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Comment by insickness | Hacker News Reader

The assumption of this game is that women emotionally respond to men's gift giving. That would seem sensible. But it is patently false. Gifts do not facilitate courtship.

Have you ever won a woman's favor by buying her a drink? Would it help if instead you bought a vacation for this woman whom you hardly know? Buying things in order to win a woman's favor is the worst strategy ever.

Instead of taking a woman out to an expensive dinner on your first date, have ONE drink with her and see if you both like each other. Take away all the pressure and make it fun.

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There's countersignaling at play too. A woman has very little information about your true "value" at first blush. If you buy drinks for her, that indicates that you think she must be a good catch, i.e. she's out of your league. Knowing nothing about you other than that you think she's out of your league, why should she go out with you?

So guys "play it cool" as a way of signaling that their true social value is well above the woman's, and they don't need to play her with gifts for them to be worth paying attention to. It's a way of saying "I'm so cool that I don't need to buy you drinks to make you pay attention to me."

That's why dating is usually described as push/pull. You want to signal your interest and commitment to a woman. However, if you signal too hard, then the impression she gets is that you have nothing to offer other than your undying love (hence "coming on too strong"). But if you signal too little, it's indistinguishable from someone who doesn't care about her at all.

"... So guys "play it cool" as a way of signaling that their true social value is well above the woman's, and they don't need to play her with gifts for them to be worth paying attention to It's a way of saying "I'm so cool that I don't need to buy you drinks to make you pay attention to me."

Spot on observation. Obligatory reference to Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" cf "You Just Ask Them?".

"If you buy drinks for her, that indicates that you think she must be a good catch, i.e. she's out of your league"

Could you elaborate on why buying a drink for someone indicates that she's out of your league? Is there an alternate approach in a drink-serving setting that would not hint that?

Cost is relative and does not need to translate to a monetary value.

1. An entrepreneur spending $500 on a gift after they've IPOed/sold the company compared to when they're ramen profitable. The significance is different because the level of sacrifice is different.

2. A hacker setting up a blog as a gift (easy) versus writing a sensitive poem (hard). The challenge and amount of effort (real or perceived) are what count in this case.

This is why unique, hand-made, decorative items work well as gifts, because they show a large time investment without having any appeal to gold-diggers.

When courtship is reexamined in this light, it fits the model pretty well actually.

Yeah really.

And what does it say about the authors that they conclude that it's better to give women expensive worthless gifts to deter 'gold-diggers'? Hold on a sec, I'm just going to check with my SO to get her perspectives on that ...

UPDATE: She says her favorite gifts were my poems -- not expensive at all. And she really liked a watch I gave her: relatively expensive, and useful, and she still has it 20 years later. Shoot. I hope she's not a gold-digger.

poems are extremely expensive in terms of time. only those with the sharpest mind can afford to create them.

Or worse, a poem-digger. You don't want to be that guy who wakes up one day and realizes that she was only in it for the anapests...

Believe it or not, this has actually happened to me. I was going through a long literary dry spell, and my SO of the time turned to me once and said "I miss those poems you used to write." I told her, "the only thing I can write right now is soulless but amusing battleraps. I could write about how weak your rhymes are in comparison to mine, but it wouldn't be quite the same."

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