I have to plug this Roissy post. It’s one of the few blog posts I’ve encountered and thought: man, I couldn’t have said that any better. It’s an exceptionally good read. It is: 30 And Still Flaky.
Combat dating must end. The male backlash against female misbehavior is brewing. Women who flake don’t only represent themselves badly, but their whole gender suffers. Consider the workplace environment, in which it’s very unlikely that anyone will go through his or her entire career without having a male boss. When a woman refuses to return a man’s calls, she’s indicating to a man– in the future, possibly an innocent woman’s boss– that women are unprofessional, passive-aggressive, and weak. When she cancels a date on 6 hours’ notice, she sends the signal that women are unreliable and rude. The fact that this behavior is widespread makes it difficult for men to take women seriously, both in dating and in the workplace. It’s extremely unfortunate, because not all women behave so poorly, and the ones who behave well– in this environment, on the dating market only for brief intervals– don’t deserve such a negative depiction.
Modern men are losing respect for women, not because of inherent misogyny, but because female behavior, in our society, has become so awful that many women just don’t deserve to be respected. In the modern U.S., the greatest enemy of the feminist cause is the modern, urban woman’s shitty behavior.
Well, like typical for roissy, there are a few things I’d quibble with.
First, roissy’s contention that these women do not “possess the market leverage” to be flaky. At least here in Austin, TX, uhhh… unless they’re fat, the reality is that they do.
The recommendation of cancelling dates also strikes me as completely counterproductive.
It’s more complicated than that, and Roissy overstates the importance of age.
When a woman starts flaking, the “nice guys” stop calling her altogether. The assholes see a challenge and pursue her for a hate-fuck pump-and-dump; this is what women mistake as increased male interest following flakage, but it’s just a modern veneer over the rape instinct. Men in the middle of that spectrum edge closer to the “asshole” side of things, as they generally lose respect for a woman once she gives him the “second-string” treatment.
If a woman’s looking for rough, unattached porn-sex, flaking might be the way for her to go. It’s a way of using men’s worst attributes (rape instinct) to generate short-term sexual interest. If she’s looking for a relationship, it’s a bad idea. This is true whether she’s 23 or 35.
My thought is that you shouldn’t cancel first. It’s disrespectful and fairly transparent. Shit testing was never a good idea; why would a man add to the problem by stooping to that level? Also, people are pretty good at sensing out a bullshit cancel from the real thing, women are probably better at this than men, and the flake-to-inflate-your-social-status strategy only works if people fall for it. The Roissy policy (always be 10 minutes late for a first date) might induce flakage rather than reducing it.
On the other hand, I’d argue that you should retaliate 2-for-1 against flakage. This holds even when she has a semi-good reason (sick friend, office Christmas party) just to establish a pattern. (In the “black” cases, such as dead relatives’ funerals or an immediate work deadline, don’t retaliate. But do so in the “dark gray” cases.) If she puts you off 2 days, put her off 4 days. If she ends a date at 2.5 hours*, end the next date at 75 minutes. If she turns down your suggestion, turn down her next two. If she suggests something you really want to do, you can always propose it, significantly later, as your own idea. Eventually, either she’ll get the hint, or you’ll stop talking to each other altogether.
*Aside: I’ll invoke gender roles here: the woman should never end a date, unless it’s going horribly, or in the case of a firm time constraint that was established before the date was agreed upon. It’s unladylike. On the other hand, it’s sadly sometimes necessary for a woman to do so, as some men lack the manners to recognize when to end the date, which is long before the woman even considers leaving.
Retaliating to flakiness with more flakiness still strikes me as counterproductive. This has never worked for me. The same goes for roissy’s 3:2 communication rule. It just spirals downward to neither person talking to the other.
Then again, virtually all my interactions with women seem to eventually spiral downward to neither person talking to the other, so maybe I’m the wrong guy to talk.
I’m led to conclude that these women, even the more homely ones, have such a massive surplus of male attention that they’re not willing to put in any effort to keep a guy around unless they really, really like him.
So where you see flakiness as a tactic for obtaining attention from asshole guys, I see flakiness as a reflection of market power. Women flake (or behave in other obnoxious ways, such as not returning calls) because they can. Even if they’re looking for a nice guy, they already have more nice guys than they know what to do with, so they’re not going to go out of their way to keep you around. Flaking on one is not going to drive the others off.
Roissy’s 3:2 rule is stupid. It doesn’t make sense in long-term relationships. As you said, it leads to a drawdown.
When you retaliate against flakiness with more aloofness, the most likely outcome is that you eventually stop talking to each other. That’s not a bad thing. It gets the useless women out of your hair. The girl who made an honest mistake rebounds and chases you back; the obnoxious bitches disappear.
It’s mostly something I do for my own sanity. If a woman flakes, I’m a flake and a jerk back. It gives me a distraction from feeling hurt or angry (although, at this age, it doesn’t really piss me off anymore). If it works and she rebounds, then great. If it fails, I don’t need to feel rejected; I was being a jerk.
I think the reason why people “game” (and women do it as well, with their shit tests and flakage) is to protect their egos against rejection. If they make a vapid game out of the dating process, they don’t have to feel bad about getting turned down. It’s not him who was turned down, but his avatar– his “game”. So he tears that schtick down and builds a new one.
This also explains why sociopaths are so attractive to so many women. They can change their “face” on the fly, and they never take anything too seriously.
They think they do. What they’ll realize as they get older is how meaningless this glut of male attention is. It’s like junk mail or spam. When the commodity is attention or casual sex, women have a huge market advantage. When it comes to forming loving relationships, neither gender is at advantage. As they age, I think men actually have it a little bit easier.
There are a lot of women these days with overblown egos, and as they age into their 30s and 40s, they’re going to be the most miserable people on earth.
I like your analogy of excess male attention to spam.
Then again, only the most naive Internet newbie gets excited upon receiving spam (“ooh, I got an email!”). Many women seem to revel in this attention.
When it comes to forming loving relationships, neither gender is at advantage. As they age, I think men actually have it a little bit easier.
I guess I used to think that if I could just get my foot in the door, most women would see the value that I offer as a person. It’s clear to me now that this isn’t the case, and that getting my foot in the door is necessary but far from sufficient. It’s gotten so freaking complicated these days. It should be so simple: “Here I am, this is what I’m about. Let’s get to know each other in a low-pressure way and have fun doing it. If you decide you don’t like me, that’s OK, no big deal, just let me know and I’ll move on. If we both like each other, awesome, let’s get together.”
No one follows that script any more.
Male attention is ego-candy. It has no substance, but it’s addictive.
It’s the illusion of choice, leading people to think they can always “do better”– someone with flashier style, a more exciting job, more friends, bigger tits/dick.
People have two sex drives, one of which is r-selective, peaks around age 18, and is strongest in the spring. The other is K-selective, peaks in the 30s, and is strongest in the fall. (If you ever wondered why relationships tend to form in the fall and break up in spring, this is why.) The r-selective sex drive is immediate and, in men, triggered by physical beauty. In women, the r-selective drive is usually delayed and is triggered by animal posturing (“psychosocial dominance”).
The female sex drive isn’t inferior or weaker than the male drive, but a woman’s K-selective drive is stronger and her r-selective drive is weaker. The rare “spark” a woman might feel three times in her life is when the r-drive goes off. This “spark” has nothing to do with relationships– that’s what the K-drive is for– but if you don’t inspire it… next!
You’re running into the instant gratification culture where if a woman isn’t swept off her feet in the first 30 seconds, you’re useless to her.
This “spark” has nothing to do with relationships– that’s what the K-drive is for– but if you don’t inspire it… next!
This also impacts relationships that are already formed, because if/when that “spark” begins to cool, women begin to question whether they belong in the LTR to begin with, and start to look elsewhere. This even happens with married women.
The culture is to blame for this, because it tutors women that unless the spark is there, the relationship isn’t really worthwhile, and that if they search harder they will be able to find the “package deal” of a guy who meets both the r and K drives. Such men exist, but they are exceptional. Today, though, women feel that if they do not land one of these guys, they are “settling”, and many women are loathe to do that. So they age well into the 40s without really finding Mr Right (and not realizing that they likely passed over Mr Good Enough several times in the 20s and 30s).
The r-drive “spark” will dissipate, inevitably. It lasts about 6 weeks at the most, and if it’s not supplanted by K-drive, the relationship ends up as a fling. When couples say they’re still in love after 15 years, that’s a case where the K-drive has taken over fully, and remained strong.
Everything that the r-drive can do, hedonically and emotionally, so can the K-drive. So the K-drive is strictly more powerful, except on the matter of delayed onset. The difference is that the r-drive is immediate, and the K-drive sets in gradually.
As said in this morning’s post, the female r-drive is vestigial and generally very weak. It might go off, in the natural world, for 0.25% of men. (Post-“game”, it’s much more common.) In the past, it was well understood that the impulsive r-drive was the inferior one and that the K-drive would set in after a couple months of gradually getting to know a person. So women were more patient, and men accepted that they wouldn’t be sleeping with a woman until after they knew each other for a couple months.
The world of casual sex/combat dating/”game” has ruined all that, and even though most women don’t like these things, they still crave the r-drive and rule a guy out instantaneously if he doesn’t provoke it, even if he’s objectively physically attractive. I think a lot of it has to do with the female obsession with youth. The female r-drive is generally quite weak and, in most women, is basically dormant by age 20, although the K-drive’s very strong. So when a 28-year-old meets a PUA who can provoke the “spark”– the r-drive– she feels like she’s 17 again.
The world of casual sex/combat dating/”game” has ruined all that, and even though most women don’t like these things, they still crave the r-drive and rule a guy out instantaneously if he doesn’t provoke it, even if he’s objectively physically attractive. I think a lot of it has to do with the female obsession with youth. The female r-drive is generally quite weak and, in most women, is basically dormant by age 20, although the K-drive’s very strong. So when a 28-year-old meets a PUA who can provoke the “spark”– the r-drive– she feels like she’s 17 again.
This could be, but cultural issues play a role as well.
The current culture deifies r-drive as “true love”. The stuff of Hollywood romance is mostly r-drive stuff. So is the content of romance novels. Women are actively encouraging each other to pursue r-drive love, even well advanced in life. A recent example of this is Cristina Nehring’s book on love — basically a trashing of K-drive love in favor of r-drive love. It may be true that the r-drive in women is vestigial, as you put it, but the entire culture seems bent on stoking it and increasing its importance to women.
Roissy seems to value quite high European ways. I suspect that if he’d actually drop to Europe and started to look for a girl, he might change he’s opinion… Our men certainly complain about the same things that Roissy does. Or, then again, Roissy would probably have “foreigner bonus” so European girls would be very interested in him.
Yes, I’m European and not from Britain so sorry for my bad English…
Anyway, about the thing itself. If the girl doesn’t answer the phone or calls a date of etc. you and Roissy seem to assume that she’s playing a game. She really is interested but she’s pretending hard to get because she values herself too high.
What if the girl never was interested at all? Some of my friends have sometimes given their numbers under pressure and tend no to answer strange calls because they were not interested in these guys at first place. There’s no “I’m hard to get and can play with you” -thing going on. Rather “leave me alone, I don’t like you” -thing. We should ofcourse tell the man straight if we are not interested but quite often we just chicken… I mean, it’s not easy to tell someone things you know will hurt him so girls often choose the easy way out and fall in deep silence hoping the guy will eventually understand.
Well, of course this will not be the case with all the girls but maybe some? Or if not, then American and European ways REALLY do differ a lot…
Rejection, by a person you’ve never met, doesn’t hurt. So, we’ve chatted for 4 minutes but we’re not hitting it off. Or we are, but she has a boyfriend. Annoying? Yes. Hurtful? No.
If you want to brush a guy off without upsetting him, and you’ll never see him again, when he asks for your number, just say, “no, I don’t think my boyfriend would like that,” even if you don’t have a boyfriend (how will he know?) If he persists, then he’s a sleazebag and you shouldn’t feel bad about telling him to get out of your face.
It’s much more annoying to be given a phone number and not have your calls returned, than it is to just be turned down for the number. The first is extremely disrespectful, because you know she’s laughing at your voicemails (and probably playing them to friends); the second is just rejection and everyone goes through it.
And yes, in the US, it’s very common for women to take the passive-aggressive route and not take calls.
The link to the article doesn’t work anymore. Do you know where I can read it?
@ lordzorgon – I think 30+ women are often choosier than younger women, but that doesn’t mean they can afford to be. Roissy actually had a good post on why this is the case.
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/the-difficulty-of-gaming-women-by-age-bracket/
In my mind, a woman’s stock takes a pretty significant hit once she turns 30. First, I’m thinking, perhaps on a subconscious level, that if she’s single, then she’s damaged goods. Somebody would have taken her off the market, right? Second, I’m thinking, perhaps subconsciously, that she’s been around the block more than a few times. Not attractive. Third, if she’s still physically appealing, I wonder how much longer that will be the case.
Finally, I don’t want a wife who will press me to have kids as soon as we exchange vows. If I meet a woman at 30, it will take at least a year to decide whether I want to marry her, and at least another year to prepare for a wedding. Realistically, the woman would be 32 years old, maybe pushing 33, by the time we’re married. That means there will be no “us” time. She won’t want to put off kids for 2 or 3 years and travel around Europe. She’ll want a family NOW. That’s a lot of pressure, and that’s why I think men tend to shy away from 30+ women. Not to say that I would never give a 30+ woman a chance, but beiing 30+ as a woman is the equivalent of being under 5’7 as a man. It takes a heck of a woman to make me want to commit to her.