A lot of men are unsatisfied with their abilities to attract women and have nowhere to go for help. And where they do go for help, they are met with heaps of misinformation. Most men learn from pop-culture e.g. movies, TV shows, magazines or other incredulous sources. This cloud of useless information leads some men toward further low self-esteem, low confidence, feelings of inferiority and hopelessness.
Here in college, a lot of guys enter the dating world for the first time and feel hopeless because they’re not part of the football team or because they’re shorter than most girls. But these things, like the other misconceptions, aren’t really what women are attracted to.
I’ve taken the evolutionary approach in proving what women are actually designed to be attracted to. Just like men are designed to be attracted to large breasts and a certain waist-to-hip ratio, women are designed to be attracted to men with high self-esteem and confidence.
Back in the hunter-gatherer days, females increased their genetic fitness if they reproduced with the highest status males (alpha males). Their children are more likely to have the same successful genetic traits the alpha male has. Furthermore, the children are more likely to have access to the alpha male’s resources.
Natural selection would weed out societies that gave their high status positions (and therefore high status privileges) to males who weren’t the most genetically fit for the job.
Having high status greatly correlates with high self-esteem. Self-esteem is a function of one’s perceived social status; a belief of how much value one has amongst others in the tribe.
In short, all of the following positively correlate with one another: status, genetic fitness, self-esteem and confidence.
Now we come to this question: What are the most reliable fitness signals women could have used for deciding which partner to mate with? For one, symbols of status are unreliable because the females may not always know which symbols are real; it would be easy to counterfeit symbols. Also, symbols of status don’t generalize to all societies. If a true alpha male wanders to a new tribe, his fit genes will be neglected simply because he doesn’t have the proper symbols (same is true if one tribe takes over another).
If status symbols aren’t good enough, what about objective measurements of desirable genetic traits like intelligence or strength? The problem is, having one or two of these traits does not imply high status. Instead of testing for every possible genetic trait, it is easier to just test for self-esteem.
The most reliable and parsimonious fitness and status indicators are signals of high self-esteem. Some of these signals of high self-esteem include: confidence around anyone, lack of self-consciousness, being true to one’s personality (not acting fake to please others), non-needy, self-value not outcome-dependent and self-actualized. Since high self-esteem is highly correlated with high status and genetic fitness, and since humans are bad deceivers, these signals are reliable.
And therefore, signals of high self-esteem dominate women’s attraction heuristic.
Most men who don’t succeed with women feel that they don’t have anything valuable to offer attractive women and, therefore, have no confidence communicating with them. And the most important factor in attracting women is, ironically, confidence and high self-esteem.
All men have the ability to attract women – they just need to have the right mindset. Some men will waste their energy and resources on things that symbolize or signal for high status (e.g. fast cars, expensive clothes, or big homes) in hopes it will make them more attractive. Or they’ll endlessly work out to look stronger and signal for genetic fitness. Men need to accept the fact that their self-esteem does not need to be correlated with actual status or genetic fitness and they need to work directly on their self-esteem.
LIOR GOTESMAN believes that there is an easier way to gain confidence than by becoming a body-builder or a millionaire. Ask him how at liorgott@gmail.com.
