How do ERE men attract women?

[7Wannabe5]

I believe it is directional. A continuum. Connecting with a soulmate is associated with positive emotions, and losing a soulmate with negative emotions. The direction one is moving along the continuum is the key in my mind.

Well, the same continuum could be constructed for one's relationship with God, but many people simply aren't very religious and/or very romantic. I am living completely by myself for the first time in my entire life at the age of 58, and I don't find myself feeling lonely at all. Maybe a teensy bit more anxious, but that's just rational. I've definitely felt more lonely and more anxious at times when I have been married or living with a longish-term SO. In fact, I would say that I never felt more lonely than during the last 4 or 5 years of my 19 year marriage. I was so starved for simple affection, I literally burst into tears when the very nice Buddhist-guy-who-taught-gym-and-nature-studies-at-Montessori-school who was my first sexual partner after my divorce pulled me in for a cuddle. He was very recently divorced himself, so he started crying too Luckily, the interactions with my second partner were a lot more hawt and fun He took me bike riding and out to open air concerts and other interesting places and dropped me off the side of the bed and caught me again, and moaned when I slipped off my little silk polka dot dress, and made special play-lists of music for me, etc. etc. etc. SO MUCH BETTER THAN BEING TRAPPED IN A BAD MARRIAGE !!!

However, it is true that my ex-husband has been mostly alone and at least intermittently on pharmaceutical for depression since our divorce. So, there may be something to the theory, but I would say that it is more chicken than egg. As I have noted elsewhere, being married to somebody who is chronically unhappy is like playing catch with a dead dog. So, it's very important to avoid trading your above-average inherent level of happiness, optimism and/or easy-going-ness for other factors such as looks or money in relationship. Most of my partners have been better looking than me, and pretty much all of them have had or made more money than me, so that' one of my bads.

I am talking about HOW it is happening.

I am also developing a much more generalized response based on social network theory. I will get back to you with that.

[IlliniDave]

@IlliniDave - Keep on fishing

Ha, well, for the next 2.5 months I'll be taking that advice, but very literally. After that, remains to be seen.

[Henry]

Either find an ERE woman or turn a non-ERE woman out. If neither works, start an ERE monastery.

Live by the religious conviction sword, die by the religious conviction sword.

[chenda]

Either find an ERE woman or turn a non-ERE woman out. If neither works, start an ERE monastery.

Live by the religious conviction sword, die by the religious conviction sword.

What do you mean ?

[Henry]

I participate in a world where men live by creeds, specifically Christian. The committed men on this board adhere to the precepts of ERE with the same observance. When introducing women and/or partners to either group, the belief system is hegemonic. Christians call it unequally yoked when the belief system is not hegemonic. It's one thing if someone "converts" during the relationship. But if you are self-consciously committed before the relationship, the partners commitment is required. It's a deal breaker. So either find an ERE person or find one that can be evangelized. Otherwise, walk. The relationship will not survive unless we are just talking about periodically catching some tail.

[chenda]

I see. I agree shared values are likely important to relationship success.

[chenda]

Thinking about it further if your part of a group which practices endogamy then you probably won't have a problem finding a spouse. There's probably a catalogue somewhere where you can choose one from. Not so good for the gene pool though, as you're likely to get ever more inbred.

[Henry]

Nobody knows the person with whom they think you want to enter a relationship. But to disagree on big ticket items is insane. Two people meet. They fall in love. But the guy has kind of been hiding the ERE thing, Finally he decides to ask her to marry her and slip it in so he says "I love you more than life itself and want to share a life with you where we both grow old shitting into an outdoor pipe." And he pulls out an engagement ring he made out of dead worm he found after a rainfall in the woods. Now the woman responds "Pipe shitting? You never mentioned pipe shitting. And what the fuck is that thing." And the guy responds "It's ERE." And the woman responds "What the fuck is ERE?" And the groom responds "It's this Renaissance ideal and web of goals started by this Danish physicist of how we can live on $19.17 a day." You got to think that woman is gone before she even says no. I know there's a lot of holes in the story but you get the point.

[chenda]

I get the point. But I'm curious Henry, how did you meet your wife ? Was your wife always au fait with the ring of worms as it were ?

[Henry]

We met at work. It was beautiful. I insulted her intelligence. Her eyes told me I was a condescending asshole. We each had nothing. Now we have something. Like a Bonjovi song. The most important thing to have in a relationship is empathy. It's more important than love. So if they're not on board with your deepest convictions, make sure you use birth control before you tell them to GTFO.

[OutOfTheBlue]

This is true if your goal is long-term commitment. I think the majority of men suffer from a lack of short-term social skills and long-term emotional skills. Not hiding who you "truly are" requires a large amount of self-knowledge that will ultimately improve every aspect of your life. It is however a relatively hard skill to develop that requires constant vigilance and self-reflection.

There are other easier social and emotional skills to develop concurrently though.

I also agree with what you said about the "magical other."

I wanted to bring back the discussion to ERE and highlight the importance of introspection/inner work (which probably includes what you call "long-term emotional skills", although part of it can only be furthered through relationships, not alone) and how you can use it to give out the "right" signs and present yourself in such an aligned way that allows others to "see you" and respond to that, which helps build honest/meaningful relationships, however long or short. Harry Browne must have used his own advice for flings as well, and to find sexually compatible partners. My impression is that ERE players can better afford such an homeotelic effort with wide ranging benefits, dating/relationships being only one of many. As you say, this ultimately improves every aspect of one's life.

But of course, this is not an easy task and it isn't the only area where improvements can have great impact, especially on the short-term side of things.

What short-term social skills that you would recommend working on? Any advice on that (and how to go about it) would be welcome!

My own interpretation of the increase in psychotropic drugs (btw I am concurrently reading Plotkin) is that we live in an egocentric rather than soulcentric* society. As an egocentric society departs from the actual core needs of humans we are forced to find ways to cope with this. This also causes a sort of spinning effect where we individually and collectively search for solutions to a problem we can't see. Each solution is still in the context of egocentrism, so it creates its own problems. Numbing ourselves with legal and illegal drugs (which imo can be used for soulcentric purposes as well) is just currently in vogue.

*Sorry for the jargon, it's necessary to read Plotkin to understand what this refers to. The explanation is rather long, I'll try to shorthand it for the audience here by noting that the Plotkin book is the level 10 book on the ERE Wheaton chart.

I'm very interested to learn you're reading Plotkin's "Nature and the Human Soul"! Regarding the numbing through drugs (and you're spot on that "some" substances can be used for soulcentric purposes, Plotkin dedicates a chapter on this in Soulcraft) and other related tactics, on an individual level, Plotkin has more to say about that in his Wild Mind book chapter on East subpersonalities: Escapists and Addicts. Also, in his latest book, he introduces an additional major life passage (called Eco-awakening, that brings one from an egocentric to an ecocentric version of psychological early adolescence) to his Eco-Soulcentric Wheel of Human Development. In case you want to read about it, you'll find essentially the same content in the seven part blog post series I've shared in Project "Eco-Awakening": An Invitation [Plotkin MMG] (see the links halfway through the first post).

my behavior is more analogous to the sort of jolly guy who puts on a Hawaiian print shirt, sucks in his gut a bit, smiles at himself in the mirror, and then just goes for it. Which, is actually not a half bad tactic.

Love that image! Haha. Which reminds me of a similar situation:

A friend of mine told me of a time, in Greece, where he put on a Hawaiian shirt, added two or three flower necklesses to the mix for good measure, and was just about to confidently go out the door for a dancing night when he heard his mum sigh audibly, and speaking to herself (?), exclaim "This boy is never going to fuck".

Her assessment wasn't very accurate, but the comic effect remains

[Jin+Guice]

@Ego: Ah, so the thesis is that the cultural controllers are running a general smear campaign against human connection so they can sell you a solution?

@Henry: I think you are highlighting a hole in my ability to give advice. I am very very bad at not being myself. I am also a bad salesmen and not great with people. So most of my own personal work on myself has focused on becoming more sociable and a better salesmen of myself. And I am a bit perplexed by how one would lose themselves in such an endeavor.

I imagine it is difficult to tempt people with devotion to shitting in a bucket and/ or God if one does not wholeheartedly believe that their devotion denotes a life better lived.

What short-term social skills that you would recommend working on? Any advice on that (and how to go about it) would be welcome!

The shortest explanation I can give is: 1) learn the social script for dating/ hooking up; 2) figure out which parts you are bad at and 3) work on those parts. I found the whole script overwhelming, but by teasing out the specific areas of weakness (and strength) you have and then targeting the weaknesses make the whole thing tractable.

2 pitfalls I'll warn you about: 1) Being too theoretical and not getting out there and fucking up. If you're not uncomfortable/ vaguely scared, you're not doing anything. The goal is to practice something enough that you don't have to think about it* 2) It shouldn't be that hard. Of course "it" is your goal, so hardness is variable. I'm assuming the goal is something like going on a date, getting laid or starting a relationship. It can be easy to forget that everyone has a need for romantic attention, sex and emotional connection when you are memorizing a laundry list of things to say or do.

*From what I understand this is not possible for autistic people, i.e. autistic people innately lack the ability to intuit social situations, so must always rely on memorized and practiced scripts? As noted upthread, claiming autism is currently massively over used, so most people should be able to eventually internalize the skills and not think about what they are doing.


I'm really enjoying Plotkin, I'll probably read all of his books. I'm curious how important the "communing with nature" portion of the program is. I'm working my way through the Plotkin discussion thread rn and Jacob asks a similar question towards the begin of that thread.

[7Wannabe5]

A friend of mine told me of a time, in Greece, where he put on a Hawaiian shirt, added two or three flower necklesses to the mix for good measure, and was just about to confidently go out the door for a dancing night when he heard his mum sigh audibly, and speaking to herself (?), exclaim "This boy is never going to fuck".

While having a similar conversation/debate, one of my sisters suggested that if I was a man, I would never get laid with my dorky theories, but I think that higher levels of testosterone would lend me the motivation necessary to experiment with one dorky theory after another until I was successful.

One of the many dating books I have read suggested that there are three steps to the courtship process or mating dance for a human-in-feminine-energy which are Make Yourself Attractive/Signal Availability/Filter. The human-in-masculine-energy process would obviously be more like Make Yourself Attractive/Seek Attractive Other/Make Your Move(s).Whenever you are considering putting yourself back out on the market, there can be a tendency to get stuck in Make Yourself Attractive, but when you do this, you are forgetting that there is a whole world full of other imperfectly attractive humans out there willing to offer you constructive feedback on how well you did on Making Yourself Attractive

**********************************************

I lost my exact train of thought towards relating this topic to network theory, but it had to do with this bit on the average of 250,000 humans who are 3 degrees of social separation from any of us.

Unlike a person's clique friends, a person's friends of degree three tend to live in different cities, attend different schools, and have different information. They are more diverse. They are also near enough for trust to be established: a friend of a friend of a friend could be your roommate's mother's coworker, or your sister's boyfriend's aunt. The number of friends of degree three, their diversity, and their relative proximity make them an important asset. They can provide new information and job opportunities. These are the people most likely to help a person find a job, facilitate a move to a new city, or become a business or life partner.

--The Model Thinker-Scott Page (my emphasis.)

In the olden days before humans moved much of their social life on to the internet, even humans who dated a lot would mostly date people who were within 3 known* degrees of social separation as described above. To the best of my recollection, I kissed around 14 boys and 1 girl prior to my first marriage at age 22, and of these only 2 boys that I met while on vacation were not within 3 known degree of social separation from me. My experience in the era of internet dating, since my divorce at age 42, would be pretty much the inverse. Although almost every man I have dated has lived within an hour's driving circle of me in a moderately populous metropolitan area, I have only had friends in common with a few whom I did meet through friends as in the olden days. And one effect of this randomization is that the lack of prior existing social bonds makes it much easier to break up with somebody and also much easier to have multiple simultaneous relationships in varying degrees of development. IOW, it grants all of us the possibility of being like the sailor who has a girl in every port he regularly visits, because it creates more ports. And this tendency can even be further extended by changing physical ports along lines of attachment. For instance, my youngest sister told me that she recently had a friend stay with her as a house-guest for a couple weeks, because her friend wanted to date in NYC.

So, from the female perspective, internet dating is more like dating while on vacation used to be, and it is also the case that internet dating can be like taking a vacation. Like most females, I have very little interest in just hooking up with a lot of different men, but I have very much enjoyed exploring the diverse lifestyles of the attractive men who make contact with me from beyond my own "small world network."

Okay, so circling back round to the topic at hand, my suggestion for the ERE men would be to think in terms of what you might have to offer in the middle-range of "lifestyle" when dating. IOW, create the possibilities for some lovely vignettes, interesting adventures, or even shared projects at scale above "my penis is all yours for the evening", but below "yoked for life." I think I've only dated 3 men who were over 50 and never married, and all of them were experts at knowing how to show a girl a good time with very low $$ expended. Recently divorced, long-married men usually spend/waste the most money dating.


*Since third degree separation does include 250,000 other humans on average, it is possible that you can be within this degree of separation, but not know it.

[Jean]

@Henry
i'm glad my rainpipe shiting made such an impression on you

[white belt]

While having a similar conversation/debate, one of my sisters suggested that if I was a man, I would never get laid with my dorky theories, but I think that higher levels of testosterone would lend me the motivation necessary to experiment with one dorky theory after another until I was successful.

One of the many dating books I have read suggested that there are three steps to the courtship process or mating dance for a human-in-feminine-energy which are Make Yourself Attractive/Signal Availability/Filter. The human-in-masculine-energy process would obviously be more like Make Yourself Attractive/Seek Attractive Other/Make Your Move(s).Whenever you are considering putting yourself back out on the market, there can be a tendency to get stuck in Make Yourself Attractive, but when you do this, you are forgetting that there is a whole world full of other imperfectly attractive humans out there willing to offer you constructive feedback on how well you did on Making Yourself Attractive

In the olden days before humans moved much of their social life on to the internet, even humans who dated a lot would mostly date people who were within 3 known* degrees of social separation as described above. To the best of my recollection, I kissed around 14 boys and 1 girl prior to my first marriage at age 22, and of these only 2 boys that I met while on vacation were not within 3 known degree of social separation from me. My experience in the era of internet dating, since my divorce at age 42, would be pretty much the inverse. Although almost every man I have dated has lived within an hour's driving circle of me in a moderately populous metropolitan area, I have only had friends in common with a few whom I did meet through friends as in the olden days. And one effect of this randomization is that the lack of prior existing social bonds makes it much easier to break up with somebody and also much easier to have multiple simultaneous relationships in varying degrees of development. IOW, it grants all of us the possibility of being like the sailor who has a girl in every port he regularly visits, because it creates more ports. And this tendency can even be further extended by changing physical ports along lines of attachment. For instance, my youngest sister told me that she recently had a friend stay with her as a house-guest for a couple weeks, because her friend wanted to date in NYC.

Your sister was correct. If all it took for a man to get laid was dorky theories, then we wouldn't see the rise of incel/misogynistic culture in the dorkiest parts of the internet.

I largely agree with your human-in-masculine-energy model, however I will point out that the phenomena of online dating you describe makes it much harder for men to receive constructive feedback. Whereas in the olden days you might have the friend politely pull you aside and say her friend is not into you because of X, in online dating there is no mutual friend. Men don't receive any constructive feedback from women who swipe left, women who ghost them mid-conversation, etc etc. I think this is where a lot of the frustrations come from men in online dating. They know what they are doing is not working, but they don't know why. Is it that they have bad pictures? Is their age range set to young? Are they in an unfavorable dating market? Are they prompts/bios not good? Are they being too forward with their messages? Are they not being forward enough? Etc, etc.

[chenda]

There's a lot of unethical practices going on apparently at tinder et al. Fake accounts being used to msg new joiners to get them engaged, stacking the most photogenic people to the top the pile etc etc.

[7Wannabe5]

@white belt:

Well, obvious first step would be to ask a female friend or relative to look at your photos, profile, and maybe some of your exchanges, and offer advice. I would also note that it also isn't uncommon for women to be ghosted online. Mileage may vary, and younger women may have greater tolerance for endless chatting, but my preference is for just a few pleasant "I see you like gardening..." back and forths, before making specific request for meeting in person in neutral location. Do not type anything sexual OR romantic at me before I have met you in person.

I would also note for the record that it has been my experience that even men who seem to me to be quite successful at internet dating will often complain about it. I have dated men who have complained about internet dating to me while they were dating me! Like they think it is some kind of slot machine that should eventually roll round to all Dua Lipas if they pull at it hard enough

[chenda]

The worse thing is the endless dick pics. Why do men feel the need to do this ?

[Seppia]

If one is getting endless dick pics, she/he is definitely hanging out with the wrong men (virtually or IRL doesn’t matter)

[chenda]

If one is getting endless dick pics, she/he is definitely hanging out with the wrong men (virtually or IRL doesn’t matter)

Yeah but it's hard to screen for that at the start of a tinder chat when it usually happens.