This comment was from JP McMahon on the post “Why Does Rejection Suck So Much?“
“…I have a pretty high opinion of myself, as do my many friends of both genders. It’s just that none of those friends are women who have any interest in having a relationship with me, at least not lately.
I think that good looking people assume, wrongly, that people that are not so good looking are going to find someone down in their league. A very attractive person has so many more opportunities in this area, that it is hard for them to imagine someone who doesn’t have any, or at least very few. It is like someone who says “I don’t care about money.” You never hear a really poor person saying that. In these articles about dating the way people look never gets the attention that it deserves, because to some degree, it is an intractable problem. You can redistribute money, but you can’t redistribute looks. People can donate time and money to the less fortunate, but no one is going to donate a roll in the hay to someone that hasn’t had one in years, no matter how bad they feel. It’s not fair, and can’t be made fair no matter how many “love yourself” bromides that people throw out there.”
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Photo of an (apparently) handsome young man removes his face as a mask by Shutterstock
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I would take that even further to say that you can redistribute money but you can’t redistribute dating success. Even if you take looks out of the equation there is still a matter of chance. The chance that you will actually meet someone you’re compatible with (and then there is still chance involved in how well that compatibility goes). Mind you looks seems to influence chance (as you say you tend to have more options when you are more attractive, most of the time).
Another one that bothers me a bit is the whole “there’s more to you than having a partner” bit. So far pretty much the only people I’ve ever heard say that are people who have had some degree of success in the realm of dating. I understand that one should not base all their value on the ability to find and keep a partner but it comes off sounding like that guy/woman that’s “loved and lost” telling the guy/woman that’s “never loved at all” that dating/love/sex isn’t that big of a deal.
I know many who could use a donation or 2, hell after my week I need 3. There’s probably a reason prostitution has long been around…
The government *could* redistribute dates the same way they distribute money, by force. Moreover, the moral argument would be identical, i.e., people are born “unequal”, and this is not “fair”, so the government must equal the scales. The only difference is one of practicality.
Actually, while the government has never
REdistributed sexual/romantic success, the laws defining marriage as monogamous only, and the former prohibitions on fornication and adultery were an attempt to give as many people as possible opportunity to get married, and have more or less equal sex lives.
Good point, very few people seem to realize that monogamy was probably invented to benefit men more than women. In poygamous societies, many men never have a chance to marry. Aimless young men were a social problem; every time a war ended, for example, scads of single men would descend on the countryside, with nothing to do except make trouble. Making sure every man got a wife and family served the interest of social stability. Or at least that’s one way of looking at it. It is doubtful that women in the ancient world were the ones demanding monogamy, since they had no voice in political and religious institutions.
Monogamy has tended to be the rule throughout human history though. Most of the polygamous societies I can think of existed in a situation where only some men had the resources to support a family.
I don’t think one can really argue that either gender “invented” something as basic as monogamy. If monogamy were purely a deliberate construction of society then we’d expect to see less animal species which are instinctively monogamous.
I was thinking “invented” in terms of enforcement by religious and cultural institutions, such as in ancient Rome, where the law only recogized one legal wife (although rich menhad slaves and concubines). Hunter gatherers generally don’t prohibit polygamy but as a practical matter, most men can only support one wife and family by hunter gathering. I recall reading that the Lakota Sioux only started to practice large scale polygamy after the introduction of the horse , which allowed men to kill more buffalo, and the development of trade that let them sell the skins to traders. Then men needed more wives to process the hides, and could support them via the trade in buffalo skins. Rich men started to have a lot more wives. The demand for women became higher, and men started kidnapping women from rival tribes and from white settlements. You can see how these same forces in the ancient world could lead governments and religious authorities to encourage or even mandate monogamy.
“Hunter gatherers generally don’t prohibit polygamy but as a practical matter, most men can only support one wife and family by hunter gathering.”
This assumes a few things…first that men are “supporting” their spouses in hunter gatherer populations, and second that the hunter-gatherer populations have spouses in the first place. Not all societies regulate relationships in the same way. Also, plenty of hunter-gatherer populations aren’t really set up with ‘marriage’ or having a ‘spouse’ as the normal family unit. It’s inaccurate to group ‘hunter-gatherer populations’ together and then talk about cultural norms within those populations as if they apply to all (or even most) of them. Frankly the only thing hunter-gatherer populations all share is their subsistence strategy (i.e. that they are hunter-gatherer).
And I know this is a bit tangential to your main point, but it’s important because I think a lot of what you are saying here draws these broad parallels between various populations and makes some big generalizations that aren’t quite accurate. Not to mention, the idea that governments encouraged monogamy as a way to protect women who were being kidnapped or something is highly inaccurate. For one thing, women aren’t necessarily seen as any less of a commodity in a monogamous society than a polygamous society. For another thing, kidnapping and raping women of rival tribes/groups/whatever is something that all sorts of cultures have done, monogamous or not. That is more to do with the way in which a society conceived of slaves and personhood.
From a social standpoint, monogamy is about controlling sexuality (men’s and women’s) and controlling paternity. That’s it.
Indeed. Some of the polygamous subcultures in our society (like fundamentalist Mormon enclaves) have developed a drastic solution to this problem. They violently expel low-status, young males, usually when the males are in their teens. That way, the middle-aged or elderly males who control the community can continue having their pick of 12 and 13 year old females to be their additional wives, without having to deal with a growing class of marital “have-nots.”
The difference between redistributing money and redistributing dates or “roll[s] in the hay” is that people (i.e. dates) and their sexuality are not commodities to be distributed by the government. Yeah, it’s unfair if you don’t have the stereotypical, media definition of good looks. But in my opinion, it would be even more unfair if you did and were ‘redistributed’ to roll in the hay with someone less unfortunate, simply because they were less fortunate. Prostitution, when consented to by autonomous people making a conscious, free choice is completely different for obvious reasons.
My view is that dating success if fundamentally proportional to the number of women you approach and talk to. The higher the number the better. Looks help but I know guys better looking than me who do a lot worse and conversely. Generally the guys who complain the most about being rejected by tonnes of women, being beta males and no girls wanting them are simply guys who don’t go after enough women.
And the guys I know who are most successful generally have a combination of a few attributes
1) they talk to tonnes of women of all shapes, sizes and looks
2) they are extremely friendly, very easy to talk to and very nice. When they talk to girls they are good listeners
3) they dress well, are well groomed and are generally physically attractive though not necessarily very good looking
4) they are RELENTLESS and very persistent
5) they can often dance well and are in good physical shape
6) They go out a lot, have a lot of friends, go clubbing, dancing frequently
None of them are very dominant in an alpha male sort of way but they are very social. Almost all the qualities that are possible to attain. I suggest the following:
1) Meet more people. Signup to meetups on meetup.com. Meetup has single groups, language groups, polyamory groups….tonnes of groups. You can meet plenty of people. Go to university clubs, associations. There are tonnes of events that go on everyday in a reasonably large city (I live near Toronto). Go online and find out about events, parties etc in your neighbourhood. Talk to people at work, at school and make friends. Get a social circle. Its easier done than said. You just have to make an effort.
2) Exercise…weightlifting is probably best. HIIT is good too. Exercise is probably the most important suggestion because it will improve your mood. And for most guys who can’t meet women, their depressed mood is the biggest reason they have problems.
3) Signup to Eharmony. Be aggressive in getting dates…don’t waste too much time in online messaging.
4) Dress well. If you don’t know how get a girl to help, get a magazine like GQ or just watch people in the mall to see what fashions are current.
5) Ask girls out. Ask for their numbers. Tell them their beautiful. Their cute. Show interest. Listen to them. Talk to them.
6) Learn Salsa. This is a double plus because you learn a skill and meet women who you can ask out. Later you can go to Salsa clubs and dance with women.
7) Find a guy who is good with women and see what he does
8) BE RELENTLESS. Most important thing. If you do this for anything in life you will succeed.
This has been the subject of comedy since ancient times. In Aristophanes’ play, The Assemblywomen (Ecclesiazusae), women take over the city of Athens and institute a sort of compulsory sexual access law for all citizens. However, the young, attractive men are required to have sex with old, hideous women before they are allowed to have sex with attractive women. So they must donate “rolls in the hay” to the unsightly class before they are allowed to access the sexually attractive class for themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblywomen