and definitely did not return my feelings anymore. Mortifying lol.
I know what you mean about confidence. It's hard to say exactly how to gain it when you're starting from zero. That's part of why I tried to stress how wide-open the options are. The driving thing in particular kinda cracked me up back in the day. Like, driving? That turns women on? Sounds ridiculous if true, but from my own experience and conversations with friends, it's absolutely true — at least it was when we were teenagers. I don't know if driving has done it for me recently. Music, though, remains a constant. Thank goodness my husband is tolerant of my insufferable obsessions with some of these artists, lol. He is a musician himself, so he acts like it's cute and says he remembers girls acting the same way when his old band was touring. But dedicated hobbies are one of the best ways toward more confidence, I think.
I agree with you that maintaining it is difficult if it's not coming from a sound place, which is really tricky. I know male and female confidence are different beasts, but I've struggled with having fragile self-esteem that is easily shattered with certain kryptonite (if someone so much as insinuates that I look like a boy, my middle school self emerges immediately and I need to immediately go put on more makeup or change my clothes or something, lol), although the older I get, the less those things tend to matter. I ALMOST said something along the lines of "fake it till you make it," which could ostensibly work during those times where the confidence level has dipped for whatever reason, but honestly it felt too contradictory to other things I said, like how some guys are really just bullies in disguise and trick you into thinking they're confident, and I didn't want my message to be all convoluted.
Bookmarking this to reply later because you bring up a lot of great points but typing long comments on a tiny motorola is not going to be a recipe for fun.
I hear ya there. I have about 3 comments and messages I have been waiting to reply to for the same reason. Regular keyboards are superior to touchscreens for long-winded people like us ;)
(sorry for the lateness on this one, it took a moment to write, and I guess reading it will explain why.)
I understand your reluctance to bring up the friend zone. It's something people on both sides of the aisle have instinctive, tribal reactions towards (even though I have confidence you're one of the few people who could write a brilliant piece on it given the chance). There was a writer on here who wrote a really good article on explaining the friend zone in a way that really captured the pain of hearing "let's just be friends" in a way that wasn't misogynistic or horny, but unfortunately it was before I realized Substack had a bookmark button and I can't find it any more.
Anyway, your experiences with past dates and your honest impressions of liking and not liking them at different points have been really helpful to read about, and I think one reason why it's so hard for most people to talk honestly about this stuff (in co-ed public discourse and not amongst groups of same-gender friends) is that, well, the heart wants what it wants, and at the end of the day, there's an exception to almost every dating rule out there. (This includes even seemingly obvious rules like "don't beat her up", as some celebrities have sadly shown.) There are, of course, literal billions of dollars' worth of books, websites, podcasts, and courses on dating advice out there, so it's not like people aren't trying, but one gets the sense that a lot of the advice in there isn't particularly, well, novel or groundbreaking.
(This next part will stray slightly off topic, but I think it's relevant...eventually.)
Early in college, I remember a conversation I had with a similarly-nerdy classmate when we were commiserating about our respective (poor) love lives, and I remember him claiming that most articles on dating could have been written by a virgin.
Part of that was probably him just blowing off steam, but I think his point was more serious than it had a right to be, because we both knew full well those articles exhorting us to be ourselves, wear clean clothes, demonstrate interest in her questions, don't stare at her sternum, etc.- none of it was wrong, but also nothing was in there that we didn't know already from doing our research and making the radical assumption that women generally don't like dates who are lecherous, boring, or stinky.
Honestly, looking back, I think we could genuinely have written a dating advice article and submitted it to a blog without anyone discovering we were virgins. Step 1: Don't be rude. Step 2: Dress nicely. Step 3: You get the idea. Of course, we'd likely be found out if anyone ever actually asked follow up questions, but even so.
At the end of the day, dating is one of those things you Just Can't Learn from a book, no matter how well-written, and the reality is that you can do all the basic things right and still lose, because most women want a date that goes beyond just hitting all the basics, but most dating resources seemed reluctant to mention that inconvenient fact. Any honest dating resource would have to account for the fact that humans are emotional and capricious and contradictory in all its beauty, and in doing so, such a dating resource would have to admit its own fallibility. I guess it’s easier for a lot of us to pretend that there’s no dating obstacle that can't be overcome through hard work, because admitting that some people just won’t gel with you feels like an inherent diss against your character that’s hard to dismiss, as illogical as that sounds to someone with healthy self-esteem. It would be nice if there was a blueprint you could follow that would 100% guarantee you a date with any person you want, but then again, if you reread that sentence, would you truly want to live in such a world? From such understandable human wants does dystopia spring.
As Ozy Brennan pointed out in that good feminism and dating article from a while back, dating is just complicated, bro. (Or sis.) There's a lot of room for hurt and charity in either direction, and I understand the impulse upon being rejected by someone to dehumanize them if only to render their hurtful opinion of you less hurtful, and the impulse to label them hypocritical or lying if they fail to conform to the well-meaning script you set up in your own head. Still, it bears realizing that dating rules are sometimes contradictory not out of any grand conspiracy of women but just because humans are complex and people fall in love with people, not attributes on a check list. Of course, that does little to stem the very real feelings people feel when they fall short for whatever reason, and as far as I know, there isn't much we can do to make the process of striking out any inherently less of a blow to one's self-esteem unless one's self-esteem is already reinforced with steel. Going back to me and my classmate, I'm sure some people would look back at us and call us entitled for being hurt by the fact that women weren't lining up at our feet just because we met the bare minimum of showering, being polite, and not sending dick pics, but there wasn't really an accepted cultural language or framework for expressing the complex sense of feeling unwanted in a way that manages to not come off as piteous or hateful. Or maybe there was, but in the midst of hating ourselves, we couldn't find it in time for people to avoid blaming us for the problem in the first place.
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There's an obvious tie-in here to the discussion about men and authenticity/vulnerability in literature; if I want to explore men's interiority in an authentic way, an honest way, and I pull from my own emotions to do so, am I going to write a protagonist who after getting rejected for a date for the twentieth time gives a cheerful smile, does some vipassana, and brews a cup of chamomile? I suppose I could, if I wanted to signal the healthy masculinity that "good" men should have, but this feels slightly performative in the same way that women resent being told by men to smile just to make the people around them feel better.
A common accusation against the male authenticity in fiction thing I've seen is that it boils down to male authors "just wanting to call women whores", and I have no doubt some do, but there has to be a charitable middle ground between "men just want to write gross incel shit about women and get rewarded for it" and "for all the talk about the patriarchy teaching men that anger is the only acceptable emotion, people don't seem interested in providing cultural scripts for men to truly grapple with hurt, pain, self-doubt, negativity in a way that feels affirming, agentic, and non-performative." I don't know if such a cultural script can come from men writing more honest literature, or men (or women) stepping up to mentor the younger generation, but what is abundantly clear is that the existing institutions we have aren't working, and all of us- in literature, dating, and life- are worse off for it.
"Dating isn't hard, guys, just don't be an asshole like XYZ I dated last week and you'll be ahead of 90% of guys"
This should be read like "don't be an asshole like him but have all his good traits, courage, confidence, competence, height, muscle mass, social skills and everything else I can think of"
Helfen! Meine Hosen brennen!
Very interesting.
I've been married for 20+ years now, and there's a lot of truth in what you're saying.
I've always told people, you'll find a women—when you're not looking for one.
It seems that people are at their worst (game or what have you) when they're “trying.”
Perhaps it's because they allude the essence of confidence—when they’re *not* trying.
When people aren't nervous, they generally seem confident. Think of a cab driver. They just drive the car, they aren't discussing with you how they are unsure how to operate it, or that they are unfamiliar with that particular car. If they did, you'd probably wouldn’t want them driving!
To simplify, people who are nervous, or otherwise uneasy, make the people around them nervous and uneasy. Considering that most people don’t enjoy a state of nervousness, they tend to avoid nervous people.
It’s why a lot of women check out married guys—before they realize that those men are married. Well, hopefully before they realize they are married.
I was once at a bar with a coworker, and he says to me, “Why are you cockblocking me, you’re married?” But I wasn’t cockblocking him, I was just talking with the female bartender about one of the videos that was on just on Chive TV. I was in-no-way flirting with her, but my coworker noticed that she was digging on me.
Why was she digging me? *Because* I was not “after” her. She was comfortable, and so was I, so there was no awkwardness.
He’s not awkward around women either, he’s just worried about first impressions, as most younger people are. That makes him appear nervous and women can smell that from a mile away. Conversations should flow, people can sense when you’re thinking too much, and they pick up on those cues. Most of the time we do it subconsciously, but we all do it.
So, from my experience, it’s not the douchebags that get all the women, it’s the guys that make the women feel comfortable—by themselves, being comfortable.
Confidence, I suppose could be used as a descriptive term, but it’s more that neither person is nervous, then they can pay attention to other cues.
I think you're spot on. I would put that lack of nervousness under the "confidence" umbrella personally, but I agree!
So, what are your plans this evening?
Just kidding, just kidding! 🤣😂
Lol
La Rochefoucauld: "Only those who have the strength to be wicked should be praised for being good, because every other kind of goodness is just laziness or lack of will."
There is this line of thinking, I guess a version of slave morality: "I am too afraid and weak to hurt people. I don't hurt people. Therefore I am Good."
This type of person really does not do bad things, but also does not do good things, basically just does not do anything.
The problem is, this kind of person is really boring. And I think a lot of Nice Guys are of this kind. And they think they deserve praise for lacking the strength to be wicked.
People who do things are interesting. But doers will never 100% just do good things because they are not actually the saints the non-doers claim to be, they do good things like writing and photography and bad things like stupid fights.
There is probably a ratio. Like, one can have a relationship with someone who does 10 good things for 1 bad thing they do. Or something.
But it is not the bad thing that is attractive - that is merely tolerated.
The other problem is that confidence is indeed internalized social status as malloc points it out, and in my childhood status was assigned very viciously, those who beat up others were high and those who were beaten were low. To stay out of it, be a non-aggressive boy, and yet not get beaten and not get low status was impossible. This really did made assholes more confident and normally cooperative boys less confident.
What you said about Nice Guys not really "doing anything" is an interesting theory.
Also, I'm never more grateful for being a woman than when I hear stories about boys not being able to avoid fighting as kids and sometimes adults. I barely managed to not have to get into any real ones as a kid (not because I was mean, but because other kids were) and that was terrifying enough.
...I just read a diary entry from my junior year in high school ('00) where I talk about how sexy it was to watch a guy I liked smoke weed for the first time. lmao. See?
You have to win *some* status game, I think. Doesn't necessarily have to be the fighting one, and for your general welfare it probably shouldn't be. Could be money, could be brains, could be muscles. Of course it depends on the woman, and intellectual women such as yourself are more likely to go for smart guys; an athlete wants someone who can keep up with her physically. A wealthy woman may want someone who brings more to the table financially (and may be worried about gold-diggers and alimony).
You have a few to choose from, but a lot of guys aren't going to be able to win any, almost by definition. One of the side effects of equalizing money between the genders is many men no longer have anything to offer--the whole 'work on your emotional literacy and be supportive' rejoinder isn't going to work for more than a small fraction of men. A lot of guys aren't good at that to begin with, and anyway the number of women looking for a supportive partner is relatively small from what I've seen--the alpha female usually wants a double alpha plus male.
I will say lots of women who avoid guys who get into real fights were still looking for guys willing to do the kink thing, so likely there is some sort of animal attraction to savages, and the smarter ones are smart enough to find a workaround.
Pockets?