Schools teach kids that their personal worth is measured by impersonal artifacts: an assignment, a project, a test. It doesn’t matter who produced the assignment, whether they enjoyed or suffered through it, or what it meant to them — if anything. Schools call this “fairness”.

The assignment is graded by some authority. It doesn’t have to know who you are. The grader doesn’t enjoy the grading, and certainly finds little meaning in reading what the student produced. Schools teach that deciphering the grader is more important than understanding the assignment. Each teacher is a code book to be cracked; each test, a system to be hacked. Schools call this “supervision”.

Schools teach that outcomes are improved in monotonous fashion by the application of effort in any available direction. Some students do better by cranking through more test problems, while others benefit more from watching a video or doing extra credit tasks. But in all cases, doing more of any of these things improves your grades. Exploration may or may not be rewarded, but exploitation is always encouraged. Schools call this “studying”.

School assignments aren’t real. They don’t create value in the world or directly improve the individual. They are arbitrarily chosen under the weak constraints of vaguely subject-relevant and easily gradeable. Schools call this “education”.

The one thing that’s not school

By the time a young person takes their first job out of college, they have spent almost their entire life doing school assignments. School itself, obviously. School admissions as well: the more holistic they claim to be, the more annoying the assignment they require in the form of tailored essays or curated CVs. Job applications. Social media too, with daily assignments such as “repost current snowclone format” or “express appropriate outrage at current thing”.

The first, often only thing in a young person’s life that isn’t a school assignment is dating. Looking for love is deeply personal and inextricably subjective. Seduction is unfair and unsupervised. There is no gradient that can be monotonously exploited for more relationship success.

Naturally, educated young people hate this and rail against it.

They complain about dating more than they date. They read dating advice to “learn the rules”. They look to the discourse to grade them, expecting universal, impersonal answers to every conundrum. They write date-me docs that are so similar to their friends’ you’d swear they cribbed the notes. They try to cheat on the assignment by asking an LLM (or their favorite dating blogger) to write their profiles for them. They double down on what they’ve been doing, whether mass-swiping or soulmate daydreaming or DMing e-girls with BPD, regardless of how it’s been working out so far.

When young people get into relationships, it often doesn’t feel real. The couple has no life, meaning, or social role of its own. It’s not in the service of building anything, and in any case the people in the relationship selected each other for mutual entertainment value. They often ask of their romantic involvements what does this say about me? because they don’t know how to ask, is this what I desire?

Want not waste not

The first and most impactful thing school teaches students is to not have desires.

Kids in first grade are asked what they want to be when they grow up. Astronaut! Scientist! Memecoin shill! Circus stripper! And then — surprise! — no one gives a fuck. Turns out that the paths to outer space and the circus both require five paragraphs on post-colonial themes in Macbeth, due Tuesday. And you better not be caught doing any unsanctioned space acrobatics in school itself, that stuff will go on your permanent record.

In a spirit of noble sacrifice, I once joked on Twitter that we lock up guys at their horniest with girls at their sexiest and expect them to learn calculus. If you’re not unusually intelligent then A, the algo has learned to show you tweets so blatant you forgot what irony is and B, you definitely didn’t take calculus in college. The strongest drug hit on social media is “catching someone” being low-status outgroup. Especially if you get to do it in a mob of a thousand identical QTs, which my tweet swiftly accumulated. I wonder where people were taught this particular behavior pattern, hmm.

Jokes aside for a moment — why do schools expect anyone in that environment to learn calculus, or at least calculus-adjacent exam solving? Are students driven by a primal desire to chain rule derivatives? Or did the longhouse successfully cure them of any desires aside from mimetic competition for markers of success, so that an A in Calc is more motivating than boiling pheromones?

The statistics are clear: kids these days are drinking less, smoking less, going outside less, and fucking less. But their grades are higher than ever! Do kids get better each year at gaming the system, or is the school system getting better at gaming them? It’s the same game either way.

Other people’s fantasies

When people think school + love they imagine the QB kissing the cheerleader because that’s what Hollywood scriptwriters told them to imagine. The truth is that it’s almost impossible to love the cheerleader or the quarterback. He’s the Schelling point of desire, he’s what you think everyone else wants. It’s not love — it’s mimetics.

Young love is two freak nerds making out backstage of the school play rehearsal, their reflection in each other’s four-eyes making them forget for a brief while how everyone else at school looks at them. If you saw true love at school, you were taught to point and say eww, gross.

Love means feeling a desire fulfilled that’s entirely your own, and fulfilling a desire that only you can. Second Person has talked a lot about the cultivation of your own unique value proposition, and a bit about the cultivation of personal desire. The latter isn’t something a blogger can really help you with.

One of the major obstacles to the development of personal desire is the abundance of other people’s fantasies that can be indulged in risk-free. If only I was picked to throw deep balls, I’d have mine deep in a cheerleader!

Other people’s fantasies are, sadly, porn:

So rather than fantasies that risk failure but at least clarify our real desires, we find it easier to want things that we are told to want — that we don’t want, but that there can be no guilt in wanting because they were commanded to be wanted. Since it’s too painful to fantasize what will never come to pass — or shouldn’t come to pass — we drown ourselves in other people’s visions and are led mechanically to the end, see also politics, economics, love.

Readers wanted Second Person to be dating school, to explain to them how dating works and what assignments to complete to get the grade gf you see other people get. I tried to avoid writing self-help porn — essays that leave you not motivated upon having read them, but satisfied.

And so this essay will conclude far short of your satisfaction. You have been schooled by others, but no one besides you can unschool you. But if you find yourself looking for “dating hacks”, or for someone to reassure you that you’re dating “the right way”, or you’re waiting for AI to do the dating for you — perhaps you are starting to see the scope of the problem.

In 2025, that promise is dead. Instead of safety and convenience, people complain about harassment, ghosting, and pervasive lying. Instead of abundance — endless frustration. The biggest app by far is Tinder, an infinite scroll of shallowness with no advanced features beyond “boosts” and “priority likes” that exploit slightly desperate men for money. Net user satisfaction is barely above water and falling fast. Though it’s hard to find recent data, app usage may have peaked during COVID and is falling, especially among young people.

If you don’t trust me, ask the shareholders:

Everyone asks, why can’t we just go back? Why can’t we just recreate 2014 OkCupid with the smart sorting and long thoughtful profiles and question-based match percentage calculator?

The reason is that these features never mattered in themselves. The match percentage was easily hackable, and most users never wrote or read very thoughtfully either. OkCupid worked because the promise of data-driven matchmaking attracted 2 million active users to the app in 2014. These users were disproportionately urban and educated, and enough of them were diligent about messaging, optimistic about meeting up, and serious about relationships. Terese and I both joined the app in 2014 when we moved to NYC.

And then in 2015, we met each other and left the app. Instead of acquiring new users to replace us, OkCupid spent the rest of the decade participating in political boycotts and adding Tumblr sexualities to its menu. They replaced the OkCupid data science blog with astrology and the relationship questions with this:

The proximate reasons for these changes is that OkCupid replaced a lot of its early employees, who were data-obsessed nerds, with younger hires who were too online and way too woke. But the app didn’t die because its staff spent 5 years trying to make sapiosexual a thing. They wasted their time because they had no way to find 2 million more users like Terese and me. And without people you’d want to date, what’s the point of a dating app?

There are still some active users on OkCupid wandering the ruins like hungry ghosts. Many of them have been there since 2014, if not before. Surely the 43,497th swipe is the lucky one, they think.

Fatal Economics

The only thing that matters in a dating app is the quality of its userbase. Unfortunately, there is no way for an app to grow or make money sustainably without the quality of its userbase decaying. This dynamic wasn’t obvious in the early 2010s because enough users who were new to apps were joining. Around 2020, the apps reached complete saturation with 50%-60% of single Americans having used them, almost touching the penetration of social media (73%). Without naive users to replenish the pool, the apps were forced to look down at their long run sustainability strategy and saw this:

When I talk about user quality, I don’t mean attractiveness. How hot you are determines your own relative success on apps but not the total number of people who will find a partner on them. People like to swipe on hot people for entertainment, but everyone mostly ends up dating their looksmatch.

What matters for apps actually matchmaking couples is users’ skill at finding and meeting well-matched partners. A quality user pays for premium, has an honest profile, selects for compatibility, writes thoughtful messages, and shows up to the date with a good mood and an open heart. A shit user swipes brainlessly, has AI sloptext and retouched pics, can’t text, and if they actually show up to the date you wish they hadn’t. Your experience on a given app is shaped by the sex ratio and the ratio of quality to shit users.

On a given app, both ratios will, slowly but inexorably, trend downwards.

If an app is good at setting people up, its best users will match each other and leave. If an app sucks at matchmaking, its best users will leave to date elsewhere. If it’s cheap and does no marketing, it will attract lazy users who sign up for every app hoping that sheer numbers will make up for being utterly adrift. If the app grows fast with aggressive marketing, it will attract Marl:

The first thing you need to know about Marl is that he has the attention span of a goldfish on acid. Once Marl opens your app, you have about 1.3 seconds to catch his attention with a shiny image or triggering headline, otherwise he’ll swipe back to TikTok and never open your app again. Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.

Every social app that makes money depends on network effects and success spirals. On an individual level, positive feedback (e.g., upvotes) increases subsequent engagement and effort on the app. Collectively, the more people join an app the more and better people will want to join. That’s why no amount of jank and broken features can kill Twitter: everyone is on there because everyone who matters is on there.

For dating apps, this effect works in reverse. Individual success leads to deleting the app and never coming back, unless “success” means an endless stream of one-night stands. Every app userbase trends towards consisting of three groups only:

1. A tiny minority of hot men who are looking for sex only. Since the percent of profiles that a girl swipes right on is fixed at 4-5% regardless of the average attractiveness of profiles, these men will monopolize the vast majority of matches.

2. A minority of women who stay on the app because they see enough hot guys, and can’t get off the app because these guys aren’t looking for a serious relationship.

3. A majority of men who aren’t attractive enough to get a ton of matches, and aren’t skilled/motivated enough at converting rare matches to dates to find a girlfriend.

One outcome of this distribution is that everyone in groups 2 and 3, the vast majority of users, end up trying to chat with someone who has 10x as many choices1. It’s a dispiriting and humiliating exercise. Some tenacious men and savvy women will power through and meet each other, but the on-app experience makes most people want to leave or downgrade their usage to a few minutes of drunk swiping once a month — just enough for the app to count them as an “active user” on investor calls. Without replenishment, the “active userbase” trends towards consisting of dejected men willing to pay to look at tits and fantasize that the next mindless swipe will get them laid.

Disempowerment

This sounds like bad news for VCs, but what about you? If the average user is so terrible, wouldn’t you stand out on the apps just by being normal?

This works up to point in the app death spiral. In 2015, most messages women received in their OkCupid inbox were “how aer u” but there were enough genuine attempts at connection. Most profiles were boring and poorly written, but at least they were written by the user and not by ChatGPT. It was worth people’s time to read profiles and messages and to put some effort into picking out nice spots.

As the userbase deteriorates, everyone gets more discouraged about engaging in good faith until they eventually give up. When I jumped back on OkCupid and Hinge briefly in 2018, most responses I got from women were “:)” or “haha” or questions about things that were literally written in the first paragraph of my profile. It was clear that no one was bothering to read a single word, girls were just swiping on the first picture and then toggling through chats with 20 guys at once.

When I realized this was happening, I jumped to suggesting an in-person date as fast as possible, even after just 2-3 messages back and forth. I went on few exasperating dates with women I had little in common with, then I gave up. Everyone else has been slowly migrating from apps that encouraged differentiating yourself with text to one where users only ever see and interact with static photos, one at a time.

And that’s the real problem with dating apps. If good matches are rare, you need a lot of selection power to pick them apart from the chaff. If you’re one of good ones, you need a way to signal that to potential matches. The apps give you no tools for doing that, only photos and an algorithm designed to keep you engaged forever on the scroll.

You’re looking for someone who gets you, who needs what only you can provide and delights in giving you what you truly desire. Or perhaps you’re just looking for someone who’ll show up to the date on time, have a fun and responsive conversation, perhaps kiss you at the end of it, and not assault, harass, or post screenshots of your texts to some online forum. These people are sometimes on the apps and you can stumble on them, but you have almost no control over this.

Your outcomes depend a lot on which stage of a death spiral an app is on. If a new app launches and has your female friends and peers excited to sign up, it might have a few years’ run. Any app that targets a pre-selected audience or pre-existing community (like cuties! does for TPOT), will be better than a mass-market app. But I don’t see how dating apps as a whole get better at matchmaking this side of the singularity. And if you have what it takes to find good matches on apps, you almost certainly can do great off them.

Outside the apps, you can commit to your goals and develop your unique self, naturally attracting people who gravitate to it. You can develop a dozen skills that make you better at flirting, from observing people to inhabiting your body fully. You can deepen your friend circles, learning the important qualities of people and developing a natural connection without the pop quiz of a date.

Outside the apps, you date in the context of your life, as full person, and rely on social reputation to prove yourself and avoid bad actors. On the apps, you’re decontextualized, depersonalized, and all alone. You have no avenue for agency and no way to apply selection. All you can do is post a good photo and sit there swiping and hoping until hope leaves and only the scroll remains.

We killed the apps, now bury them

When people complain about dating, they often just complain about dating on apps. And when people complain about dating apps, they often complain about the product. But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our apps, but in ourselves. We are the product, and the apps are not a market fit for it.

Dating apps could be good, for a while, when everyone was excited about their novelty and promise. But once it became common knowledge that dating apps suck, it became impossible to make a dating app that doesn’t suck. Good users don’t want to go on a dating forum that sucks, and if they do they leave quickly because they find each other or go date where they can express themselves and select for great partners. Everyone who’s good on the apps would be good at dating elsewhere, while everyone who’s bad at dating stays on the apps because they can’t think of anything better.

You’re going to keep seeing ads for dating apps, more and more bizarre ones. It costs nothing to clone Tinder and add a gimmick. They can make a bit of money mostly as an entertainment product, scratching a spot between users’ idle fantasies and quiet desperation. But they’re not going to make dating better for you. You have to go do that by yourself.

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Some people disagree. A lot of dating advice, in particular advice that’s aimed at men, promises to teach how to seduce any woman. It doesn’t. When untargeted seduction seems to work, it mostly does so not by transforming the other person’s disinterest into attraction but by selecting for interest. PUA antics broadcast that you’re looking to fuck tonight with no strings attached. This selects for the girl who happened to be at the dive bar looking for the same exact thing. If she wasn’t looking for it, reading her palm isn’t going to convert her.

You may also quibble that your dating pool isn’t actually 8 billion people. You’re right, it could be more. Men have married pillows, cellphones, and video game characters. Women have married snakes, chandeliers, and the Eiffel Tower, though the latter two are struggling to remain faithful to their spouses. There are 27,300 members between the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/MyGirlfriendIsAI subreddits, of which 99% are in the former.

But we have to draw a line somewhere. I drew it at living humans since, presumably, you are one as well. An important thing about discovery and selection is that it’s a mutual, reciprocal process. It’s a two-person game with a shared win condition.

8,000,000,000 sounds like a lot, but it’s merely 2³³. Anything that cuts the potential pool of partners by half is one bit of selection/discovery. You have, at most, 33 of those. That’s not a whole lot.

Conscious Spending

If your only dating avenue is an app, your dating pool is generally constrained to singles of one sex within a few years of your age and 5 miles of your location that happen to be using the same app. Even in a large city full of young people, these criteria define a group of 1,000-10,000 potential partners at most. This means that by confining yourself to the app, you have used up between 21-23 of your available bits before even considering the other person’s interest in you. You’re left with just 4-5 bits for anything else you might care about, from personality to life goals to sexual compatibility.

If you’re not careful, 33 bits go by really fast.

You still have to start somewhere, and sex/age/status seem like obvious criteria. But how obvious exactly? Does “single” include “single but not looking to date” or “in the process of separation”? What exactly is the incompatibility you worry about with people far from your ideal age range, and how flexible are you about those? Does “attracted to women” mean that you’re more attracted to Hunter Schafer or Mia Lesnar or exactly the same to both?

The first step towards spending your bits wisely is to spend them consciously, as a deliberate decision. Other people have their own definitions of who’s a woman and who’s too old for you. You get more bang per bit by determining for yourself what exactly your criteria are.

Mimetic Bits Are Expensive

The most expensive things to spend bits on are traits that everyone else wants that don’t also select for their interest in you.

A common tragic example is women who set height filters of 6’0” and up on apps. Only 15% of American men are 6’0” or taller. On an app with height filters, each of them has 3-4 times as many women to choose from as a guy of average height, and they’re not particularly impressed by the fact that a girl cares about height so much. The woman’s effective dating pool is limited to 5% of what it was.

A height-agnostic woman picking from a pool of 20 men could select based on looks, intelligence, devotion, industriousness, sociability, skill in bed… But only 1 of those 20 is both over 6’ and has her as his first choice. Setting a height filter spends 4-5 bits, close to a girl’s entire budget after filtering A/S/L. It gets her a guy who’s tall and nothing else.

The height-filtering girl pays a much larger cost than short men. 5’5” guys get two-thirds as many responses on apps as 6’0” guys. They message a slightly smaller pool of women to start with (for example, they probably exclude women who are both attractive and very tall), but not one that’s 20 times smaller. Being in the bottom 10% of height only costs a man 1-2 bits of selection, while hard filters on the top 15% costs a woman 4-5 bits.

A lot of women don’t even care about height that much. They just have too many potential matches and want to limit the pool to reduce choice anxiety. Since apps don’t let you filter on “will be a caring and loyal husband” but only on height, they filter on height. It feels like a free step in the direction of narrowing down their dating pool. Like mobile games and casino drinks, the free bits cost the most.

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The Best Bits are Complementarities

The big problem with male height is that almost all women want taller guys, often because other women do. It’s a mimetic desire, the kind that locks you into zero-sum competitions that devour all your slack and every bit of selection you have. The best bits to spend are the opposite: your unique desires that match your unique proposition.

The knowledgeable mansplainer and the enthusiastic learner. The meticulous planner and the easygoing traveler who loves surprises. The avid cook and the foodie who does dishes. The top and the bottom.

Complementarities are the buy-one-get-one of selection: if you find someone with the trait you like, you get someone who likes you more in the bargain.

Here’s an example in my own marriage:

I’m rarely indecisive; my wife, Terese, is rarely underprepared. I take on the many tasks that require swift action, like catching a cockroach or settling a bill dispute. If the problem requires diligent research and preparation, it ends up in Terese’s domain.

Neither of us would have explicitly listed decisiveness or diligence on our list of traits to filter for before we met each other. But we both recognized how we complemented each other once we actually spent time together. The easiest way to select partners who harmonize with your strengths and weaknesses is, as always, to just be your differentiated self consistently.

Do the Hard Bits First

Even if you’re not on the apps, only superficial traits are easy to explicitly select for. All the things that really matter for a relationship — personality, character, shared values — require time and effort to discover.

Let’s say that you’re a woman whose main criteria for a husband is that he’s fully self-accepting, attuned, and skillfully curious. You’re aware that this is a rare combination; perhaps only 1 in 1000 men meets your standard. So you write a public date-me survey that tries to measure self-acceptance and curiosity, and open the top of the funnel to thousands of men. You pick the few that score highest on your criteria, and go on dates with them. None of them turn out to be self-accepting and curious.

The problem is that a multiple choice self-report survey isn’t a powerful enough tool to find the 1 in 1000 outlier on a profound, spiritual quality. This doesn’t mean that this strategy is hopeless. But if the best-designed survey can only spot guys in the top 10%, it might take 100 dates to find the guy. And then you better be sure that you optimize for spotting curiosity and self-acceptance on first dates — your hardest selection criterion warrants most of your efforts.

There are two other ways to filter for hard-to-select traits without going on dozens of dates. The first is to be the sort of person who is maximally attractive to someone with the qualities you seek. Do self-accepting, curious men only date someone like them? Or perhaps they like a woman who’s ambitious and driven, even if lack of self-acceptance is part of her drive? I don’t actually know, but if I wanted to date someone like that it’s the first thing I’d try to find out.

The other multiplier of your selection power is outsourcing it: find communities that pre-select people for the attributes you want. For Aella, this could mean mindfulness meditation communities, authentic relating circles, dance and contact improv gatherings. Another approach is to think who among your friends is closest to the ideal of the quality you want, and see who they spend their time with and where. Persistent associations offer a stronger signal than one-off events; any deep trait take a good while to demonstrate and discern.

Communities often filter on many bits at once. Church attendance selects not just for religious belief, but also attitudes towards family, sobriety, and conflict resolution. Endurance sports select for fitness, but also conscientiousness, goal-orientation, and social class. If you don’t want the whole package, make sure to find the hardest bits first, the qualities that are more rare and take longer to prove.

A girl complained to me once how hard it is to find men that are both intellectually rigorous and muscular. I suggested she go loiter by the Jacob Falkovich lifting bench at the rationalist gym. Rationalism is slightly anticorrelated with musculature, but it selects strongly for intellectual rigor. It’s much easier to spot big biceps among a nerd crowd than to start philosophical debates with everyone at the strongman gym.

Discovery Mindset

Here’s Visa on selection:

twice as many people wanna date me? sounds like upside to me

half as many people wanna date me? sounds like upside to me

If twice as many people want to date you, you have one more bit of selection to use. If half as many, that means that you’ve successfully used it.

And Chris Lakin, in Flirting isn’t about convincing:

my favorite mindset for flirting is that it’s predetermined: either you’re already compatible with the other person, or you’re already incompatible. flirting isn’t “convincing” the other person to like you, it’s revealing

When this mindset is accessible, the concepts of “flirting well”, “fumbling”, and “success” start to feel funny and even meaningless.

If you’re trying to convince or change the other person, you’re almost certain to fail every time you try. If your goal instead is to find out whether they could be a good partner for you, you’ll succeed in doing so.

Selection is hard work, but the effort is spent before you go on dates. You introspect on what you want to spend your precious bits on, align yourself with the search, and find communities that do some filtering for you. When you actually go out and meet someone, all that’s left is to be yourself and have fun.

Most people don’t do this work of selection. Some guys just swipe right on everyone and think the work begins only when the date happens. Some girls wait for a soulmate, without any clear idea who or what that is. They still go on dates, though often not very good ones. Selection still happens whether you do it on purpose or let it happen to you.

You select dates with the city you live in and how you dress and where you spend your time. You select by having weird hobbies or being too hot. You select by being approachable or hard to get, by approaching in person or retreating to the apps. You select by complimenting a girl’s dress or negging her philosophy essay.

In the end, everyone gets the dates they deserve select for.

Second Person is written for people who almost get it. I’ve written about letting go of counterproductive stories, committing to being someone, becoming that someone through active practice. It’s a simple path, but not everyone is a blog post away from finding it. You need awareness that the stories you date by are just that, stories. You need to have a glimmer of who you want to be. You need some perception of actions you could try and risk you could take.

If you’ve stumbled into the bushes, you could hear me shouting from the clear path nearby. But some are lost in the deep wilderness. I’ve mostly hesitated to venture in to try and reach them. These people are angry and sad and unpleasant and very hard to help. I just hoped someone else will try.

Taxonomy of Anomie

One such intrepid adventurer is the young woman who reviewed Dating Men in the Bay Area. The author meets the men she writes about on dating apps, but the review is not of the dates but of the many ways men get lost without a map. Lost not knowing who they are or could be, not knowing what they want and what they’re worth.

There’s the man who slowly turns invisible, begging to be seen but unable to get anyone to care:

He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him.

There’s the man who followed a plan that wasn’t his own off a cliff:

He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers.

There’s the man who hid the sexual part of himself for so long that he can’t find it:

It all feels so futile and so unfair. All around him, he sees women who settled with crappy men who don’t treat them properly. He wouldn’t do that; he’s a good person. […] Some of his single friends have officially given up on ever finding a woman, and they encourage him to do the same. It’s peaceful, they insist. No more pointless pining, no more painful daydreams that never come true.

They’re right, he decides. He’s done. It’s over.

And of course, there’s the man who listens to Andrew Tate:

Fuck those people and all they stand for, says the influencer. If you want anyone to care about you, you have to make them care. And this influencer knows exactly how to accomplish that.

These men have one more thing in common: they end up spilling their guts on dates with the author. The dates are stillborn. Even the author, a woman of deep empathy and understanding, will not enter into a relationship with a man who is lost. She has met men who are whole and knows that only one such could be the partner she needs:

His passion gives him motivation; his goals give him intention; his community gives him purpose. Combined, they provide a scaffolding for him to build himself into the best version of himself. […] Dating a Man Who Is Whole is a rare and precious experience.

Women Can’t Save You

Surely the midst of an existential crisis is the worst time possible to be on the apps. Why does the lost bro try to find a girlfriend before he finds himself?

The lost bro’s predicament is that he can’t see the whole version of himself. He has no passions to motivate him, no goals he believes in, no community to guide him. The only thing he knows about the best version of himself is that it has a girlfriend. So that’s where he starts.

Unfortunately, this only sinks him deeper into the murk. Women reject him, which only serves to reinforce his feelings of worthlessness, resentment, and despair.

Smart women are angel investors. They evaluate a man’s potential based on his goals and character, not just his status at a point in time. But they’re not angels. If you need saving, they can’t save you.

The author readily admits it. She goes even further: she correctly notices that the map to manhood offered by polite society is unhelpful because “polite” means feminized. It cares more about “toxic masculinity” and “male entitlement” than male disintegration. Overt hostility to masculinity has long been the dogma in clinical psychology, which has educated a generation of (overwhelmingly female) therapists.

The predictable outcome:

It turns out the therapist doesn’t have any interest in listening to him, either. She seems preoccupied with reminding him of his “luck” and “privilege” and insisting that he needs to use it to better his life.

At the end of the essay, the author offers five “fixes” to the map of manhood, albeit more out of a desire to end on a positive note than out of any real conviction:

1. Encourage positive male role models to provide detailed directions on how to “become a man.”

2. Stigmatize sexist behavior toward men.

3. Remind men of their worth.

4. Encourage men to discuss the issues they face, and listen to them.

5. Openly acknowledge that men and women share some biological differences, and embrace the beauty of this diversity.

#1: Yes, fine, that’s why I’m writing this essay at last. If anyone reading this thinks of me as a positive male role model, I’m going to offer more detailed direction than I’m normally inclined to. #5 I’ve already written about: men and women are different, and that is a wonderful thing. I also agree that while any discussion of binary sex differences will flatten and overgeneralize, smart people are vastly more likely to underestimate these differences than to overstate them.

This includes the author herself. Stigmatizing sexism, reminders of their inherent worth, and safe spaces for expression are things polite society does to help women. Men aren’t starved of politeness, and they don’t need validation of their status as victims of bigotry. Men who question their worth need to remake it, not to be condescendingly reassured that they’ve always had it.

Here’s a flat overgeneralization that is nevertheless first-order correct: girls become women by default, often earlier in life than they expected to. Their struggle is becoming irreplaceable, differentiated from “women” at large. In contrast, boys struggle for longer than expected to be valuable. Once they are, they become men.

That’s why “hey, woman” feels like an insult, but “hey, man” is a friendly acknowledgment. The former denies the woman’s singularity; the latter recognizes the man’s value.

In Regione Autistum

I arrived in NYC at age 26 with a small car cubed out with boxes of crap, a job offer, and a lot of insecurity around making friends. My three previous stops were an intense military unit, a failing hedge fund, and an easygoing business school. Three different environments, yet at each I was painfully aware of being on the periphery of social life — tolerated, but not cherished. I made no lasting friendships at any of them.

I decided to make friends in NYC through sheer tenacity. I was out every evening after work at whatever random meetup or event I saw an invite for. I said “yes” to everything, showed up early and with snacks, and maintained such an eager and friendly demeanor that everyone could tell I was new to the city.

Pretty soon, I was mingling in a few different scenes. I partied with a camp of burners who threw elaborate costume masquerades and impressed each other with crazy art. I hung out with comedians at improv classes and open mics. I joined a co-ed soccer team which always went for drinks or karaoke after the game. Except for 90% of the comedians, these were all really cool people who knew how to have fun. I really enjoyed their company and also have no idea what any of them have been up to in the last decade.

Around the same time, I attended my first rationalist meetup, OBNYC. It took place in a cramped apartment, not a dazzling venue. The guys were conspicuously uncool. The girls were conspicuously absent. The agenda was arguing about some Sequences post. I was the only one who brought snacks.

I’m still friends with several people who were in that room. One reason is that I actually enjoy arguing about the Sequences and very few people are into that. The other reason is that my intellect, which was load bearing for my self-worth up to that point, was neither needed nor remarkable. However my social skills, the main focus of my prior insecurities, were suddenly in high demand.

At the rationalist meetup, I was the one who remembered everyone’s names, who smoothed conversations over, who invited guests and even girls. Pretty soon I was organizing meetups and some of the social hangouts that spun off the community. Young, slightly autistic guys were asking me how to connect with people better.

In other groups, I wasn’t filling any particular social role, and I certainly wasn’t one of the best artists or funniest comedians. People were happy enough to have me there, but they didn’t really notice if I wasn’t. In OBNYC I was counted on for what I contributed.

That was also the year when I discovered abundance in dating, which isn’t a coincidence. I was, for the first time since high school, a respected member in a hierarchy I wanted to be part of. Far from the top, but high enough that at least some people looked up to me. I had discovered and leaned into something that both I and people around me wanted me to be: I was a rationalist, and a funny one at that.

Then I met a girl who needed a funny rationalist in her life and married her.

How to Be Valued and Needed

Young men who arrive in the Bay Area are generally good at two things: working hard and getting grades. Since they were little kids, they were told that if they worked hard and got grades they would succeed. And mostly they do: making rent in San Francisco is an achievement in itself.

But they’re lost: they don’t derive meaning and self-worth from their job or their academics. And women don’t seem to care much either.

The reason is that no one needs your grades, nor even your hustle. Entry-level workers contribute a lot, but their contributions are fungible. If you fail to do good work, the company won’t collapse. If you leave, your eventual replacement will contribute about as much. It takes rare genius or many years of experience to become someone an organization truly depends on.

For most men, grades and grind aren’t egosyntonic, they’re not part of your ideal self-image. The motivation for both always came in large part from other people, not from an inborn drive. You may have had drives that aligned with hard work, like competitiveness or the desire for power and dominance, but these were discouraged and suppressed.

A man finds himself when he finds someone who needs him, with real stakes, for the very traits he wants to see in himself. For a man just starting to find himself, this almost certainly means a community of younger men who aren’t very cool.

If your ideal self is competitive and dominant, you could join a martial arts gym that lets competent journeymen teach beginners. If it’s courage, you can volunteer with firefighters or EMTs. If it’s wisdom and caring, you can be a youth mentor or sports coach. And if you actually take pride in your conscientiousness and technical acumen, you could maintain an open-source project or civic tech that people rely on.

There are unmet needs in groups all around you, which usually aren’t the main thing the group is about. The NYC rationalist meetup didn’t need one more nerd who loves debating, though obviously I am one, but someone who brings extraversion and snacks. I have a group of theater kid friends who are constantly trying to out-art and out-drama each other, and whose productions always teeter on the edge of technical collapse. A man with zero artistic talent who owns a pickup truck, a toolbox, and an electrician’s manual could become the most beloved member of that group in 3 months.

A man needs someone who counts on him for what he does. Anything that fits this bill, no matter how humble, forms the seed of a virtuous spiral. A man is counted on, he does the thing, he gets better at the thing, he earns respect and notice, he is counted on for more. And so it goes.

This is where the manosphere leads men astray. The author posits that young men gravitate to it looking for authority figures, but the manosphere promises belonging, not instruction. Andrew Tate fandom is a brotherhood of last resort for men whose insecurity manifests as anger. MRA is for those whose insecurity breeds resentment. Inceldom is the brotherhood of last resort for sadness. Incels don’t have gurus, and Tate himself is more mascot than paragon to his fans, a lightning rod for the outrage that fuels the movement.

The manosphere gives men validation for emotions they can’t express elsewhere. This can be salutary, to a point. It certainly feels good after years of repression, for men who were too busy pleasing authorities as a teenagers to express themselves. But come on, you think emotional validation will make you a man? Are y’all feminists or something?

A man needs to be needed, and no one in the manosphere needs you. You’re the audience, not the stage crew. You’re recognized for how you feel, but not for what you contribute. No one will miss you if you leave.

Then You Get the Women

Being depended on and recognized for your contribution isn’t a stop on the way to manhood, it’s the way itself. Keep going, and women will notice as well.

Of the types of lost men catalogued in the review, the most likely to be reading this post is “the man who opts out”:

He decides to shove aside dating and focus on the other things society tells him are important: his schooling, his career, his social circle. […] More years pass, and his friends who are coupled feel increasingly alien. They’re having weddings, honeymoons, kids; buying houses and saving for college; attending recitals and soccer practices. He’s still playing Call of Duty and Dota with his dwindling group of single friends.

So what if he’s only five-foot-six and a bit heavier than average? He has an amazing job, a stellar reputation, a gorgeous apartment, and a great sense of humor. He’s a catch.

Yet once they discover he’s never been in a long-term relationship, they once more seem to recoil. […]

He considers trying to make one of the connections more serious, but it becomes obvious that she’d expect him to change so much. His hobbies, his sleeping patterns, his work habits, his furniture, his friendships… all of it would require modification to keep a girl around. […]

Their lack of self-confidence causes a painful shyness and refusal to open up. They’re convinced that at any second, the woman will find something about them to reject, so they hide as much of themselves as possible.

At 20, the man who opts out was held back by his shyness and lack of physical attractiveness. At 35, his main problem is that he optimized his life for never needing or being needed by another human being. On his own, enjoying his fun hobbies in his nice apartment, this man does great. Nothing in his life requires improvement by any specific sort of woman. There’s only this pesky girlfriend-shaped hole. Any girl would do for that one, so why won’t a single one stay there?

The reason is the opposite of what he thinks. It’s not that they eventually find some reason to reject him. Every happily married woman could find a dozen reasons to reject her husband, if she wished to. Every man is imminently rejectable.

Women stay with men they need, despite whatever else makes him rejectable. They leave the men who opt out when they give up on finding anything to depend on him for. He doesn’t want to be depended on. He’s not nervous on dates just because he expects failure, but also because he fears success. Success means escalating obligations. He’d be counted on to plan the second date, to listen and understand her troubles, to buy a ring, to change diapers…

The man who opted out of being needed has to start small, a junior report at work or a volunteer shift. Or perhaps a summer fling, some casual thing with clearly marked expectations and an expiry date. At 5’6” skinny fat but with a great career and friends, the man thinks he’s a better husband than hookup. He’s wrong. He’s nowhere near abundance, let alone commitment.

By dating casually, this man will learn another important lesson: he’s not getting what he needs from his casual girlfriend. In fact, he needs some very specific things. There are lacks in his seemingly perfect life that he not so much papered over as simply learned not to look at, but that reappear in vivid HD when someone almost touches them. He learns that he needs a very specific woman for very specific needs.

And then he might actually find her, because women need to be needed too.

Soon after, I got an email from a literary agent who asked if I was planning to write more than one page on the topic. Since she asked, of course I was! I spent several months putting together a 16,000-word chapter outline to pitch to publishers.

The agent told me that the market wants books with “concrete steps to help readers”, not vague attempts to orient them towards self-directed action. She said that good books explain one perspective a dozen times, and that my inclination of adopting a dozen perspectives on the same problem is a better fit for a collection of essays than a longform book. She said she will not be pitching Dating Other People1 to publishers.

At that moment, I swore an oath of venge… just kidding, I thought she made some good points and thanked her for the feedback. A friend who liked my writing suggested I do a Substack first and offered a generous investment in the project. I launched Second Person on September 27th, 2024.

I plan to conclude Second Person by September 26th, 2025 with four more essays after this one. The immediate impetus is that I have accepted an offer to work full time as a writer. I thought I could continue Second Person alongside a job in ops or product, by writing posts in my head throughout the week. I’ve written Putanumonit in parallel to a finance job that didn’t involve much writing or idle thinking about new topics. But I don’t think I’ll have the motivation or ideation capacity to write something good about dating alongside a demanding writing job.

To my readers, I want to say: thank you, and it’s all your fault. One year ago, I had no idea if my writing was good enough for people to pay to read it regularly. Most of Putanumonit was one-off topics, as were the few articles I sold to magazines. Second Person was my first attempt to become obsessed with a single question for more than two weeks at a time. I discovered that I enjoyed the tighter focus, that I got better (hopefully) at thinking and writing about dating over time, and that you were willing to come back every week for it. You gave me the audacity to pitch myself as a writer and the proof that I could do it. One extremely exciting company2 was convinced.

Please stop sending me your money! I’ll attempt to pause all subscription renewals before 9/26 and set a yearly option for new readers who discover Second Person and want to read the paywalled archives. You should downgrade to a free subscription by the end of the month just in case I mess it up. If you’re a paid sub and want access the archives going forward, just email me and I’ll extend your subscription for free for the next year. And if you’re a founding member, you might receive something else in your inbox sometime in the next few years.

Book in a Page

The other reason to wrap up Second Person is that I have said most of what I had to say about the question that launched it: why don’t people do anything about getting the relationship they want? I’ve turned almost everything that was in my original book pitch into posts, except for the parts that were dumb. Some of my best posts contain ideas I didn’t even grasp when I wrote the pitch, insights I got from reading a dozen books and talking to dozens of friends throughout the year.

But recently, the pace of new insights I get about dating and relationships has slowed down considerably. I’ve mostly arrived at the coherent framework that the book agent correctly pointed out was missing a year ago. I even have a list of concrete steps for readers to actually move their romantic lives forward. I’m more excited to organize my existing thoughts into a book, whenever I find the opportunity to do so, than to keep trying to come up with something new and unexpected every week.

So, two years later, here’s my second attempt at explaining the book I haven’t written yet but totally will one of these days in a single page:

• Why do people who demonstrate agency in pursuit of money, prestige, and success often show so little agency in dating? For most things in life, what matters is what you’ve done. But in dating, what matters is who you are.

• We hate this. We want a fair outcome for fair effort, like grades at school or payment for work. People react to the unfairness of dating either by adopting some flavor of fatalism (ranging from inceldom to soulmateitis), or by demanding to be told what to do.

• They look to advice books, credentialed authorities, socially enforced rules. When this frustrates them, they buy socially acceptable highly credentialed advice books that tell them to do nothing at all.

• This doesn’t help, and people become resentful. Dating discourse offers an endless supply of ready culprits and generally exists to prevent you from finding relationships. Unlocking romance requires purging your mind of antiromantic memes.

• Discourse infects you with grievances against the opposite sex. Understanding the struggles and predicaments of the opposite sex is the medicine. For women, it’s understanding that men must somehow learn to read minds, take risks, and initiate action in a society that suppresses and punishes male agency. For men, that women must walk a tightrope between male gaze and female judgment, between their own volatile power and unreliable desire.

• The other key insight is that love isn’t transactional, but dating is a market that matches supply and demand. You want to narrow both down to a single person who wants what you alone offer. Someone who needs your unique talents and complements your unique faults, not just someone equally fuckable.

• Back to what’s important: who you are. This isn’t some ineffable essence, a question to investigate at a remove, or a curated story you tell people. It’s a matter of deliberate practice, of having goals that you pursue with integrity, of incremental progress from being a nobody to becoming somebody.

• The key skill is commitment: sacrifice of optionality and dedication to action. Commitment to your dating role, to becoming the person you set out to be, to what your partner needs and who they set out to be with you.

• It takes a while to learn commitment, but once you do the fog lifts and the path of your dating life stretches clear ahead. Once you sharpen who you are and start acting on it, you’ll keep moving forward through success and failure both. Let go of what holds you back, and step forth.

Unlike my first speculative attempt, every link above points to an essay I’ve already written. If you’ve read every one, I’ve probably taken you as far as I could. Godspeed!

Share

At first glance, the answer is “none of them are good”. All four are a minority preference for the opposite sex, desired by only 20-40% of potential partners. But dating is a market — supply matters just as much as demand. The fraction of men with chiseled abs or women with a vetted orgy guest list is a lot less than one in ten. Of the eight birthday gangbang fluffers, at least two are expecting babies with their devoted partners right now. Being a minority taste is good if no one else cooks like you do, and it makes filtering for a good match that much easier.

They’re all attractive for another reason too: they show differentiation and commitment. All four are ways of being somebody, a person who follows their own path in life. This has been the theme of the last several posts: the journey from being a nobody in the dating market to becoming one half of a great relationship, committed and unique.

It starts with setting goals and pursuing them with integrity, having one clear course of action that succeeds automatically instead of deciding what to do and who to be at each turn. A coherent self is built by active practice, not through introspection or following someone else’s instructions. It makes you powerful, but not necessarily balanced. This is good: great couples complement each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and imbalanced tendencies; if you go too far, a loving partner can fix you.

But no one can help you if you choose to go nowhere at all, if you simply sway to and fro with the waves of what everyone else is doing, becoming a smooth well-rounded pebble in a pile of identical stones.

To continue the mineralogy metaphor, differentiation and commitment are the process of cutting a gem out rock. A singular individual has flaws and sharp edges, but they sparkle. What is shaved away with each cut is optionality.

The Cult of Optionality

We yearn for freedom, but freedom is hard to grasp or measure. So instead, we worship optionality. The two are often confused in a historical lens: comparing liberal society to the traditional ones it positions itself against, lack of individual freedom was visibly manifest in lack of options. People had fewer choices around where to live and work, what they could buy or consume, and whom they could date.

But this doesn’t mean that maximizing the number of choices open increases freedom.

I value liberty immensely, and I appreciate that we’re blessed with a degree of choice that our ancestors could only have dreamed of. But the truth is that liberty is enantiodromic; too much of it leads to its opposite.

Modern liberal society is defined by its lack of constraints, but rather than make people feel free, it tends to make them feel lost. Without a system to guide us through the labyrinth of dizzying possibilities, we resort to our evolutionary programming, mimicking our peers or following animal impulses that lead us into neurological traps like addictions to porn and news, or indoctrinations into cults and ideologies, or obsessions with status and money.

In today’s world it’s possible to have a wide range of choices, but for most of those choices to be a trap. Therefore, the freest people are not those with the most choices, but those with the best ones. And the only way to have the best choices is to live a life of structure and discipline, taking the hard path over the easy, favouring the long term over the short. Paradoxically, we must restrain ourselves to be free.

— Gurwinder Bhogal

This quote is from an interview on Freya India’s Substack, which talks about the cult of optionality as a pitfall for young women. Therapy culture (especially on social media, not the actual therapist’s office) is a major culprit. Avoiding all commitment is called “protecting your peace”, “setting strong boundaries”, and “choosing yourself”. Obligation is oppression, and even duties freely chosen are a “people-pleasing fawn response”.

Parents used to worry if their daughters waited too long to get married; now they object if their kids commit to starting a family in their mid-20s. Instead of committing, young people are expected to make money, stay hot, gain generic prestige from school and work, build weak-tie networks of acquaintances and followers, and become “well-adjusted”.

Ivan Vendrov calls these “maximally fungible social capital”. These all give you the optionality to get some group of people to do arbitrary things for you in the undefined future. In contrast, minimally fungible social capital means getting something specific and non-transferable from a single person: a loving relationship.

Optionmaxxers rich in fungible capital are attractive, but hard to date. I wrote about this paradox in the context of very hot women, and the same is true for men. A tall funny rich guy is a dream bf, but he’s not your dream bf. What does he lack that only you can offer, that will make it worth sacrificing all his optionality capital for? You could try to seduce him by maximizing your own general fuckability. But having two partners with infinite optionality isn’t making the process of settling down and staying together any easier.

Optionmaxxers choose contracts over covenants. They give only what is fair, not all they can. They want to be asked out, not to take any risk. A lifetime habit of keeping your options open can be very hard to break.

The common meme is that commitment itself is fungible, that if a guy is “married to the gym” he has less commitment juice to give his wife. I don’t think this is true short of Isaac Newton-level obsession, and people like that show little interest in romance anyway.

I think in reality there are people who gladly commit to something they’re aligned with, and people who aren’t aligned with anything enough to commit. When we met, my wife respected my loyalty to my employer even when I had other options, and I admired her perseverance through long, hard years in biology grad school. Are you so permanently delightful that dedication isn’t something you need in a partner?

Slack

Insofar as you have a choice, it’s probably not between being a bodybuilder or cosplayer, virgin or hyperslut. The choice is between leaning into whichever minority preference self you feel called to be or engaging in the mimetic competition for fungible capital.

The competition is often quite fierce. You don’t earn money, prestige, and clout by doing whatever you feel like. There are strict rules to each game, and you have to play hard to score points. You have to be reactive, constantly on alert for threats to your optionality. Keeping your options open eats a lot of your slack.

Committing to the bit preserves your slack, not your options. Doing what you’ve decided to always do isn’t very hard. It takes time, but it doesn’t eat your unclaimed attention. When you meet someone who wants more of that in their lives, it’ll be easy for them to trust that they’ll always get it from you.

This trust creates shared slack in the couple, more room for each person to do their own thing without worrying that they’ll knock their partner off course. It makes it easier to give when you have and to ask when you need. When you’re not maximizing the number of doors, you can start building a house together.

And yet: he needs fixing. He can be fixed. People are constantly changing — it can’t all be random drift. If anyone can fix him, surely the person who loves him can.

Or her. The cliché is that women hope to change their husbands while husbands hope their wives never change — both end up disappointed. This may be a result of women hitting the marriage market earlier and dating guys who are slightly underbaked. I’ve certainly been tempted to “fix her”, for various values of her and of fix. In this essay, I’ll mostly stick with fixing him for simplicity. I recommend reading this from both points of view: the fixer and the fixee.

Not Actually Fixing Him

“I can fix him” has two obvious failure modes. The first is: “I’m signing up to live with something I can’t live with”. Abuse, addiction, infidelity, severe disorders. Even if you could fix these eventually, you’ll have to live with them for a long while first. You have to be ready to live with them forever.

If you’re fixin’ to fix someone’s glaring issue, you should have a good answer to why he hasn’t done this already. He’s aware of the problem, aware of its persistence, and aware that he can get you as a partner despite it. You’re starting from a harder difficulty baseline than all the previous attempts to fix it, his and other people’s, and they all failed.

Another thing you shouldn’t be trying to fix is his willingness to commit or escalate the relationship. You can live with it for a while, and that’s the problem: you’re losing time which you can’t afford to lose. And since commitment issues are visible much later than a drug habit, he knows that he can not only get you but also your replacement despite them. If every time you mention moving in he remembers how he’s always dreamt of solo-climbing Kilimanjaro, he’s not the one that can be quick-fixed here.

The other error is when “fix him” means “shape him to my liking”. Throwing out his cargo shorts and making him vacuum the couch aren’t “fixes”. It’s perfectly fine to ask your partner to satisfy your preferences, even if these affect personal choices like summer fashion. Giving more and asking for more are the prerogative of a great couple. But even if you’re tempted to make your dissatisfaction his problem, it’s important not to confuse the two.

These are the failure modes, but success is also possible. It requires wisdom, persistence, charity, and devotion. It’s probably too hard: how many projects in your life have you successfully applied all four of these to? There are easy and productive ways to not fix him instead. Before you attempt any major remodeling, you should at least have some compelling reasons to reject the alternative.

How to Not Fix Him

Read more

“Oh, Auntie Mimi, what a wonderful surprise!” exclaimed the bride, “I couldn’t remember if you RSVP’d or not, how strange. But tell us, what is this box?” The old woman put the box down and smiled. “This box came from my late husband’s mother, and she got it from someone else in turn. She said that if we kept it above the mantle, our marriage would be blessed with gratitude and fulfillment. Our quarrels would be short, our daily tasks joyful. But — there’s a catch. If either of us opened the box, they would get only what is in it, and nothing else.”

“But what’s in the box, auntie?” the groom leaned forward in eager bewilderment. “Did she tell you?”

“Inside the box, my dear, is fairness.”

Womankeeping

Hanlon’s razor says never to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The straight read is that this is a factual claim: malice is salient but stupidity is common, so a bias towards the latter leads to a more accurate worldview. But it can be also read as a matter of taste, of spiritual stance. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world of misguided fools who merely need correction, as opposed to a world of irreconcilable conflict?

As for me, I would rather live in a world of meaning and humor. I abide by Strauss’ razor: never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by esoteric trolling. The latest New York Times mancoinage is a masterpiece of the genre:

His straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists, he said, “doing all the emotional labor.”

Ms. Tilley-Colson has hung out with her boyfriend’s close friends a handful of times; he hangs out with hers several times a week. […] “Mankeeping” put a word to her feelings of imbalance. “I feel responsible for bringing the light to the relationship,” she said.

Rather than viewing “mankeeping” as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said…

In my Straussian reading of Barbie, I pointed out several techniques the author can use to hide the true meaning in plain sight. The Straussian writer will draw surprising connections, leave glaring contradictions deliberately unresolved, and put the expression of their true feelings in someone else’s mouth. Did you notice how the last quote implies that it takes expert education to disagree with the view that “mankeeping” is a “bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men”? The latter is the natural view of non-experts, a category that includes both the essay’s author and its readers.

Now note the term emotional labor, prominent in the title. It’s a term of art with a precise definition, emphasis mine:

the act of managing one's own emotions and the emotions of others to meet job or relationship expectations

In the essay, this emotional labor is performed by men. They’re the ones who keep their emotions managed and contained at work and at home. Which leads us to the most glaring omission in the essay: there is no mention of men dealing with their girlfriends’ emotions. Is the author trying to convince us that this doesn’t exist?

Of course not. Men having to deal with women’s emotions is so prevalent it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

The spelled-out message of the essay is that men need to make more friends to ease the burden on their long-suffering girlfriends. The exemplar of this suffering is “Ms. Tilley-Colson”, who is both a “TikTok content creator” and rich (lest a single reader feel sympathy for her), who hangs out with her friends “several times a week” and drags poor Glenn along.

The esoteric message of this essay is that in any relationship one of you will inevitably do more emotional therapy for the other, and that if you complain about this you’re an ungrateful twat.

Give and You Shall Give

Most modern complaints about marriage use the language of fairness. Female TikTokers complain about “mankeeping”, male Redditors complain about divorce and custody laws, married people complain about the dishes and the trash. It’s a rhetorical convenience — no one’s going to argue that marriage should be unfair. But this discourse carries a hidden assumption: that fairness is an important goal of marriage and indicator its quality.

It isn’t.

Everyone knows that when a couple argues over the dishes and the trash, they’re really fighting about something else. Attention, trust, respect, care, gratitude. The important things can’t be measured in fairness, and what’s measured in fairness isn’t important.

Is it fair if only the husband works? Is it fair if the wife spends more hours with the baby than he does at the office? Is it fair if she gets a hormonal high from being with the baby, while he feels burned out? Is it fair if she expresses more gratitude for his contribution than he does for hers? Is it fair if they agreed several years ago to share all burdens equally and now they’re here?

My marriage is unfair. Only one of us can lift and carry the other, and only one of us can breastfeed. One of us worked during COVID while the other was on sabbatical, the other spends more hours parenting while the first is on sabbatical. One of us will stay hotter into middle age. One of us believes in the other more when the other has self-doubts. One of us had more dating options when we got together. One of us is liked by our kids more, one is more respected. One of us feels more jealousy. One of us will die first. This is all very unfair. But it’s impossible even to say who it’s more unfair to.

Focusing on fairness is a symptom of a bad marriage, but not because only bad marriages are unfair. It’s an appeal to some objective observer to judge you. You can’t take “I don’t feel loved” to court or to r/AmITheAsshole, but you can bring up the dishes. If you can’t be happy, at least you could feel righteous.

A good marriage is a two-person firm in which each of you does for the couple what the other person couldn’t. That means that often, what you contribute the most is what you receive the least of. How do you compare friend-making with emotional support? Breadwinning with baking bread? Ideally, you would be too impressed by your partner’s skills (including the all-important skill of seducing you) to worry about tallying up fairness points.

There’s a simple antidote to getting sucked into the fairness frame: figure out what you need and ask for it. Don’t trade for it. Don’t offer to do an equal amount of it for your partner — they probably don’t want it, and you’re probably not good at it. Just ask for it, unconditionally. Ask for it so that your partner knows they can ask and receive what they themselves can’t give.

This is the great benefit of the “couple as firm” over a relationship based on quality time and mutual entertainment. A cofounder who fills the roles their partner can’t is irreplaceable. They learn to expect more of themselves and of their partner. They give more, and they receive more, and no one could ever tell if this is fair or not.

A persistent topic of “the discourse” is whether rich, successful men want to marry the overeducated girlboss or the simple tradwife. Most contributions to this discourse consist of the airing of class grievances, but sometimes somebody bothers to collect some actual data. Turns out, rich men want to marry the overeducated tradwife.

One spin on this is that men want a trophy wife to show off to their friends. In 2025, trophiness is measured in advanced degrees and venture funding, not just in waist-to-hip. This belief is mostly held by two subsets of educated women: those who never liked men and don’t expect to marry them, and those who feel that being a trophy wife sounds lovely and chill, actually.

Successful people in actual marriages, like Simon Sarris, think of it a bit differently:

I somewhat dislike this common line, “want to take these women out of the workforce". My wife and I run a small firm together (our family). There are many things to get done, lots of delegation. One of the tasks is "go get money" so I also have a job […] "on the side". That's what 99.9% of jobs are. It's fundraising for the bigger thing, which is my family and my life.

Men want educated, talented, and agentic wives for the exact same reason they want educated, talented, and agentic business cofounders. The real prize isn’t the credentials your wife accumulated in the few years before you married, but what you’ll build together in the decades after.

Entertainment

A couple of years ago, I wrote about couples that build together vs. couples that entertain each other. Most people got the premise intuitively, and 60% of those in relationships chose the building path.

Even though most people want to build together, almost everyone inadvertently selects for entertainment only:

A woman wants a husband to have 3 kids with in a house with a picket fence. So she goes to the bar with 10 strangers off an app and picks the one who’s most charming after three drinks…

This extends to “data-driven” matchmaking. OkCupid tried to assess a compatibility score but mostly ended up measuring lifestyle similarity since the majority of questions were about hobbies and culture war signaling. My friends in NYC ran a matchmaking project based on a survey of 400 questions that correlated for friends and roommates.

But roommates aren’t building anything. Some people discover this by trying to date their roommates. I went in the unexpected direction: after Natasha and I broke up over our incompatibility as partners, we lived together for over a year in a small apartment. We could never raise a family together, but we were perfectly capable of providing each other with pleasant company.

Good roommates are predicted by similarities: shared politics and religion, homebody vs. party-animal lifestyle, similar circadian rhythms and music tastes and tolerance for mess in the kitchen. But no one picks a startup cofounder who’s identical to them. You want to be aligned on the vision, but have complementary skills that cover everything a business needs to thrive. It’s the same for the family firm.

Alignment

People have a decent idea of the things a couple should agree on before tying the knot: children, geography, monogamy, frugality, sex, in-laws, house plants. Above these specifics, there’s a governance layer that’s often left unspoken: How flexible or rigid are you going to be about all these topics? How conservative or ambitious? How will you prioritize them against each other? Is marriage a sacred duty, or a pragmatic strategy?

Are you here for self-fulfillment, or to build?

My post on the two types of couples was inspired by a friend couple. While my wife and I were clearly building, their marriage was oriented towards and sustained by entertainment and quality time. A short while after I published my post, they divorced.

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I got this idea from the world’s only behaviorist evolutionary psychologist, Diana Fleischman, who’s working on a book titled How to Train Your Boyfriend. I haven’t read it, but I’d wager a major object of training is the man’s attention, in directing it towards yourself and your vision of the relationship.

Women have a vast arsenal of mindshare colonization techniques available to them. Some are direct: looking hot in his presence, texting a lot, planning shared activities. Girls also deploy strategic coyness and emotional illegibility. A guy will text “how are you feeling this week? any Saturday plans?” and his girl will answer “idk 🤷‍♀️ kinda everything” with no elaboration. If he’s kept guessing, he’s kept thinking.

I think Diana would agree that women rarely do this with conscious intent. A girl’s internal experience when texting at random hours is I feel better talking through my problems, not I want him to have no time to concentrate on anything else. Academic psychology calls this key principle “strategic self-deception”. I prefer Simler and Hanson’s gentler “self-discretion”. Successfully persuading others doesn’t require outright lying to ourselves, so much as unthinkingly sliding our own attention away from motives we don’t want to admit.

Nevertheless, my tweet made some women mad. A longtime mutual called me unbearably cynical and blocked me. But I never said it’s bad that women seek to occupy a man’s headspace. Quite the opposite — I wish they embraced this and got better at it.

Will to Power

The consensus story on dating today is that we all just want a nice loving relationship, but are thwarted in pursuit of it by shitty apps, selfish culture, childhood trauma, unreliable men and unrealistic women. This story requires little cognitive effort to believe and rewards you socially for repeating it, making it highly memetic. It spreads from Instagram post to Modern Love column, mutating just enough to remain endemic.

But there are two antimemetic attitudes toward dating that hide in the gaps of the consensus story. Both are underdiscussed, especially in the open. But both can be seen in their impact on people’s dating behavior.

The first is men deciding that actually they’re fine without a relationship. Tinder girl is welcome to come over but if not that’s cool, he’s got other things to do. A guy can’t express this attitude in too-explicit terms, since that gets him rounded off to MGTOW or incel. He simply pursues some high-status lifestyle, whether it’s focused on fitness or self-actualization or shipping code, that just happens to leave zero room in it for any serious relationship. For many aspirants of such a lifestyle, the lack of girlfriend space isn’t a drawback — it’s the draw.

I know plenty of guys like that. The other antimeme is rarer for me spot in person, but in many ways it’s the mirror image of men opting out. It’s the conviction among women that any woman with the will to grab it could have basically any relationship she wants. Yes, men are lost and scared to approach and easily manipulable — this makes seducing them easier than ever. If you can’t, girl — that’s a skill issue.

The quintessential example is a tradwife influencer like Hannah Neeleman: an eager doormat on the surface, a powerhouse business manager behind the scenes. The story of Ballerina Farm isn’t that billionaire heirs are hunting for dancers to lock up on a cattle ranch. The takeaway is that you can snag a billionaire heir by selling him on your personal ranch life vision. There are lower stakes versions of this. The girl who abducts a guy into circus arts, authentic relating, political activism, or simply a more exciting friend group. The girl who sends him on a quest. The girl who fixes him. The girl who shows off her power.

My recent favorite in the genre is Scarfgate, which went viral for exposing just enough of the antimeme to the broad public to trigger an immune reaction. The replies all argued whether you can just do things includes petty larceny or not. But they missed the two most important words in the tweet: now-girlfriend. Agency is power and power is sexy; that girl nabbed more than a scarf that night.

There are reasons why we don’t talk out loud about powerful men opting out of relationships and powerful women grabbing relationships by the scarf. But once you train your eyes, you’ll start spotting these more and more.

Pay Attention

The girl in the meme says, I bet he’s thinking of other women, and of course the problem is that he’s not. He’s thinking about literally anything besides women. That’s why everyone’s so frustrated. If women evolved to require 50% of a man’s mindshare but he has only 10% dedicated to the entire female race, they’re both going to get frustrated and blame it on attachment styles.

Men have more things to think about these days. Sports, video games, algorithmic rage bait, the Roman Empire. At the same time, men have learned to resist their attention being hijacked by sexy women who aren’t, in fact, going to have sex with them. Unlike sexy chicks, The Roman Empire doesn’t leave you humiliated and frustrated.

My message to women is simple: if you like a guy and, in fact, are planning to have sex with him, he’d rather be thinking about you than about anything else. Shifting more of his attention to yourself is a great act of service. Don’t call it “mindshare monopolization”; call it seduction, bewitchment, the cultivation and maintenance of infatuation.

It’s a highly valuable skill. If you were a medieval peasant girl or concubine in the Qing court, the skill of manipulating male attention was a prerequisite for survival. In our comfortable post-modernity, this skill is optional and thus scarce, akin to physical strength in men. But a girl who can’t bewitch a man is like a man who can’t physically pick a girl up: it gives the ick.

Objection #1: I want a man who loves me for who I am, not for playing mind games. This is a bit like saying I’m a good writer, I deserve this blog post to write itself. “Who you are” isn’t some ineffable essence, it’s built of what you do day to day. I’ve decided to be a writer by writing every day. You can just decide that who you are is an irresistible enchantress — just go and enchant. If you feel resistant to the idea, are you sure that’s not your insecurity masquerading as authenticity?

Objection #2: It’s unfair, why do I have to do all the work? Fair: if it feels like an unreciprocated chore then this labor is probably wasted on the wrong man. Aside from generally being worth the effort of seducing, a man must be skillfully responsive to reward the work you’re putting in. It goes both ways: if you’re underwhelmed by the time you spend in men’s heads and beds, have you tried being with a guy who’s truly smitten with you?

Objection #3: It’s not love if it’s based on manipulation or deception. So true, queen: don’t manipulate or deceive guys. That only works for the short term anyway, unless the guy is too stupid for you anyway. To live in a guy’s head you must pay rent in anticipated experiences. If the anticipation is realized and the experience is positive, that’s how love is built to last. The best way to capture a man’s focus is to show him a better future to focus on.

This applies at all timescales. You can send him a hot selfie during work hours, and he’ll be thinking about what’s in store for him in the evening. You can assign him quests, whether it’s picking a place for dinner or finally finishing his taxes, making sure to reward him with honest appreciation. You can paint a clearer vision of what his life as a husband would be like, something that men yearn for but have trouble imagining in detail.

Of course, there’s no universal spellbook. Every woman has her own charms. Every man is different too; capturing a man’s attention requires paying careful attention to him as well. When you observe someone intently you discover the deep desires they can’t even tell you about themselves — that’s where magic begins.

Your True Desire

A lot of people are wary of “obsession” in a romantic context, and with good reason. It conjures a feverish crush, one that’s triggered by narcissistic projection and crashes into a wall of disillusionment at the three-month mark. Being crushed on is exciting but also terrifying, in large part because it’s almost entirely out of your control.

It can seem safer to avoid this whole emotional neighborhood, to fast-forward from the inevitable excitement of early dating to comfortable companionship. I used to see it a lot on women’s app profiles: “I’m a simple girl”, “I’m low-maintenance”, “I just want to skip to watching the 5th season of our favorite show on the couch together”.

This is very achievable. A lot of couples are very comfortable together, give each other a lot of space, and enjoy the moderate baseline of infatuated attention that comes with living with a person you like and have regular sex with. But if there’s something lacking in this arrangement, I think the woman is likelier to feel this lack.

Loving attention is not mere validation, which is what insecure people grasp for. Validation is table stakes. The opposite of insecurity is believing you’re going make your dreams, the future you envision, a reality. Invite a man into that future, and he’ll direct his attention to making it come about.

The current arc of Second Person is my turning away from the idea of self-authoring and towards the idea of fucking around with no narrative. When I asked you all to write the story of you and your dream partner, you mostly described your current lifestyles. When I write the story of my own transformation, it only coheres in retrospect. When I think of a model for deliberate self-coaching, it looks more like gradient descent than like a well-planed voyage.

Caveat: allergy to grand narratives might just be a Jacob thing. I’ve never seriously tried one of those self-authoring programs Jordan Peterson is peddling, but I love improv. It’s how I approach my career as well. Looking at my friends who seem committed to lifelong narratives, I wouldn’t say that it helps them find happy relationships.

I can see two main benefits to deliberately writing out your story. First, it breaks you out of other people’s stories that you may unwittingly fall into, like red-pill noir or rom-com soulmate cargo culting. Second, it clarifies your values, setting a fixed guiding light for all your decisions.

Both are very important! I like to attack bad stories directly, like in the two posts linked above. You can confront the story directly to see the functional impact it has on you and, more importantly, how it’s false. Then you can dehypnotize without having to replace it with something else. As for values, I think bootstrapping integrity through ten thousand small choices is more important than having a list of “core values” published on the corporate website.

Self-authoring is so popular because other people demand that you write your own story legibly, for their own benefit. They don’t really care if it helps you or not. And we pretend not to notice that we’re all terrible at writing.

Seeing Like an App

I’ve seen a shocking number of dating app profiles whose response to the “about me” prompt is ugh, I hate writing those or I never know what to put here. Writing such a thing is a terrible indicator of your intelligence and seriousness about engaging on the app; you shouldn’t kick off your profile with I’m lazy and uncreative lol. But also: yeah, I get it. My self-summary? What the fuck am I, the wiki page for an IKEA bookshelf?

Apps mostly responded to how bad people are at writing by cutting down the space you’re given to write. My OkCupid profile in 2015 was about 600 words long, and my wife read every single one. In 2025, Hinge limits you to just over 600 characters; probably no one reads them anyway. And why would they? Writing a compelling story is much harder when you have less space to do it!

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Three weeks later, he emailed me back:

Still barely any matches / dates. To be clear, I'm not upset at you for this outcome, or really particularly surprised. The text can't overwhelm me being an ugly weirdo loser with a low status job.

I agreed that his problem certainly wasn’t the Hinge copy I wrote. But neither was it his job, hobbies, or appearance. His problem was that he decided he’s a loser. Perhaps he could spent time with just one person who didn’t think he was…

Self Surgery

In 1945, a successful plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz reflected on the surprising variance in the outcomes of surgery. A boy complained that his giant ears made people think he’s stupid. When his ears were cut down to size, he regained the confidence to express himself and no longer felt disrespected. But the Duchess didn’t just remain shy and self-conscious after her humpy nose was sculpted into classic perfection, she insisted that her nose looked the same as ever before!

Maltz came to the conclusion that the majority of his patients suffered not from a defect in their nose or ears, but from a fault in their self-image. This self-image was only loosely tied to a person’s physical appearance. It was made of habits of action and reaction, not bone and cartilage. Nonetheless, Maltz decided that it too is amenable to surgery. The resulting book, published 15 years later, was Psycho-Cybernetics.

Psycho-Cybernetics is a peculiar book, by the standards of both its time and of ours. The second chapter concludes with a prescription to reread the chapter at least 10 times. The acronym for symptoms of an automatic failure mechanism is FAILURE. The book refers to then-current research in neurology, cybernetics, and computer science, but ultimately grounds its core thesis in that assertion that “God created man in his own image […] an all-wise and all-powerful Creator would not turn out inferior products”. The word “sales” appears 139 times in Psycho-Cybernetics, the word “golf” another 100. Whether an improved self-image can help in any domain of life outside of these two is left as an exercise to the reader.

But the book’s three core ideas are powerful and correct, and they have formed the basis for much of the self-help literature published in the last 65 years.

First, that you “act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be”. Your day-to-day behavior, emotions, and even the reactions you invite from others are both driven by and limited by your self-image.

Second: this inner thermostat is adjustable, albeit slowly. It can be nudged by mental rehearsal, reliving past successes, selective forgetting of failures, and, most importantly, your observed actions in the world. Like an LLM, you train yourself into becoming a character, whether a successful one or a miserable one.

Third: the key to success in most endeavors is to train a self-image of success, give it a clear goal, and then get out of the way. Without conscious interference, your Automatic Success Mechanism (ASM) will guide the ball to the cup and the deal to its close.

I’m pretty sure this works in dating as well.

Master of Dating Administration

In the last decade and a half, my career trajectory has been:

• I got a Master of Business Administration degree during which I learned little tacit or explicit knowledge that’s applicable to administering a business.

• I worked at a successful company for 11 years, taking on dozens of different tasks of my own initiative.

• I’m suddenly quite good at many aspects of administering a business.

So what did business school actually teach me?

It taught me that I’m the sort of guy who’s good at administering a business. Since I arrived at Kenan-Flagler with almost no business experience, I was amenable to being told that this is easy enough to learn in two years. Since I found the MBA classes a cakewalk after a math degree, I learned that I’m unusually good at this. And even though on my first day at work post-MBA I was more delusional than good at anything, I just kept acting like I was until the reality of my skill caught up to my MBA self-image.

In that post I also wrote that the main reason I don’t want to pursue dating coaching as a career is that I don’t want to be a solo operator. I want to join a great team with a great founder. Dozens of you shared my post, and in the last three weeks I’ve talked with incredible founders and team leads almost every day. I’m really grateful to everyone nudging my dream career towards reality.

It’s only fair that I share the playbook I would use if I were to do dating coaching: the Psycho-Cybernetic playbook. I never learned it from a coach; perhaps you don’t need one either.

The Torah on One Foot

The whole of the Psycho-Cybernetic playbook is just be yourself, the rest is commentary. Unfortunately, “just be yourself” is as commonly given as it is useless, as commonly misunderstood as it is wise. Thus the need for commentary.

People who need this advice imagine “yourself” as a fixed target that you should aim the verb “be” at. This is precisely the wrong attitude. “Yourself” is a real thing, but it is neither fixed nor visible to you to aim at. It is the result of your actions, deliberate and non-deliberate, not their object. “Being” means the absence of deliberate action, the letting go that lets “yourself” act non-deliberately. When I give this advice, I say let yourself be.

That’s how “just be yourself” is misunderstood. The reason it’s useless is that people seeking dating advice have no self they trust to let be. They want a list of instructions to cover up that lack of the self.

Instructions won’t help you. But I can offer you a list of steps to take towards the place where just be yourself is the only dating advice you need.

Step 0 – Dehypnotize

If your eventual success requires a successful self-image, it means that your failure is caused by a self-image set up to fail. The self-image itself may be hard to get at directly, but it’s orbited by a cloud of beliefs and stories that explain your failure. I’m too short. Men only want X. No one’s allowed to flirt anymore. It doesn’t really matter if the story is about yourself or the people you’re supposed to date or the world at large. If your story ends with “…and that’s why I fail at dating” then the self-image underneath will ensure you fail.

One thing you may notice about these stories is that they are false. You know short guys who are happily married. Your friend is dating a guy who wants Y instead. You flirted once and weren’t sent to horny jail.

Maltz likens these beliefs to self-hypnosis. He offers the following anecdote:

The gripping strength of another athlete has been tested on a dynamometer and has been found to be 100 pounds. All his effort and straining cannot budge the needle beyond the 100-pound mark. Now he is hypnotized and told, "You are very, very strong. Stronger than you have ever been in your life. Much, much stronger. You are surprised at how strong you are." Again the gripping strength of his hand is tested. This time he easily pulls the needle to the 125-pound mark.

[…] The hypnotist merely removed this mental block, and allowed him to express his true strength. The hypnosis literally "dehypnotized" him temporarily from his own self-limiting beliefs about himself.

I have spent much of this blog trying to dehypnotize you from various self-limiting beliefs. One reason for this focus is that I am still a rationalist at heart, and attacking false beliefs in longform blogs is our chief hobby and status hierarchy. Another reason is that every following step in this process is unique to you, and I can only give broad outlines without knowing you personally. But the poisoned narratives are made and distributed in public where I can see them.

When a guy tells me “you can’t flirt anymore because of #MeToo”, there could be many different things hiding behind that. He could worry that his mere presence causes women discomfort, or believe that he couldn’t handle the pain of rejection, or that women are out to get him, or perhaps he resents the expectation that men must make the first move. I tell him market logic dictates that #MeToo has not made flirting any easier or harder for men, hoping that once he discards the protective shell of the outward-facing narrative he would notice the falsity of the self-belief underneath.

Ultimately, that step is also up to him alone.

Step 1 – Pick a Target

Once your self-image isn’t set up for failure, you can aim it at success. To aim anywhere, you must first see the target. This is what I attempted with the guide to authentic wanting, except “your dream partner” turned out to be too remote and difficult a target to aim at.

When I actually coach, I give clients nearby goals to hit this week, not year-long projects. If a guy is wary of approaching women, I may try to update his self-image towards “people enjoy my company”. The target: get someone to smile in response to something you said three times this week, then move on. Imagine the outcome, not worrying about the steps to get there: I’ll make a funny observation or give a compliment and they’ll smile. Then you go out and do it until the outcome becomes not just imaginable, but expected.

Once your self-image expects easy wins, bigger goals become imaginable. I will take Julia out for Thai food and have her smiling for an hour with my playful conversation.

A good target is salient, aligned, and inside your locus of control.

• Salient: it feels real when you imagine it, in full sensory detail. The power of the ASM is that it directs your entire mind towards the goal, the conscious and the unconscious. A good goal should be deeply felt and desirable, not a cognitive abstraction.

• Aligned: you can’t succeed if you’re fighting against yourself. If you yearn to feel like a master seducer but tell me on the form that you want a wife and kids next year, you won’t achieve either. The reason you can’t align on a single target is that some parts of you are holding on to false stories about yourself. Go read the Sequences back to step 0.

• “My soulmate will stumble on me at the book store checkout line” is a lousy goal because it’s not up to you. Your self-image isn’t a narcissistic story about what happens to you because you deserve it, but about your actions and their direct outcomes.

Step 2 – Boot Up the Self-Image

Maltz is a huge believer in the power of imagination and mental practice:

Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because, again, your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.

If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance. Mental practice is as powerful as actual practice.

I’m more skeptical, though perhaps I simply lack imagination. However, I fully agree with the first sentence: imagination lets you do what you can’t yet do in actuality. You must imagine something before you can do it.

Mental rehearsal can’t be the whole of your practice, but it’s the necessary first step. Can you visualize bantering with the barista for 20 seconds, in full HD embodied first-person POV, without the movie glitching? If you can’t, you may still be in the grip of a failure narrative or trying to hit a goal that’s too far out. Go back to Step 0 or Step 1, respectively. If the movie feels realistic, go to Step 3.

Step 3 – RLHF

Your self-image doesn’t change overnight, but it gets updated every minute of your life by observing your actions and their consequences. If you let this process run unchecked, your actions will dig a deep trench of confirmation bias around whatever self-story happened to be there. Orienting your self-image towards success requires two things:

• Setting up an environment where you get to act often and succeed sometimes, even if for small stakes.

• Updating in the right direction from both success and failure.

The LLM metaphor is very germane here. Your self-image is instantiated in a literal neural network: your brain. Success comes from gradient ascent up the win landscape, where every learning isn’t a token that’s fed to you but an action you take. Learning means fucking around.

People get stuck in dating because they’re disconnected from the actual learning landscape, or because they let failures drag them back instead of pushing them.

The former includes everyone who participates in dating discourse to find the “true rules” of dating but never actually flirts. It’s the resentment maximizers and the fuckability maximizers. These people may think highly or lowly of themselves, imagine themselves undeserving or worthy. But their self-image doesn’t expect to win because they don’t actually play the game.

A neural network updates equally on both a loss and gain, and both nudge it in the direction of smaller loss in the long run. Learning from failure is the same. Maltz equates failure to warning lights on a car’s dashboard: you should acknowledge them them and take immediate corrective action. But your failures aren’t part of who you are, no more than low tire pressure is a core part of the car brand.

Self-image reinforcement learning isn’t a discrete action; it’s what you’re always doing in the background. The intervention is in setting your life up for learning, which usually means an active and open-minded social life, and in setting up your own mindset to be nudged in the right direction by every social interaction you have, good or bad.

Step 4 – Trust the Mechanism

The “cybernetics” part of the book comes from viewing your brain as a regulatory control system directing your body towards a target state. Maltz extrapolates this metaphor from bits of 1950s science and technology. In the decades since, neuroscience has shown this to be an accurate description at every level. Your brain creates conscious experience in the process of regulating your body into the state of being alive.

This control system can direct you into either state, success or failure, depending on which aligns with your self-image. It doesn’t even know what success or failure are, all it knows is making internal predictions come true. If you give it a clear goal that you’re fully aligned with, it will fly there like a rocket — the Automatic Success Mechanism. To get to its destination, the rocket needs thrust and steering.

Your integrity is the thrust:

A guy whose swagger doesn’t match his status in either direction is off-putting to girls. They sense the lack of integrity. Even if he isn’t consciously trying to fool other people, he’s fighting to fool himself. When a man is fully aligned he can’t even imagine pretending to be someone else for others, there’s no one he can be but his whole self.

The power of the ASM is that it mobilizes every last neuron in your brain towards the goal. But this means that without integrity, your parts are pulling in different directions. Integrity is built simply by repeatedly observing yourself being true to your values. The good news is that the more integrity you have, the easier it is to keep building on it.

The big idea of psycho-cybernetics is that when it comes to game time, the best way to steer is to let go of the wheel. If you’re scripting decision trees or arguing “shoulds” with yourself, it means that your System 2 is in conflict with the rest of you. It’s bad improv.

This is the part where rationalists get stuck, after breezing through steps 0 and 1 and forcing themselves through 2 and 3. Rationalists love thought experiments where you’re nobody in particular, and they love decision theories that produce mathematically precise plans. Being a nobody with a plan is great for solving differential equations. But in dating you have to be someone, with no plan other than letting yourself be.

Step ∞ – Keep Going

At the end of this process it stops being a process. It’s just who you are: a person who knows where they’re going and expects to arrive there. It took me about 5 years to get there with dating.

There’s no guarantee of how long it will take your automatic success mechanism to actually navigate you to success, since that depends on serendipity and market forces. I’m lucky to be a top 20% man who “graduated” into a wife-heavy market, so it took less than a year from establishing my self-image as a husband to meeting my wife.

Of course, the process never stops: only the goals change. I’m working on my self-image as a caring husband and doting father who perfectly balances family life with a demanding career and many intellectual obsessions, and that one’s pretty patchy at the moment. But I know the path now, and, most importantly, I have my wife to keep me on track. Building self-image is much easier with the help of someone who believes in who you could be. Part of my reluctance to do coaching comes from never having used a coach myself, but I do believe that the right person in your corner can make a huge difference.

How do you know when you’re in the right place, at least with respect to dating? A good sign is when someone asks you for dating advice and all you can tell them is just be yourself, because you can’t imagine doing anything else.

Hinged

When I told the guy who commissioned my Hinge copy to spend some time with people who didn’t think he was a loser, I meant his friends or coworkers. I don’t know if he read my email, but I do know that instead of friends he reached out to his ex. 10 weeks later, I got another email:

Long story short, we started talking every day, for hours. And I started to decide I wanted her back...

...And then I started to have hit after hit on hinge dates, at least for a few weeks. Cool, interesting women seemed all over me, I couldn't get them to not like me.

[…] I still feel deeply unsure how to efficiently meet good people and maintain this level of confidence and attractiveness. But I know it's possible, at least in theory.

It’s possible, in practice. All a man needs is a clear goal and a win landscape to gradient-ascend. While I would perhaps recommend that this man tune down his learning rate parameter a bit, he has all he needs.

This was the starting point for my journey up the “marriageability curve” I introduced last week. It’s the path from being a nobody (as far as the marriage market is concerned) to becoming a husband. Here’s my path.

Positive Momentum

The first part of the curve is painfully slow. It’s hard to get better at dating if no one wants to date you, and girls won’t date someone who gets no girls. But you can still be making exponential progress in the mathematical sense: compounding improvement relative to where you were last year, even if there’s little absolute improvement in your dating outcomes.

To build on steady progress, the crucial thing is to steer clear of the undertow that drags you backwards. Dejection, resentment, learned helplessness, rumination, victimhood, dating discourse. If you avoid the traps and live your own life, it will teach you the wisdom you need.

The inflection point in your journey comes when you don’t expect, usually after years of barely perceptible progress. For me, this was my 23rd birthday.

At 23, I wasn’t feeling particularly bad about my life. I was still close with friends from high school, and we were mostly going through the same flailing of young adulthood. I was finally out of the military and living on my own, which meant that I was finally free to dress how I wanted and play as much Civilization IV as I wanted. I dressed poorly, but Civ kept me from going online and falling prey to egregores. I still liked girls a lot, even if they didn’t respond to my overly sincere messages on crappy dating apps.

I was learning how to be an adult — taking care of my basic needs, showing up professionally, socializing with people I wouldn’t naturally be friends with. I signed up for the GMAT on a whim and studied every day during dead hours at work. While much of my day-to-day was a bummer, my overarching life mood was one of indefinite optimism.

Two months after my 23rd birthday, I took the GMAT and scored in the 99.5th percentile. My optimism suddenly became a lot more definite. My job became a placeholder as I worked on business school applications. My material conditions stopped being a reflection of my worth, just a temporary circumstance.

In July, I got an email from a Russian acquaintance I met on Birthright during my service. She was in Israel with a friend named Natasha, did I want to meet up? The answer was no, it’s 100 degrees outside and the World Cup is on. But I owed her for entertaining me in Moscow when I visited. I turned the football off, texted a few friends to meet us at the beach, and got on the bus.

This photo was taken that night. I’m in the corner, my hand resting awkwardly on the shoulder of a classmate I’ve been fruitlessly pursuing for years. Natasha is in the back, ignored.

But over the next week, she and I got a few occasions to hang out. We talked about Siberia, mathematics, and the desire to escape and start fresh. I wasn’t trying to flirt or even impress her, since Natasha lived 1600 miles away in a country I was never going back to. The evening before her flight, I invited her to sleep over at my parents’ place. We ended up talking all night. At 5 am, I drove her to the airport, got out of the car, and finally realized that we’re both hopelessly infatuated. We kissed and she flew off.

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When people are asked in public what they’re looking for in a dream romantic partner, they often say rather silly things. They name immaterial proxies and status markers like his height or her alma mater. They refer to vague attributes like “cute” or “great vibes”. They’ll sometimes list attributes that would make the actual relationship worse, like girls who demand a man who goes to therapy and then wonder why all of their boyfriends are mentally ill.

People ignore the anticipated experience of being with a partner, focusing instead on how a partner appears on paper. They struggle to narrow down what makes someone a great match for them personally, as opposed to someone broadly attractive. They give an answer that looks good — appropriately modest, not too weird, carrying a positive signal — instead of envisioning a good partner.

Last year, I invited readers to fill out a personal guide to authentic wanting. I hoped to push people past social desirability bias with carefully guided introspection. I chose six questions and expanded on each one with more detail and examples in the form itself:

1. How would an honest friend describe you right now?

2. Your date says, “here’s the sort of relationship I’m looking for.” What are you most hoping to hear?

3. What experiences do you want to share with a partner? Think about past relationships or friendships — what did you love having, or wish you had?

4. What absolute dealbreakers or requirements shape your dating life?

5. Whose type are you? Think of skills and qualities that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea but make you really valued by those who seek them. What do your friends appreciate about you? What desires and needs did your former partners have in common?

6. What’s your deepest insecurity or shame around dating? What would it feel like if someone not only accepted it, but was specifically drawn to it?

My goal was to ground my readers in their actual lived experience and feelings that come from the gut, not from the discourse. I hoped this would create a canvas for responders to paint the partner that’s the perfect fit just for them.

Did it work?

The 49 men and 8 women who filled out my form did manage to avoid vapid mimetic signaling. Unfortunately, very few of them felt that they arrived at a clear enough picture of their dream partner, even after a follow-up chat with me. My readers’ most common gut feelings are insecurity about their lack of romantic experience and anxiety about approaching attractive strangers. Their lived experience is not knowing where to go to meet good options. Their dream partner feels out of reach, even of their imagination.

It’s very hard to tell apart the responses of those seeking to settle down ASAP from those who are looking for a casual relationship or to “see how it plays out”. The chart above shows how many readers in each group mentioned a desire or experience in each domain.

The most frequent mentions for both groups were conversation (“we talk about systemic social/technological issues”) and shared leisure hobbies (6 mentions of skiing, 12 of board games, 15 of drugs). Chatting and sharing hobbies are the two things you do even with a casual or remote partner, not necessarily your spouse. GPT counted only 9 mentions of “spouse-only” wants among the marriage-seeking group, and most of these were simply restating the general desire for starting a family.

Here are a few examples of what I’d classify as envisioning married life, not just sketching out a sexy roommate:

• “no phone at the dining table or in the bedroom […] I love having systems to make sure that clutter is regularly cleaned up […] a really good understanding of finance and I could trust him to navigate macroeconomics changes.”

• “wants to raise any future kids Catholic”

• “the dream scenario is like George Eliot / George Lewes or John Stuart Mill / Harriet Taylor Mill or maybe Esther Duflo / Abhijit Banerjee”

• “I like asking for advice and then not following it.”

All four of these came from my female readers. In general, women seemed to have a much clearer vision of long-term relationships, regardless of their own dating intent, than guys looking to settle down. Guys mostly described a girl that would fit comfortably into their current lives, not how they want their lives to change with a wife. And they mostly described themselves as a man, not as a husband.

Husband-Shaped

The authentic wanting exercise was an attempt to pull readers away from the cached, socially-desirable account of who they’re looking for. I worry that instead it pushed readers towards the cached, socially-desirable account of who they are: a commitment-minded husband-in-waiting. I think many of them aren’t that, not truthfully.

It felt to me that behind many of the “looking to settle down soon” responses was a desire to skip the difficult and anxious process of early-stage dating, rather than a true yearning to start changing diapers next year. In our follow-up conversations, several of these guys admitted that what they actually really want right now is to become more attractive and more confident talking to women, or to experience sexual abundance before they lock it up with monogamy.

It’s also no surprise that men without much serious dating experience can’t describe in detail what their perfect wife looks like. How would they know? No amount of introspection can teach someone about experiences they haven’t had yet. A man can’t find out without fucking around.

(I asked one of the women I quoted above why women seemed better at envisioning married life. She suggested that in the male-dominated communities my readers are drawn from, women gain more relationship experience at younger ages.)

In The Good Men Aren’t Gone, They’re Delayed, I noted:

Women enter the marriage market earlier than men, but leave at the exact same rate of one per wedding. For any given age, eligible wives outnumber eligible husbands. This makes each woman feel that the odds are stacked against her.

Overall, this handicap is offset by the fact that women spend longer on the marriage market, not only playing the numbers game but also learning with practice to recognize and seduce the right men. But this also means they have a longer experience of frustration with the undersupply of husbands. Given the favorable ratio, men who graduate into husbandability get hitched before they have time to complain. When a guy says there are no good wives out there, we assume he’s not much of a catch himself.

That essay explored the delayed-husband situation mostly from the point of view of women. I described how the marriage market shifts sharply against women as people age into their mid 30s, and the smart risks a husband-shopper must take to counteract her disadvantage. But what does it mean for men?

At the end of last week’s post, I wrote about the “slow virtuous cycle” of abundance for men (the mirror image of the victim-minded man’s slow-then-sudden spiral into inceldom). A man’s dating success comes with confidence and with understanding what you and women really want from each other. Confidence and wisdom come from experience. Experience1 requires some initial success.

The ideal growth curve for a man looks something like the chart above. Women look for relatively similar traits in casual boyfriends and in husbands2, so a guy with no husbandly traits takes a while to ramp up any dating success. The first threshold is attaining abundance mindset, where his dating mindset shifts from grasping and competitiveness to playful generosity. From a place of abundance, a man can wholeheartedly decide that he wants commitment for its own sake, not as a bargaining chip he offers a woman in exchange for sexual access. Soon after he makes that decision, his future wife snatches him off the market.

Men can get stuck at various points along the curve. By this point on our journey, there’s a Second Person blog post for each one:

• Giving up before you even try (because you’re depressed).

• Looking for a foolproof playbook or “scientific consensus” on dating instead of seeking first-hand experience.

• Prevented from exercising your own agency by the longhouse.

• Stuck in resentment that results from the inability to understand how women are different.

• Performing for the wrong audience and optimizing for optics instead of intimacy.

• Dating with an adversarial mindset or in a low-trust environment, precluding abundance even if you’re successful.

• Being unemployed.

This upcoming chapter will talk about the bachelor’s final transition, from abundance mindset to husband mindset. I’ll describe my own journey in the next post, then I’ll lay out a blueprint for identity transformation using the framework of psycho-cybernetics. Finally, I’ll offer some observations on what makes marriage work, with an eye to confidently deciding whether to marry the woman you’re already with before you waste precious years of both of your lives.

I realize now that no step in this process requires compiling a spreadsheet of your ideal wife’s attributes. The initial selection in most relationships will be done by the woman, whether she pursues her choice directly or sets the course for him to pursue. If she’s hot enough, the man will likely be blinded by projection for the first couple of months anyway. What matters to a marriage, including the set of lifelong problems each person brings into it, can’t be planned or accounted for in advance.

In the middle of working on this essay, I got an unexpected shout-out from a happy husband-to-be:

I guess I got it right back in 2023. If you bring husbandly qualities and have a clear plan for married life, there’s little to be gained from further contemplation. Waste no time before meeting in person, and be your husbandliest self when you do.

In the last decade, I have developed two distinct sets of employable skills that are visible to two distinct audiences. If you’re a former Nasdaq colleague, client, or skim my LinkedIn, you’d see industry expertise in banking and regulation, and experience building and selling enterprise software to banks. You’d imagine me a middle manager at Moody’s or Morgan Stanley. It’s a nice gig. I’ve worked with many nice people who have it. I don’t want it.

I have also spent the last decade writing online. I’ve made bets and predictions, stood for or apart from causes, and tried to make sense of the world. I have found readers and online friends who appreciate some talents that come through in my writing — insight, integrity, rational analysis, creativity, discipline — but who have little idea what I used to or want to do for a living.

This post is for the latter. I believe that the second set of talents is more valuable to the right employer than any specific industry or role experience. It’s also much harder for an employer to select for. If someone you know is looking to work with someone like me, consider this my “hire-me doc”. And for everyone else, this may still be an interesting read on how a particular career path felt like from the inside, not just as a list of bullet points.

Rogue Generalist

They say your natural talent is what everyone else seems surprisingly bad at. In my case, I’ve been surprised how naturally most people conform to the box of their defined role. They’re careful not to step on any toes and careful not to learn anything that might volunteer them for work outside their job description.

I’m the opposite of that.

I started my education in mathematics, then learned finance, then spent a decade moving to roles that required soft skills. I’ve vibe-coded collateral allocation algorithms and made financial models for paper mills. I’ve written software sales brochures, talked at conferences, and made award-winning slide decks on new financial regulations. I’ve encouraged despondent coworkers and placated angry clients. I ran classes on macroeconomics and how to crunch numbers in your head. I’ve made smart gambles at work, on sports, and on major global events. I made people laugh in the office a lot. Less than half of these were within my job description at any given time, and the other half created by far the more value.

I get burned out if my work is disconnected from any outcome anyone cares about. When that happens, I just go looking for something cared-about to do instead. I joined my last employer, Axiom SL, when we had 50 people with 100 hats to wear. Eleven years, one merger, and two acquisitions later, Axiom became Nasdaq — an excellent company with 9,000 excellent well-defined boxes for its employees to stay in. I quit to go somewhere small and do it all over again.

I’m a broad-scope generalist who loves rogue tasks and moving quickly. I’ve started practicing the use of AI to get even better at this, catching up on new subjects quickly and automating repetitive tasks.

If you’re running a team that has a lot of problems that need to be solved every day that don’t fit into any job description — problems you can’t write a job description for because there’s going to be a different set next week — you might want to hire me. At the very least, you should tell me what all these problems are because I like learning about all kinds of businesses and am definitely going to have some thoughts. Then you might want to hire me.

Factual Resume

Early Life

I grew up in Israel in a trilingual family of scientists. As a teenager, I skipped school a lot and placed in the top three in most national youth math Olympiads. In my mandatory IDF service, I did field research of advanced electro-optics systems. I completed a BSc in math and physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2009.

After the military, I pivoted away from math and academia and took a hedge fund job day-trading interest-rate derivatives. Six months in, I read a copy of Fooled by Randomness that was on the office shelf and realized that none of us had any alpha or market edge. Excited by my encounter with finance but disillusioned with day-trading, I applied to business schools. I was a rather unusual MBA applicant. My GMAT score of 770 was in the top 0.5%, but my BSc grades were just average and my work experience, at age 23, was very limited. Kenan-Flagler Business School decided to take a chance on my potential, and I arrived at UNC Chapel Hill in 2011.

After mathematics, I found the MBA classes easy, TAed for two professors in my second year, and took extracurricular PhD courses in econometrics. What I struggled with was absorbing American corporate culture from scratch, from email etiquette to networking practice to what exactly counts as “business casual” in each industry. At the end of two years, I was just about acculturated enough to be employable.

I was interviewing in Atlanta for management consulting when my girlfriend at the time announced a surprise relocation to New York. I had a sole job offer in NYC, a modest fintech named Axiom Software Labs. The CFO was impressed by my military service. I was impressed by my future boss who explained how his team makes money without the obfuscating corporate-speak I’ve grown to expect in b-school. I took the offer.

Axiom SL → Adenza→ Nasdaq

Axiom SL is a provider of software that automates risk and regulatory operations for major financial institutions. In 2021, it was acquired by PE firm Thoma Bravo and merged with a capital markets fintech to form Adenza. In 2023, Nasdaq acquired Adenza for $10.5B to form the backbone of its internal financial technology division. I worked at Axiom from 2013 until 2024, with a short sabbatical in 2017 in which I got married, learned Spanish in Latin America, and did an internship at Jane Street.

Axiom was initially a provider of regulatory reporting, selling templates that would package client-prepared results in the format required by financial regulators. These reports required upstream processing of the raw information and derivations of various ratios and summary amounts. This was usually done by an array of consultants with spreadsheets. In 2013, Axiom was ready to expand into this lucrative niche by automating the data transformation and calculations within its own proprietary software platform.

Developing Clients

Axiom didn’t have a training or onboarding program. I learned the software by reading the manual, playing around, and asking the platform devs dumb questions. In my first year at Axiom, I was the main developer on two solutions: FFIEC 009, a computation of banks’ net foreign exposures, and a calculation engine of Basel III risk-weighted assets.

The solutions performed to spec but didn’t gain traction beyond a few clients. Banks had pre-existing workflows for both regulations, and even if these were expensive and unreliable we didn’t know how to sell them on the upgrade. I built both solutions for functionality at the cost of accessibility, which didn’t help close sales either.

From 2014-2017, I was sent to on-site implementations of Axiom’s products at Morgan Stanley, PNC, RBC, MUFG, and SVB (RIP). I learned three important things behind enemy lines.

First: clients want a lot more from a software vendor than a solution that performs ABC by XYZ date. They may want assurance that they’re in line with competitor best practices, “phone a friend” for emergencies, validation, an impressive story, or a scapegoat. It took a while for me to understand all of this and finally develop the “soft skills” business school was supposed to teach.

Second: clients aren’t paying for creativity or initiative.

Third: thank God I didn’t become a management consultant. Hotels and bar tabs get old fast.

Back at Axiom HQ, I also became involved in recruiting. I traveled to colleges, interviewed applicants, and developed the company’s first technical aptitude test for candidates. Talent evaluation is the most difficult thing I tried my hand at. Thankfully, one guy was hired against my recommendation and became one of my most competent collaborators and a good friend.

Product Management

After I rejoined the product team, our big break came with the publication of the Single-Counterparty Credit Limits (SCCL) rule in August 2018. The process for building a solution for this at large vendors would involve subject matter experts analyzing the rulebook, product managers writing specs, developers building and testing, and marketers creating brochures and decks. If every link in the chain is competent and it goes smoothly, this takes about 12 months.

I started building SCCL with one developer (the one I recommended against hiring) and one rules analyst. We worked in an agile way, turning rule diagrams to code modules and specs to marketing slides as we went. 10 weeks after the rule came out I showed a working demo of SCCL to our first client, complete with a brochure explaining the rules and a slide deck explaining the business case. Our solution was ultimately purchased by 14 out of the 25 US Banks that were subject to the rule, earning Axiom several million in ARR.

Eventually, Axiom also grew in complexity and team size. In 2021, I was managing a new product for the Brazilian market that involved a fragmented team across four different countries. My work involved connecting the silos, translating requirements to specs for developers in Ukraine and explaining our technical capabilities to client managers in LatAm.

I wonder how this project would have worked in 2025 with a good LLM. The tasks that kept everyone waiting, like translating rules from Portuguese or writing unit tests, can mostly be automated. The high value human tasks, like understanding the client’s true pain points and deciding on priorities and trade-offs, would be easier with a smaller, proactive team. Enterprise AI transformation still feels slept on, I’m excited to be in the generation that gets to figure this out.

After the merger and Nasdaq acquisition, product management moved mostly outside the New York office. Our team was re-christened as “pre sales”. I spent a lot of 2023-24 planning go-to-market strategies with Salesforce, putting together demonstrations and PowerPoints, and preparing talks for client roundtables and conferences. My remaining product responsibilities were becoming harder and harder to do, with every decision having to get approval from more stakeholders and executed through longer processes.

Though I still got the satisfaction of helping close multi-million deals, the day-to-day work lost a lot of its appeal. In June 2024, I told my boss that I wanted to leave. I spent two months tying up loose ends and transferring knowledge, then said goodbye to the team in August. I’m happy to provide references and recommendations from my time at Axiom/Nasdaq, it was time well spent.

Looking Forward

Things I’m looking for in my next job, in descending order of importance:

• A boss worth following into battle and a talented team that cares about their work. The main reason that writing/coaching isn’t my plan A is that it’s lonely work, I’m stronger in a squad.

• A winner: a company whose offering is best-in-class, or a startup that is sincerely trying to become one (as opposed to building hype and raising money, sorry “web 3”). From my experience, a lot of company culture is downstream from profit margins.

• A culture that values initiative and autonomy over protocol. I don’t need something crazy to be happening every day, but my chaos-thriving talents are wasted if there’s no chaos.

• A salary I can raise a family on, or an equity position with a time horizon in the 2020s. I have plenty of runway from saving my Axiom salary ($250k pre-tax TC in 2024), but I also need to feed the kids.

• I’m flexible geographically (within the US — I’m a permanent resident) with a preference to live near NYC or Berkeley. I actually enjoyed hybrid work for balancing maker and manager schedule, but I’ve also successfully worked remote from 2020-2024 and don’t mind being in the office full-time if the work requires it.

• I don’t care how trendy your industry is, how impressive my job title, how fun it is to talk about at parties. I keep the professional professional, and I find every business interesting in itself.

If you are:

• A team of engineers/researchers that needs a head of ops to keep things running and start developing a process.

• A startup that wants a fractional CFO to grow with as you approach Series A.

• A growing fintech looking for a product strategist to pivot or launch a new line.

• A lean private equity firm that’s going to make a killing with AI transformation.

• Someone who knows of an even better fit and can’t wait to tell me about it.

DM or email me at yashkaf@gmail.com, I look forward to working with you.

You may wonder if the vibe at such a conference would be dry and academic or edgy and stimulating, doomer or optimist, egalitarian or hierarchical. You probably wouldn’t expect the vibe to be free-flowing libidinal energy.

How did a conference with sessions on elastomeric respirators and the Book of Revelation get horny? Like Darwin’s journey on the Beagle, I shall list some field notes from my journey to Lighthaven. Then, perhaps a unifying theory will suggest itself.

1

The venue groundskeeper, Ronny, tweeted about getting a tattoo to commemorate being Aella’s 100th sexual partner. In response, thousands of people all over the internet had an aneurysm. A comment saying “you should have been bullied when you were a kid” from someone who attended Lighthaven last year has 3,400 likes.

Why is everyone so obsessed with a few friends goofing around like any college kids on spring break? Any guy can open Tinder, click on “top picks”, and see women with body counts higher than Aella’s accumulated over men with sillier tattoos than Ronny’s. Hatred this intense usually comes from envy. But it can’t just be envy of having sex with a hot online celebrity. People reacted as if Ronny broke some sacred rule of the universe.

2

Overheard:

People have tried to smear my org with sex abuse for years, and now I’m told to censor what I think about AI labs because someone powerful might be offended? Fuck that shit.

3

My friend “Standard Deviant” gave a talk titled “How I’ve had more sex”. He described the “escalator”: starting a conversation, exchanging compliments, light touch on the arm, etc. The important thing isn’t to rush up the escalator, my friend said, but to move together in synchrony whether you’re taking a step up or a step down.

When women show interest in casual sex, he often asks: do you do this sort of thing often? If they don’t, he often forgoes the opportunity out of an excess of caution.

Afterwards, more women wanted to have sex with him. I joked that women want to have sex not with the tall guy, hot guy, or the famous guy, but with the Schelling point guy. Someone pointed out that tall, hot, and famous are the usual Schelling points.

4

Observing a scrawny, slouching blogger in an ill-fitting jacket give a talk, two women independently declared that he was the sexiest guy at the conference. I observed the man in question for a minute. I noticed that he seemed extremely comfortable addressing a crowd while sitting slouched in an ill-fitting jacket, more comfortable than most people can ever get in front a crowd no matter their dress or status.

5

I have an application to date me up on my old blog, on the view that if a girl enjoys my writing she will certainly enjoy my company as well. A few years ago, I was asked out by a girl who admitted she only read a small bit from one of my posts. She told me:

If you’re a writer, you’re cool. But a lot of people online are creepy and DM you pretending they don’t want to fuck you. The fact that you’ve had this dating form up for years means I can trust you.

6

A group of girls were talking about how it’s obvious that high-status men are sexy and that you can easily tell that by how confident they are. I asked: which is it, the status or the swagger? Is it hot when a guy is high status (e.g., respected as a master in his field) but doesn’t show it, or when he shows high confidence that isn’t really deserved? They scrunched their faces at the thought of either of these, though they couldn’t quite explain why.

7

A woman who writes about casual sex online showed up to LessOnline not being very familiar with the rationalist community. She asked a cuddling couple if they were sex partners and was shocked to hear that they’re just friends. As the evening grew colder, more and more people joined Platonic cuddles on benches around the fire pits. The woman sat apart on a chair, observing with curiosity.

8

Last summer, a story in a major newspaper accused Lightaven of having “racist ties” and hosting conferences with “extreme figures”. This summer saw a 50% increase in LessOnline attendees of all races.

9

So uh...

Chasing Right Tail

Sex requires trust. Trust requires integrity.

It’s an old idea, though not by any means universal. Fuckbois and pickup artists pursue sex with zero integrity and make fun of “nice guys”. Most people hate that, they try to punish defectors and enforce dating norms that reward being reasonably nice and honest. 99% of the discourse about sex and integrity focuses on the conflict between “sex defectors” and the mainstream.

If we draw the distribution of “integrity and trustworthiness around sex” in the population, we see that these two groups form the left tail and middle hump, respectively. But what about the right tail? What do sexual relations look like when you optimize for trust and honesty far beyond where most people settle?

The right tail is a strange place to be. The struggle for trust flips from trying to convince others to being purely internal. The signals of trust flip to countersignals. Sexual abundance lets people have very high sexual standards, but on very unusual traits.

And everyone who’s never been in a high-trust community is convinced that it’s a sex cult.

Welcome to LessOnline.

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The most provocative chapter of The Value of Others is titled “Love Has Nothing to Do with Relationships”. That proposition isn’t really defended so much as it simply falls out of the author’s word definitions: relationships are “the media in which value is transacted” and love is devotion that seeks nothing in exchange. But the chapter does contain a fascinating overview of how “love” was seen throughout history:

Being shot is not an experience that most people seek out, which is why the Greeks treated those “pierced with Cupid’s arrow” with a kind of pitiable indulgence: a feeling akin to what most modern folks extend to the homeless. Most believed it was an unenviable affliction brought about by a combination of personal weakness and circumstances beyond the individual’s control.

Taraban traces the origin of contemporary romantic love to the 12th-century Cathars who rejected marriage and celebrated chaste longing. After the Catholics massacred the Cathars, romantic love found refuge within the tradition of medieval chivalry as the projection of religious sentiment on a single woman:

Since the transfigured religion is monotheistic, romantics choose one person to elevate above all others as the object of their devotion. This is the origin of oneitis, the affliction whereby romantics humble themselves beneath a pedestalized love object of their own creation. Within their imagination, the love object functionally becomes a god, capable of judging the inherent value of its devotee and either blessing the faithful with ecstatic union (heaven) or damning the unworthy with perpetual separation (hell).

In an act of quasi-religious devotion, a knight would choose a woman to serve as his personal representation of divinity in its feminine aspect, and he would undergo all manner of trials and quests in the name of “his lady fair.” However, to ensure that the game of romance could be played for as long as possible, knights would only dedicate their efforts to women who were married to other men. This would not only ensure the unobtainability of the objects of their devotion but would also effectively prevent the purity of their love from being “tainted” by the gross and corruptive influence of sexual intimacies.

Taraban argues that love has nothing to do with the relations between men and women specifically. It comes from the same place as religious devotion, or the devotion of a fanatic to their idol. It doesn’t matter whether the object of one’s love is Jesus, a K-pop band, or the MILF next door. Love is a sacrifice of the self, “the humiliated self, triumphant”.

This is fascinating, but it doesn’t explain why I love Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Although Tottenham’s search for a major trophy in the 21st century featured all three of Taraban’s requirements for love — unobtainability, external obstruction, and tragedy — my love entails neither self-sacrifice nor humiliation. And my love would not be diminished if it were consummated. If I were, for example, to watch my Spurs lift a European Cup after defeating an insufferable domestic rival.

Responsiveness

Sasha Chapin says: what humans love is responsiveness. Acting and feeling the world answer back, immediately and positively.

Sasha’s essay starts with a short clip of the most responsive girl to ever order a halal plate, eliciting countless professions of love from men online. Contra Taraban, it seems that men don’t love to self-immolate trying to grasp the unattainable, but to “dance with a great follow”. They want to feel empowered and in control.

I would argue that responsiveness is a core human need/desire. It is, perhaps, required for happiness. People are happy enough rich, and people are happy enough poor. But it’s hard to imagine anyone happy without a feeling that their actions have some impact, however small. Even if you’re not going to be remembered by history, you want to be remembered by your barista. The prisoner, though largely robbed of power, is probably happier if he can vex his captors, or skirt the rules somehow. Life is good if it squishes nicely when you poke it.

When tempted with responsiveness, people will seek to exercise influence even if they know they’d get a better outcome by dropping the reins. They get addicted to video games, day-trade instead of holding an index fund, helicopter parent, micromanage subordinates, and drive stick.

Remove the responsiveness from a game, and it immediately becomes pointless. Remove responsiveness from work, and burnout inevitably follows. Remove responsiveness from a romantic relationship, no matter how well your partner treats you, and it becomes terrifying.

This is insightful, but it doesn’t explain why I love Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. There is no experience less responsive than sitting on the couch emotionally invested in an event I am entirely powerless to control.

It’s not a checked out experience either, like watching a TV show might be. I’ve played soccer myself since I was a kid. I think with the player on the TV as the ball is arriving at his feet, deciding in the same split second whether I would dribble or attempt a pass. My feet twitch as I watch. And yet — I’m perfectly aware nothing I do has any impact on the result. I don’t have rituals or superstitions like many sports fans. I often watch the games alone. And yet — I love it.

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One Evening in Bilbao

It was the best of times and the worst of times in North London. Spurs raised eyebrows in 2023 by hiring a journeyman Australian manager with no English football experience. He had one thing going for him: an improbable streak of winning trophies in his second season of coaching a team. Tottenham is run by extremely pragmatic men, but perhaps even they believed that lifting the club’s trophy curse may require some antipodean voodoo.

The system Ange installed was extreme in its intention to wrest control of the game from the opposition. In possession, every Tottenham player was tasked with making quick progressive passes regardless of the pressure they were under. Without the ball, Tottenham would play a high line and press the opposition to try and win the ball back immediately, leaving themselves vulnerable to a counterattack. The approach wouldn’t change regardless of whether Spurs were leading or trailing in the game.

If “Ange-ball” is executed perfectly, the opposition can do almost nothing to counter it. It’s unclear whether any collection of players exists that can execute it perfectly. Tottenham’s certainly couldn’t, though several Spurs injured themselves throughout the season trying to.

Ange-ball caught many teams off guard in his first season in England, and Tottenham finished in 5th place. This qualified them for the Europa League in 2024/25, a continent-wide competition. But in the second season, domestic opponents were ready. They tired out the Tottenham press with sideways passing and sprung easy counters off Spurs turnovers. I watched them lose game after game in England, helpless.

The European campaign didn’t offer much encouragement. Tottenham had to come from behind against mediocre opposition from the Netherlands and Germany, squeaking past each with a single goal margin. In the semi-final, they faced a Norwegian team that was lucky to be there. And yet, in the midst of their worst domestic season in history, Tottenham suddenly found themselves in a European final despite not having played a single good match against a strong opponent.

Tottenham arrived for the final in Bilbao with a rare complement of healthy defenders, without all three of their best creative passers, and with one burning question: would Ange Postecoglou make concessions to the realities of player availability and circumstance? Or would he, knowing that he’s likely to get fired either way, go down swinging with his uncompromising approach?

The final started off with both teams tense and anxious, though perhaps it was just me. Both teams struggled to complete passes, desperately chased long balls, and launched themselves in front of shots. Neither side looked threatening until the 42nd minute, when Tottenham midfielder Pape Sarr hit a speculative low cross to find Brennan Johnson making a near-post run. Johnson lifted his foot and… swung it clear over the ball. The whiff was so bad it caught a United defender by surprise. The ball hit him in his side, then slowly dribbled over the line past the reach of the flailing United keeper.

Without having played a single good attacking move, Spurs were up 1-0 through sheer dumb luck. Ange, who spent years crafting a system to generate good attacking moves no matter the cost, contemplated this strange predicament. At last, he decided to just give it all up.

The second half was some of the worst football I have ever seen in my life. Spurs held 20% possession, committed 10 fouls, and took zero shots. United dribbled the ball around them, lofted inaccurate crosses, and took bad shots from distance. Spurs goalie Vicario made a few good saves. And then, in the 68th minute, he came out for a simple cross in the middle of the box and inexplicably failed to catch it. The ball bounced off his face and right to Manchester United’s striker who headed it towards an empty goal from 10 yards out.

Tottenham’s most athletic player is Micky van de Ven, who unfortunately has missed 20 games in each of the last two seasons with hamstring injuries. But he was there in Bilbao, popping out of nowhere to stretch his hamstrings impossibly high and clear the goalbound header 7 feet off the ground at the goal line. Fans won’t remember many plays from this game, but every single person will remember this one.

It’s poetic that the play of the game had nothing to do with control, or pressing, or anything that a soccer coach can plan or practice for. And for the remaining half hour of the match, Ange watched the game much as I did from my couch: with complete surrender. The team had little tactical instruction beyond sitting back and booting it long. Our hearts sank with every United cross and soared with every block and clearance.

For the remaining half hour, Tottenham blocked every shot and cleared every cross.

Surrender

Look: what can I tell you about love, really? I just wanted an excuse to write about Tottenham and to share links to some great writing. Here’s more of it, from the Museguided Substack:

When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision. The moment that cracks open the script you have been given and offers you, terrifyingly, an alternative. Not necessarily better, certainly not safer…. but alive.

It is a metaphysical orientation: the decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control.

Longing, unlike craving, is unruly. It cannot be scheduled, monetised, or disciplined into productivity. That is what makes erotic decisions so destabilising: they can’t be managed. They don’t respond to logic.

With every sentence, every surrender, every sacred mess we choose to enter, life begins anew.

To love is to surrender. Surrender does not have to be sacrificial or humiliating when it is chosen freely. You may not choose which longing calls you, but you can choose to give yourself over to it as a deliberate act, not caring what the Greeks would say about you.

To surrender is to be responsive, to react wholeheartedly to the whim of the beloved with no thought of your own script or even your own identity. Men like halal-cart girl because they also desire to be loved. In a relationship, surrender isn’t a one-way street.

To love is to smile when the other person smiles. Not because you’re transacting with them but because you have surrendered your happiness to theirs. When they smile you are truly happy, in a special and different way from the happiness brought about by your own achievements.

There are some people that get me smiling whenever they smile, no matter how melancholy I was a few seconds before. Terese. Our kids. Son Heung-min.

Antifeminists say: the men are just as good, but women’s standards are unrealistic. They took all the college spots and high-paying jobs, but still demand a husband who is richer and more accomplished to impress their friends. And blame hookup culture too: girls hook up with Chad once and expect a ring from a guy who looks like that.

Feminists say: the standards haven’t changed, men just aren’t stepping up. Women just want an emotionally literate provider, and everywhere they see man-children. Instead of competing in the modern marketplace with educated women, men retreat to insular status games like video games or crypto schemes. And blame hookup culture too: since casual sex is so easily available (if not to engage in then at least to fantasize about) that they feel no pressure to become worthy husbands.

Both are right in some ways. People have extremely high expectations of marriage — especially women. Yet simultaneously fewer people seem interested in marriage — especially men. A woman looks at her peers and notices more women who are ready to be wives than men ready to be husbands, in both ability and desire.

But both the “women should lower their standards” and “men should step up” camps are making the same mistake: treating the dating pool as fixed. People’s marriageability and their standards for a partner change a lot with time. Few 18-year-olds know what they’re looking for in a spouse, even fewer have the proven traits a good spouse wants.

If we add time as a variable, we can explain much of the mystery:

• Where the good men are.

• Why it’s straight women who complain about the difficulty of finding a marriage even though — since every straight marriage involves one of each — it must be equally difficult for both sexes.

• Incels.

• Age-gap relationships.

• Why women feel that dating suddenly becomes impossible at 35, even though they are as attractive as ever, skilled and confident, and have (with some technological assistance) many years of fertility left.

People become “marriageable” — fulfill the list of criteria the opposite sex expects in a spouse — at different ages. The questions above are answered with a single observation: men become marriageable at a later age, on average, than women.

Man Lag

What makes a man “marriageable”? Depends who you ask. For the Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, it’s being able to run across the backs of several bulls tied together four times. This requires considerable physical prowess, but it can be accomplished by guys as young as 15 or 16. Once he has “jumped the bulls”, the boy becomes “maza” and is eligible to take the first of several wives.

What if you ask educated Western women? Aside from fixed physical traits like height or length, the first three things they’d list would be:

• Emotional intelligence and communication skills

• Financial stability and a clear career trajectory

• Willingness to commit

There are approximately zero 16-year-old men in the West who satisfy these basic requirements. All of these contribute in various ways to the divergence of marriageability clocks between women and men.

Women develop the soft skills that are relevant to marriage much earlier than men because the same skills — empathy, supportiveness, communication, awareness— serve a girl in a female peer group. In contrast, boys’ hierarchies reward boldness, gregariousness, humor, and physical prowess — valuable traits, but not ones that demand much emotional intelligence. A man needs to learn the latter over time, often from frustrated girlfriends who leave him slightly improved for the next one.

Financial stability often means a white-collar career; these require a lot more years in education, more years to get established, and more years to pay off the debt. It also takes longer to prove that you’re on a stable career, with Americans staying less than 4 years on average at a job. Even if a guy has all the traits it takes to make a good living, the inherent uncertainty of the modern economy means women will wait longer until they’re sure.

What of a young man in possession of a good fortune, must he be in want of a wife? Not necessarily.

Women generally select for short-term partners on the basis of the same traits they look for in husbands. Young depressed guys with no male friends are unmarriageable and, as a consequence, unfuckable. But a socially fluent guy in his twenties with a job and a bit of courage can find relationships of any length he desires. Outside of conservative communities like Mormons, he faces little pressure to settle down. His male friends, especially the ones who aren’t marriage-ready themselves, will nudge him to preserve his freedom to party, travel, and hang out.

Longer education, extended adolescence, and the prevalence of premarital sex delay women’s marriageability too. But women develop emotional skills earlier, don’t have to prove their breadwinning, and they feel the pressure of the biological clock. All the modern trends that push maturation to later ages push guys further back than women.

Let us summon the old spirit and put a number on it. Extrapolating from average age at marriage and other trends, I estimate that the median woman becomes wifeable at 26, while her future median husband only comes online at 30. Four years is a conservative estimate of the husbandability delay, especially if you ask single 30-year-old women. As we shall see, even a modest gap like this will have profound effects on the dating landscape.

Mind the Gap

There’s an equal number of men and women in the population, and an equal number within each marriage — one of each. So how come it’s women who predominantly complain about the difficulty of finding a husband?

It’s all about the delay. Women enter the marriage market earlier than men, but leave at the exact same rate of one per wedding. For any given age, eligible wives outnumber eligible husbands. This makes each woman feel that the odds are stacked against her.

Overall, this handicap is offset by the fact that women spend longer on the marriage market, not only playing the numbers game but also learning with practice to recognize and seduce the right men. But this also means they have a longer experience of frustration with the undersupply of husbands. Given the favorable ratio, men who graduate into husbandability get hitched before they have time to complain. When a guy says there are no good wives out there, we assume he’s not much of a catch himself.

The chart also explains the observed age-gap pattern in marriages, without having to resort to reddit words like “nubile” or “breeding potential”. That pattern is that men tend to be older than their wives on average and that the gap grows with husband’s age.

“Age gap discourse” brings to mind guys in their 30s picking up college girls, but these relationships are exceedingly rare. The average 31-year-old husband marries a 28-year-old wife (and still has to deal with age gap discourse). We see the widest distribution of husband ages for wives at 40, right at the tail end of biological fertility. A lot of these women end up marrying men who are 50 or older.

If a guy enters the market in his late 40s (or re-enters it after a divorce), he will still find a favorable ratio and a pool of younger women because other men are becoming marriageable even later, if at all. He can afford to be selective on women’s relative youth.

Not a Wall, but a Cliff

In the original chart, I assumed a Poisson distribution for becoming marriageable with age, one with relatively narrow tails. Under this assumption, after age 28 more men than women are added to the pool of eligible singles and the ratio for women slowly improves.

This, however, is not the actual experience reported by women. The Atlantic ran the famous All the Single Ladies cover story by Kate Bolick 14 years ago. The experience of looking for husbands in one’s 30s has not improved since then:

We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. […]

But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

The article echoes second wave feminists who argued that marriage is a bad deal for women, subordinating them as housemaids to ungrateful men. These arguments don’t seem to have chased many women out of the marriage market, otherwise the remainder would have an easier time. They seem mostly to help women come to terms with an increasingly hopeless dating market in their 30s. A market in which “most of the men have gone already” and, more importantly, some “have never shown up”.

Here’s how that market looks like for a woman:

For this chart, I ran a simulation with a couple of additional provisos:

• Half the eligible men get into a marriage-bound relationship each year, taking themselves (and their wives) off the market.

• 10% of men don’t become marriageable at all, at least not in the time window that’s relevant for women who want to raise children.

If we remove just 10% of men from the under-40 marriage market, the dynamic in women’s 30s changes drastically. Instead of the singles ratio slowly edging towards parity, it drops off a cliff in their mid-30s.

Like Ms. Bolick, many young women don’t feel a rush to get married in their 20s because the ratio keeps improving in their favor: more men become marriageable each year than are taken off the market. But this flips past 30: most of the men who were gonna become husbands have already met their wives, and the shrinking pool of singles turns the ratio sharply against women.

The just-world fallacy creates a lot of psychological resistance to accepting the simple logic of supply and demand. People feel that on some level, everyone must get what they deserve and deserve what they get. If you can’t afford the house you want then either the system has judged you to be morally deficient as an earner and house-buyer, or else the system is morally corrupt for depriving you. People don’t want to accept that house prices are driven by impersonal forces that pass no judgment on anyone’s character.

This moralizing frame is even more tempting when it comes to dating. Either the single women are bad — entitled, ungrateful, and unattractive — or else the system is bad for inflicting broke, unmarriageable men on virtuous women.

This frame is both false and useless. You won’t shame an unpleasant loser into suddenly transforming into an attractive partner. And you certainly won’t shame women into manifesting husbands out of thin air. Women in their mid-30s are very marriageable — smart, caring, all looking young for their age — they’re just late.

I get why this is enraging for women, especially since the very men who refuse to demonstrate any husbandly qualities are the ones telling women they’re simply no longer hot enough to marry after 30. Being hot has little to do with marriage, and can even be a detriment. And insofar as it matters, a guy who’s actually thinking about spending the rest of your lives together and not just trying to neg down women’s mate value cares how good you look for your age. He’s not out there proposing to 18-year-olds as if they’re gonna look 18 forever.

It does feel unfair that the delay in men’s marriageability puts extra pressure on women to look for husbands early instead of enjoying their twenties carefree. But life is no picnic either for the man who fails to become husband-material, whose unattached lifestyle becomes just a little sadder and lonelier with each passing year.

The diverging timelines harm both the retarded man and the woman who’s waiting for him in vain. I want to help both.

I’ve written a lot for the former. I’ve tried to help guys get rid of the bad narratives that stand in the way of truly engaging with women and give some general guidance on practicing that engagement. I’ll have a lot more to say about what makes a man husband-worthy, though ultimately every man creates and discovers his own attractiveness through his own agency.

Here I have some market-based advice for women facing the husband cliff, offered at a fair market price.

Read more

William Costello is the foremost authority on incels not just through his rigorous research, but because he’s actually curious what it’s like to be them. He talks to them, surveys them, and fights everyone trying to impose their political agendas on what is a very human condition. I shot William my half-baked theories about incels, status and identity, feminists with bad boyfriends, and the future of relationships. He responded with thoughtful scholarship and some great insights.

If you share our curiosity, you’ll enjoy this.

Jacob: My intuition has always been that inceldom isn’t fundamentally about women or sex, but about a man’s status among men.

We have to ask: what separates an incel from a guy who just happens to be single and/or a virgin? My take is that an incel has such precarious status among men generally that he can’t risk the status hit of being seen trying to find a girlfriend and failing. He may hate being celibate but he’s used to celibacy, it’s not scary. The fear of being an outcast is much more salient. If a guy has good friends, is respected at work, and has good relationships with his family he’s probably not going to share the stereotypical incel beliefs and behaviors.

This is also why incels don’t “just go see a prostitute”: paid sex doesn’t confer status or prestige on a man. But incel ideology does, somewhat: it gives its adherents the positive self-image of seeing the cruel reality of mating with no delusions, and respect within the community of men who share that worldview.

If I was to give a guy one piece of advice for escaping inceldom, it would be: find any community of men to belong to that isn’t incels. Even if it’s a video game guild — it won’t make a guy one iota more attractive to a girl, but it could turn him from an incel into a guy among guys who just happens to be celibate.

I don’t think actual incels will agree with me, since any talk of male hierarchies and communities is a red pill thing; the black pill rejects the importance of interpersonal things like friends or social status. How central do you think this is to inceldom?

William: We have a deep evolutionary history of some men being involuntarily celibate. What is novel is that they are finding each other and galvanizing into a victimhood group identity around their inceldom, and ostensibly “opting out” of mating.

The incel identity is also seductive because, like you say, it comes with a different kind of status. We even find in our data that incels score very high on the “moral elitism” facet of the victimhood mindset. Incel identity also comes with a lot of other incentives, e.g., a rich trolling lexicon that’s pretty comical, a victimhood identity, a sense of fraternity, a common enemy, and an excuse to leave behind the anxiety and humiliation of rejection.

I’m writing up a paper with experimental evidence about rejection anxiety now. Mating anxiety is an example of evolutionary mismatch in modern mating environments. Human mating psychology evolved in ancestral contexts of small, tightly connected social groups. Romantic rejection could carry severe reputational costs, convey probabilistic information about the initiator’s mate value or lack thereof, and reduce future mating opportunities. In the modern world, given large urban environments and the relative anonymity of online dating, rejection rarely threatens mating success. Potential partners are abundant, unlike 99% of human evolutionary history. Yet for some individuals, such as incels, dating anxiety is one of the primary reasons they cite for their singlehood.

Of course, inceldom and being sexually selected is entwined with status. One’s romantic partner functions as a status marker, and one’s inability to attract a partner lowers one’s status. It’s why AI sex robots and sex workers would only scratch a certain itch for incels. Maybe one’s ability to purchase the most elite sex worker carries some status in certain circles (San Francisco maybe haha), but not in mainstream society. For incels, “having to resort” to paying a sex worker so transactionally would likely emphasize their shame and feeling of inadequacy.

It is interesting how “incel” has come to function as an insult. Men use it to derogate other men’s masculinity and implicitly emphasize their own sexual prowess, while women use it to demean men as being unworthy of the ultimate “reward” of sexual selection. Sometimes “normies” will chastise incels for “caring so much about sex” but then in the same breath derogate men they don’t like using “incel” as the insult de jour, which solidifies its salience as being linked to status.

I think the whole “why don’t they simply care about other things” is a difficult one, because yes they should cultivate other interests and improve their lives, but by the same token it’s very hard for any of us to concern ourselves less with mating. It’s fundamental to humans. It’s the engine of evolution, we are all here today because an unbroken evolutionary chain of our ancestors found a mate for long enough to reproduce. We build billion-dollar industries around it, write poetry and songs about it, and we even go to war over it.

If I go to a party and tell people what I do for a living, they are all interested in it because they all live and breathe it every day. It permeates every feature of our psychology. My supervisor in the early 1990s decided to “take a break from studying human mating” and decided to study “murder”, and he found that mating motivations are often tributary to murder. All of this is to say, it’s a tall order to ask incels to simply care less about their mateless circumstance.

But I think your overarching point about incels needing to improve their lives in other domains (work, education, hobbies, friends, particularly opposite-sex friends) is a good one because it would have the downstream effects of helping them find relationships. For instance, a recent meta-analysis found that ~60% of relationships started as friends. Humans can also create multiple status hierarchies in all sorts of niches. I would never be considered a “catch” in a nightclub in Miami for example, but I might be at an academic conference.

Jacob: Of course, being an incel is about identity preservation, and being in a group of guys who reinforce that identity can be seen as just part of it. It’s a big theme of Second Person: the identities we maintain to interface with society at large get in the way of actual intimacy.

I’ve written on Ribbonfarm about identity preservation through the lens of predictive processing: we need a self-consistent worldview to make sense of anything that’s happening and to understand/predict our own actions. Without a self-model you can’t do anything. People can get their lives ruined even by “good” identities, like students suffering abuse and mental health breakdowns in grad school because of their attachment to the identity of “academic”.

Part of identity maintenance is self-verification theory: seeking out and shaping others to conform to how you see yourself. What are the core pillars of “incel identity”, aside from being unwanted by all womankind? And how do incels elicit confirmation of this self-image?

William: Inceldom for me is an identity and an internalized mindset and set of beliefs (e.g., the blackpill). One way to think about it could be “sufficient discomfort with your celibacy that you internalize it into an identity and set of accompanying beliefs, and maybe even “give up” on mating and lean into resentment. Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted, as Jim Morrison of The Doors sang.

I have become very interested in what happens to incels who “ascend”, and I think the mindset is much more of a pathology than I initially thought. Incels I engage with online have moved their rhetoric recently. Their original claim that physically unattractive men cannot get partners is just demonstrably false based on a cursory look around at society. So, incels now instead claim that such men may be able to get a partner, but he would never be able to cultivate “genuine desire” in her. This is an unfalsifiable claim that they have so far been unable to provide reasonable criteria for. If an average looking man’s wife has sex with him every night and has an orgasm each time? Incels would likely say that this is not genuine because “she is probably thinking of Chad”. Some of the criteria offered were ludicrous, e.g., one incel said the only evidence would be if you were able to cheat on her and she wouldn’t leave.

I have previously published data showing that incels do not have “overly high standards”, but I don’t give those findings as much weight anymore because there’s another sense in which “nothing is ever good enough” for incels. In my qualitative interviews with incels, I often ask them “how would you know you’re no longer incel, what would have to change?” and they invariably say, “I could always relapse”.

There’s even data to show that incels engage in self-verification. I called it “performative antagonism”. They engineer criticism from the world (which people are happy to give them) and use it as evidence that they are victimized. We recently published a paper showing that incels are “wrong” about how society sees them. Our data showed that people (with the exception of female feminists) have a lot more sympathy for incels than incels think.

But in that same paper, I felt it appropriate to highlight the genuine hostility incels do encounter. Here’s how I described it: One possible explanation for incels’ overestimation of societal blame and underestimation of sympathy may be their high levels of rejection sensitivity. Although it is important to recognize that incels do legitimately face some significant hostility, for example, 86 % of incels report experiences of bullying compared to 33 % of the general population. Some online spaces, like the r/IncelTears subreddit, promote ridicule of incels. Notably, the subreddit had to introduce a rule against encouraging incel suicide.

This combination of psychological predisposition, bullying, and real-world hostility may reinforce incels' distorted belief that society overwhelmingly rejects them. Ultimately, it becomes this cycle of antagonism-criticism-victimhood.

An external locus of control is also a key feature of incel psychology. The black pill is the ultimate in an external locus of control. The failures of cross-sex mindreading are key; they refuse to believe women are fundamentally different from men.

Jacob: I’ve written about the resentment that comes from blindness to sex differences, and also how each sex’s dating complaints are mirrored in the other sex, often in unexpected ways. Which leads to the obvious question, what’s the female mirror of inceldom?

If we stick with the frame of inceldom as being about a self-reinforcing identity trap, I think the parallel is the girl who consumes “men are trash” feminist content yet endlessly bounces from one abusive boyfriend to the next.

Sarah Constantin wrote a powerful essay about abuse-cycle-as-verification:

The abuse isn’t being read as wish-fulfillment, but as verisimilitude. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author and many of the fans have been in abusive relationships or grew up in abusive households. It feels realistic and relatable that the main character has the experiences and feelings that they did. The emotional punch of her suffering is cathartic. She’s sobbing herself to sleep? Yeah, I know that feel.

It’s a human desire to have your experiences validated — in the sense of getting confirmation that you really did experience what you did.

A classic and maybe even defining feature of abuse is that the abused person is made to feel that it is normal or even right for them to be harmed. And people who deeply believe that it is normal or right for them to be harmed may expose themselves to harm again, in order to confirm or validate their model of the world. This is what “self-harm” or “self-destructive behavior” is. It’s not that the harm makes them happy. It’s that it makes them right.

She’s saying: women don’t want to be treated like shit, but some of them expect it. The same way the incel expects to be rejected.

This has a social component, of course. There’s a “femisphere” talking about how all men are sex-obsessed, entitled and violent that mirrors the manosphere discourse about all women being superficial, fickle and cruel. These spheres select for and cultivate interpersonal victimhood, which your research found incels score very highly on: grievance, moral sneering, lack of empathy, external locus of control.

The incel says: what can you do, women will always reject and bully me. The men-are-trash girl says: what can you do, men will always treat me like shit. And then self-verification kicks in, where you’re eliciting the behavior that reinforces your self-image and the worldview of the community you rely on. And you become blind to any disconfirming evidence, like romantic interest from a kind and caring person of the opposite sex. You rationalize that away as being not real somehow.

The point here isn’t to victim-blame. It’s more to say why it’s useless to tell an incel to just ask girls or tell a girl in an abuse cycle to just stop saying “yes” to shitty men. These are tricky traps to get out of, especially when entire online forums exist to keep you in them.

William: I very much agree with you here. Except the female analogue doesn’t need to be hidden away in a fringe anonymous forum, it’s a mainstream view that she will be applauded for to say “where are all the good men”.

I suppose another related female analog of incels is the women who are “alpha-widowed”. This is likely a genuine artifact of higher mate value men being willing to both “mate down” for short term sex, and also deceive women about their intentions. So, it’s hard to blame women for having this happen to them. Where I deviate from incels and red pill gurus is that I don’t think there’s any strong evidence that such women are then irreparably damaged and unable to form genuine pair bonds thereafter.

It’s different from what you described with abusive boyfriends. Domestic abuse is actually more common as a cost-inflicting mate retention strategy of low mate value men. But an “alpha widow” who lacks the self-reflection to acknowledge that this has happened may also re-categorize the guy who used her as “trash” as opposed to someone who was truly out of her league.

Jacob: The “alpha widow” seems more like a mirror of the guy who takes a PUA class and manages to bang the one desperate girl hanging at the bar late and now thinks he’s a world-conquering Chad. It’s a failure of over-updating on optimism, which I think is much rarer than over-updating on despair and resignation.

But maybe female optimism is truly the mirror to male pessimism. There’s this common trope that women tell each other “you look great with short hair!” or “you’re beautiful at any size!” as a form of intrasexual competition. They also encourage other women to have crazy high standards, talking about icks and red flags and reacting with “dump him” to any post about the slightest male transgression. The theory is that over-inflating other women’s confidence sabotages them in the dating market.

Do men sabotage other men by lowering their confidence? Guys will keep posting the same old study about how hard it is for short guys on dating apps even though the methodology is garbage and the gap in response rate across male heights is pretty small. Maybe the same way the “body positivity” movement is spread by women (consciously or unconsciously) hoping to see other women get fat, some incel ideology is spread by non-incel men hoping to see other men lose hope. After all, self-confidence is a huge component of men’s attractiveness!

William: Very interesting. I spoke recently with Rob Henderson about what I see as a potential two-pronged type of intrasexual competition from incels.

On the one hand, their misogyny could be seen as coordinated condemnation to attack women’s self-esteem and thereby their self-perceived mate value and subsequently their standards. This happens within relationships whereby low mate value men choose the cost-infliction mate-retention strategy toward their partner. They say things like “who would have you except me”, etc. Incels may be doing this from outside the context of a relationship. Importantly this would only work if they can cultivate the sense of consensus in a woman that she thinks there’s broad agreement that she has too high standards.

It’s too easy to dismiss one person as just an asshole; it’s no coincidence that incels spend most of their time convincing other men to buy into the misogyny. Incels’ hostility towards women seems very much as if by design trying to function to make them lower their standards. They remind women they are going to hit the wall and even derogate their choices of sleeping with Chad saying that he is likely to cheat or alpha-widow them.

The second prong in this style of intrasexual competition is that incels (virtually all anons) are literally trying to motivate their intrasexual rivals to give up and stop trying. So, a Machiavellian incel could simultaneously benefit from the coordinated misogyny (without incurring any reputational costs) and motivate his competition to stop trying. A very effective strategy if you can pull it off.

Now, I do think most incels “buy their own bullshit” and really believe in the blackpill. But perhaps they are being self-deceptive, or perhaps this strategy is only pursued by a minority of them.

Jacob: There’s an old Russian joke: if you don’t have a girlfriend, it means that someone has two.

You’ve talked often about the fearmongering over “incel extremism”, that unattached young males would obviously be violent and socially disruptive. People often bring up socially-enforced monogamy as the solution to this “young male problem”.

But it actually seems like we have the opposite “young male problem” in the West. The criminal underclass seems to have an easier time getting laid than many law-abiding men. Porn, video games, online forums, secular testosterone decline — whatever the reason is, society isn’t being terrorized by incel gangs. You’ve spoken about how rare incel violence is outside of one or two celebrated cases. Incels aren’t so much threatening society as simply dropping out of it.

Orion Taraban calls monogamy “sexual socialism” that requires active enforcement. He predicts that the will for this enforcement will erode over time as people perceive themselves to be paying more and receiving fewer benefits from monogamous marriage. If so many men drop out from the bottom of the dating pool, and that’s before we even get to AI-powered sex bots, it seems that universal monogamy is a challenge from a pure numbers perspective.

Taraban predicts a “romantic gig economy” in which the most desirable people “optimize value across individuals”. I think that’s going to prove really unsatisfying for people, it’s missing the deep joy of self-transformation in a serious relationship. But I can’t really see any trends that point to monogamous marriage bouncing back strong anytime soon.

You study where we came from, the evolutionary history of mating. Where do you think we’re going?

William: Super fascinating! I think the stratified mating market you described is not crazy to imagine and is happening to a degree already. It is an uncontroversial fact from anthropology that one of the main cultural benefits of monogamy is the more egalitarian distribution of mates. In creating fewer troublesome incels, cultures that practiced monogamy flourished compared to those that didn’t.

Now, if you can find other ways of pacifying otherwise troublesome incels that buttress against their otherwise destabilizing nature, maybe you don’t “need” socially enforced monogamy as much.

One feature of this mating market you didn’t mention is the sex ratio effects on sociosexuality. Typically, whichever sex is in the minority in a given sex ratio is better positioned to “get what they want” on the mating market, so we see women turning more promiscuous (male-typical) when men are scarce, and men being more willing to commit to long term mating when women are scarce. If more and more men drop out of the mating market then the few men that stay in it will be well positioned to have a lot of short-term sex. So, in this future world that Taraban describes, the main benefactor will be Chad. Women are typically not as unrestricted and will not be satisfied with that style of mating market.

There’s actually a controversial theory about this being a partial reason why black men are so commitment averse. Many of them die or go to prison quite young, so there is a sex ratio effect of far more women than men. It’s actually quite anti-racist because it suggests that the sociosexuality we observe is not so much a result of any innate racial differences, but rather a second order sex ratio effect.

The key issue, I think, is status. As long as there is still status afforded to people who can be sexually selected, there will still be incentive to compete to try to achieve that.

Could monogamy make a comeback? I do think that women now have unprecedented levels of autonomy and are for the time being seemingly increasingly choosing singlehood and career rather than settling for men. But this level of autonomy is quite new, and many women may feel culturally compelled to avail of it. There’s a certain stigma towards women who do not fulfill their girlboss potential. In a few generations that may go away because their autonomy is not so shiny and new or juxtaposed with recent generations of women who didn’t have it. Even now it’s becoming a status symbol for some women to be able to attract a man who frees them up to be a stay at home mom. But most people aren’t that economically free, so are increasingly choosing the DINK (dual income no kids) life.

Jacob: I’m glad we circled back around to status. When I see DINK content it feels like slightly desperate status signaling. Look at me, I have money AND a spouse! I deserve respect! What’s nice about being married with kids isn’t that it grants me some unusual prestige, it’s that I don’t have to care as much about status signaling games.

Incels talk a lot about being “genetic failures” and “evolutionary dead-ends”, but perhaps there’s more hope for them than for the aging status-anxious DINK couple.

The other kind doesn’t believe in soulmates, she wants to be proactive about her dating life. She asks the internet for advice. Everyone from red-pilled bros to traditionally married Christian mothers agrees: forget girlbossing or developing a personality, just lose weight and try to become really, really hot. On rare occasion, a woman may be given hotness-orthogonal advice like being less insecure or liking men more. But I’ve not once heard a woman be advised that she’s too attractive and should tone it down.

It seems straightforward: women gatekeep and select men. The hotter a woman is, the more men she can select from to find one that satisfies her, and the easier it will be to keep him. According to “the economic model of relationships”, being hot provides an advantage in all stages of a relationship — attraction, negotiation, and maintenance — with no diminishing returns. There should be no point where physical attractiveness becomes a downside.

And yet it does. Very attractive women (and men) are less satisfied in relationships, get divorced more, and have fewer children than nice mids. It’s hard to find a measure of relationship success or happiness that 10s do better on than 6s.

As a happily married 6, I don’t find this surprising at all. It’s instructive of the differences between transactional dating and what it takes to build a partnership that lasts. Relationships require selecting for specific traits in others and cultivating them in yourself. Attractiveness raises the skill floor required for both. Dating while gorgeous is a challenge not many people are up for.

Note: most things in this post apply to some extent to very hot men as well, but I’ll focus on just women for simplicity. Male attractiveness often involves outlier talents or achievements that make a man rich or famous, and how that works in dating depends a lot on what that talent is. For women — unless you’re a celebrity — hotness is just physical appearance.

Adverse Seduction

I wrote about women proactively asking guys out: they gain the opportunity to date more attractive men, but lose the power to select for devotion and commitment.

The same is true for certified baddies: they get a lot of interest from hot men, but can’t easily tell who’s interested in them personally and who’s just attracted to their attractiveness.

Hotness is capital, and guys want to get rich. Nothing raises a man’s esteem like a beautiful woman by his side: in his own eyes, in the eyes of other men, and especially in the eyes of other women. Since women generally gatekeep the initial approach but not long-term commitment, the status-boost of having seduced a stunner sticks to a guy even if the relationship didn’t last.

A hot girl also pay an intimidation tax, filtering out competent but non-flashy men who feel that she’s out of their league. Paradoxically, it applies doubly to a guy looking for a serious relationship. He runs the risk of initial rejection and the risk of her losing interest over time, which both seem more likely with a girl who has seemingly infinite options. A guy who’s only interested in something casual has less to fear when asking her out.

So: a bombshell has a lot of inbound interest, but it’s adversely selected against devotion and commitment. She’ll be tempted to come up with heuristics to narrow down the sheer number of suitors, but such filters are more likely to be gamed by exactly the sort of player she hopes to avoid. Being hot, she is restricted to dating only hot guys — one more obstacle to finding loyalty and commitment.

The default outcome for very beautiful women is an endless string of casual relationships that last exactly three to six months, eroding their trust in men and in themselves.

The Crisis of Disillusionment

The Value of Others lays out the problem of projection:

Whether or not they want to, people unconsciously fill in the gaps in their knowledge bases with what they expect to find there. […] When people are attracted, they fill in those same gaps with hopeful projections and positive attributes. This is an example of the halo effect, in which people unconsciously attribute positive personality traits to those to whom they are attracted. Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely that the beautiful woman you just met is also funny and charming and intelligent and kind. And in any case, you can’t possibly have enough data to support those conclusions at this point. […]

Like Narcissus, the romantic lover tends to fall in love with his or her reflection – except, in this case, the projected surface isn’t water: it’s another human being. These people aren’t engaging with another person as much as they are interacting with the reflected projection of their own fantasies.

The consequences [of this projection] tend to build up over time until they reach the point at which the fantasies can no longer support the weight of the disconfirming evidence. Whether this threshold is reached by a single large “betrayal” or an accumulation of many small “disappointments” is irrelevant: over a long enough time line, all lovers eventually arrive at this point.

This is the Crisis of Disillusionment.

The CoD predominantly affects the sorts of men a hottie is inadvertently selecting for: guys who care about their image, guys who think short-term, and guys who chase the emotional highs of limerence. Cuties get crushed on, but crushes often lead to crashes.

Avoiding the Crisis of Disillusionment is mostly up to the illusioned, but there’s an important thing the girl herself can do to sail through it. She must replace the projected fantasy with something even better.

A woman can bring joy and value to a man in many ways that don’t include just standing there being hot. If she’s extroverted she can invite him on adventures or delight him with her humor. If she’s quiet and sensitive she can make him feel loved with thoughtful gifts and private acts of care. If she’s intelligent and curious she can stimulate him mentally and help with practical problem-solving. She can even lead him to god.

Unlike the appeal of beauty, which loses its power over a few months, these skills take months to fully showcase. And unlike beauty itself, which fades over the years, these skills take years to develop. But developing them requires honest feedback, and that’s the toughest thing for a dazzling dame to get.

I get immediate social feedback on the quality of experience of being in my company because that’s the only thing people are in my company for. But physical beauty projects a warm glow that people simply want to bask in. If you’re hot, people will seek your company regardless.

There’s a tendency to believe that beautiful people are by nature mean and entitled, but that’s a myth. Hot people experience a world that’s kind and loving and suffer less from the insecurities that can sour people’s personalities. In data I’ve collected, attractive people were slightly more agreeable and extroverted.

But being a great spouse requires more than general pleasantness. Marriageability takes time and effort to develop. A hottie who’s surrounded by friends and hops from one short-term relationship to another may not realize the work she has to do to become a wife, not just a trophy.

Transcending Beauty

Becoming a wife isn’t just cultivating a skill set. It is, literally, a becoming — transforming into someone different. The process of this transformation is what separates real relationships from the transactional arrangements The Value of Others talks about:

The economic model presupposes an economic agent with a fixed and legible set of “wants”. This sort of agent can decouple and “optimize value across individuals”, as you suggest, choosing which desires they want satisfied by a romantic partner and which by porn, social media, hired help, or friends with benefits.

This is not how looking for love feels like. People enter the dating arena hoping to be taken on a ride, to discover new experiences, to be transformed. This transformation, or self-transcendence (in the simple sense of becoming someone other than your old self) isn’t some heroic feat, akin to reaching Buddhist enlightenment. It’s a consequence of being in a relationship you take seriously.

You say that people will never do the “right thing”, whether committing to marriage or eating healthy food, just because it’s virtuous. I agree. They will do it because transactional situationships and donuts are, ultimately, not satisfying.

Gorgeous women are the billionaires of the transactional relationship economy. They can engage more partners, demand more resources, set their own terms, exercise power. The one thing they can’t simply make happen is falling in love.

But — it’s still a lot, and a lot of it will be lost to them if they become someone’s wife. They won’t be able to transact their hotness capital so freely. They won’t be able to fantasize about what could be with their infinite optionality. The main obstacle to hot girls getting married is wanting to get married badly enough to give up being a hot girl.

This is easiest for women for whom being a smoke show is secondary to their main passion, whether it’s acting, singing, poker, chess, or governing Finland. Beauty is a great amplifier of whatever a woman’s life is about, whether it’s an impressive career or her interpersonal qualities. And if being a hot girl isn’t the centerpiece of her identity, she doesn’t have to give up her identity for a relationship.

A very hot girl needs astute discernment in selecting partners, strength of character to develop relationship skills, a talent to shine brighter than her beauty, and the will to transcend being just a very hot girl. But I’m not writing this post as spiritual guidance for perfect 10s who happened to stumble onto this blog (I offer spiritual guidance to 10s in person — DM me!) I’m writing for everyone who’s envious of them. Do you have all it takes to pull off being a very hot girl?

Of course, if you do, then your romantic life is probably going pretty great already. You have no need to be a hot girl, and no reason to envy them. And if you don’t, you probably want to focus on all the other skills a hot girl needs instead of on looksmaxxing.