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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how this is helpful. I've known I'm personally more attracted to personality than looks. That's not the problem.

The problem is it's hard (at least for me) to get the opportunity to be around members of the opposite sex long enough for them to see my "uniqueness"

Personal examples. My last job of 5 years had 100 people on my floor only 2 of which were women. My friends are generally all geeks who have no women friends to include in our activities.

I'm not whining. Only pointing out that telling me it's okay because my uniqueness will win over my consensus desirability is not helpful because no one gets the chance to learn my uniqueness

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Firstly, this is a problem I'm not sure is very common - I'm guessing most people do hang out around members of the opposite sex, at work, with friends, etc.

Second, for your specific situation - you say you have a problem. But it's a very solvable one. Find places to hang out with members of the opposite sex. This can be anything from going to specific classes that have women in them and that you also enjoy (e.g. drawing? Pottery? I don't know, depends what you like).

You can also actively try to befriend people who hang out with women.

I used to think the same, then I tried to actually get into environments with a more balanced gender ratio, and I realized that actually I was not faring any better than before. Apparently I have low desirability and have few unique appeals/provoke low unique reactions.

At the end, it's inevitable: even if just by mere chance, someone _has_ to be in the lower 5% of people who get the least successful interactions with the other gender.

(Anyhow, his problem seems very common to me, but obviously my POW is skewed, since I got to know most of my friends in one of these place with unbalanced gender ratio in the first place)

Someone has to be in the lower 5%, it's true. But it doesn't have to be you or the parent.

It's absolutely true that the skills to make yourself seem more desirable are "learnable" skills. They also happen to correlate pretty highly with plenty of other important skills, like making better friendships in general, succeeding more in business, succeeding more in other spheres of life, etc.

That's because most of the things you need to improve to be more desirable is: a) make yourself actually more desirable, usually by doing interesting things/etc., and b) make yourself a better marketer, who knows how to actually show that you're more desirable, in a way that doesn't turn people off.

I really recommend you and anyone else who has trouble "attracting" the opposite sex, read any of the Pick Up Artist material that's out there. Don't fall too in love with the "world of PUA", and don't take it too seriously, but do read it and practice it. It will really improve your life, and not just in dating.

Any sort of dancing is usually a good option.

And the Bay Area has a really good social dancing community - Swing, Salsa, etc. I am in Atlanta, which also has a good dance community.

I can genuinely recommend you to read 'the game'. Don't get deterred by what people might tell you about it, especially people who have not ready it.

It was eye opening to me that it's in your complete control to show people (not only girls, really anybody) your uniqueness, and that you can literally meet dozens of people every week and must not rely on office environment or random coincidence.

"The Game" is only useful in making one realize that attracting women is a learnable skill. I was a big fan for a time but now realize much of what it recommends is like snake oil. I recommend going through David Deangelo's later material (2009+) and also Michael The Wizard. Deangelo's early work made it into "The Game" but even he realized with years of experience that there is a better way (Of course he made tens of millions from selling courses on material he now admits was wrong!)

Also, unfortunately a lot of PUA stuff seems to revolve around convincing men that there is an objective standard of beauty in women that all other men are chasing too, and structuring their interaction with women in ways that stop their personal judgement from diverging from that consensus.

Any specific recommendations for DeAngelo's later stuff?

I too was big into that whole PUA/game thing in a former life (more theory than practice though) and came to much the same realizations about it, particularly after listening to many of Barry Kirkey's radio shows (the very early ones) where he gave you the non-exaggerated, non-glorified view of what it was like to live in that house.

FWIW I also have a similar problem to the OP. Other things in life I'm sorting out right now but taking up classes again and going to meetups are on my radar for the near future.

    > I too was big into that whole PUA/game thing in a former
    > life (more theory than practice though)

I spent a few years working in that industry.

If you want to bring more women in your life, the most important thing is: "find and talk to lots of them". Everything else is window dressing, which is why the whole "theory more than practice" thing is such a dead end.

Honestly, I'd recommend one of the big commercial workshops. The attendees skew 90% towards people who want to find a life partner, a coach will be able to point out any weird habits you have that are holding you back, and it'll normalize (through a lot of practice) the idea of starting friendly and normal conversations with women in your day-to-day life. The course material tend towards 40% self-improvement, 40% "how to sell", and 20% how to make small talk. Most of them also offer pretty robust money-back guarantees. Hard to over-estimate the benefit of a workshop over reading some ebook.

So true about practice over theory but the reality is you need to change yourself and become a different person in order to have success with women, if you are currently unsuccessful. To do something you have never done, you must become someone you've never been. And you are not going to change in 3 days!

I have attended some of those bootcamps and the reality is that most of the instructors are not that successful with women themselves. They have spent lots of time perfecting the approach and interactions at bars and are great at this, but outside of it have nothing else. I think they have paid too high a price. They have no careers, and must earn a living by teaching other men how to pick up women. Fundamentally this makes you a very unattractive man. You may seduce hot chicks from bars but you will never attract or keep a quality woman. By day three she will realize what a shell of a man you are and take off! If you are in your twenties, I would strongly advise you against going this path. Work on improving yourself, becoming more interesting, advancing your career, making more friends while simultaneously learning pick up skills. It is not easy but ultimately leads to the most fulfilling life.

I recommend Man Transformation. I also recommend the book The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (updated edition by Dan Kennedy). You can listen to the entire book on YouTube or download it and listen to it while driving. I recommend listening to it at least 3 times a month apart. I also recommend doing the following:

1. The theater of mind exercises where you visualize yourself as successful with women. You must make your visualization script really vivid for it to have any effect. And you must not lose focus while visualizing. This is actually quite hard and the reason why most people get no value out of it.

2. The mental rehearsal exercises before you go out and talk to women. You must design your life such that you are constantly interacting with women. The easiest way to do this is to sign up for dance lessons. Salsa is my preferred one. Other ideas: Hang out at coffee shops, in busy areas (malls, near college campuses etc)

email me at honeydoilookfat [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll send you more tips. For all intents and purposes I have solved the women problem although it took me six years. Now I am working on the wealth problem!

pua is usefull only when you want to get sex, but honestly considering the time you have to put into mastering pua, you can safely get a second job and pay for hookers, at least it'd be less random.

Also the book was utter garbage i've read around 30% of it and fell asleep.

What you need to do is go somewhere where women exist. Find extracurricular activities that tend to skew heavily towards women, and see if any such activities interest you!

I've always thought that women didn't go to extracurricular activities to find dates, and only men do this. I'd like to be told I'm wrong, but my experiences show otherwise. Of course I do live in a west coast city infamous for its gender imbalance and the associated mentalities that go along with that.

> I've always thought that women didn't go to extracurricular activities to find dates, and only men do this.

According to the article, if you feel you're lacking in immediate mate value and want to emphasize uniqueness instead, you shouldn't be trying to "find dates" but just to expand your social circle. That fits with my experience pretty well, actually. The idea isn't to meet a woman that you can ask out for coffee the next day; the idea is to start spending time with a wider range of folks, get them acquainted with your uniqueness, and increase the odds that one of them will either find your particular traits attractive or introduce you to someone who does.

As a side benefit, you'll also be meeting new friends and broadening your horizons.

^ This. It may vary depending on your age range, but as a middle-aged geeky woman I put a lot of value on being able to be friends, because that will last longer than looks, sexual ability, or other changeable factors.

I'd like to say you are wrong, but it's possible we are in different west coast cities. Meetups where I am (SF area) are pretty well populated with single women looking a mate or at least new friends. You may have to go outside your comfort zone to attend meetups that women are more likely to go to.

My personal experiences with this: you'll find a good gender balance in groups for going trail hiking, especially with their dogs because everyone loves dogs and sometimes people have dogs because they are single. :) Wine tasting groups generally have more women. Movie watching groups have slightly more women. JQuery meetups have nearly no women. :)

    > I've always thought that women didn't go to
    > extracurricular activities to find dates, and only 
    > men do this

Even if that were true, so what?

Go do extracurricular activities to find female friends, to get some experience talking to women, and you're more likely one of them will introduce you to a friend who is looking.

It's not about finding dates. You don't go there with the intention to find dates -- you go there with the intention to meet women.

What are your hobbies outside of work? that's a great starting point that will introduce you into a more diverse population. I've heard good things of the 'meetup' website.

That sounds like a painfully abnormal work environment. Not even considering dating opportunities here - spending most of your waking time in an almost entirely male domain for so many years seems torturous, like some kind of prison experience.

Maybe it's time to look for a different job, with a more gender-balanced workforce? Five years is a long time to work in one place anyway.

Hmm, I've worked at 9 tech companies. Only one of those 9 had any reasonable number of women in the product development department and generally other departments didn't socialize with product development.

I don't think changing jobs is going to fix that. Possibly changing careers but that's not really my desire.

Volunteer. Get involved with a tutoring program or ESL or something like that. Walk dogs for your local shelter--I was running in the park last summer and encountered a group walking shelter dogs. The group was mostly women, and the women were mostly attractive. It is also a fair bet that they were good-natured and generous people.

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