Girls' Dates & Exes Are Never as Perfect as You Imagine

Several weeks ago a reader named Jason H. asked the following on my article about the reasons for there being so many single people:

Have you any advise in seeing things from the women's POV and feeling how women feel attracted differently from us men?

I've been reading Girlschase long enough to know that women and men at a GUT level are attracted to and prioritize different things.

The men part I GET at a deep gut/intuitive level when I read the articles. "I'm like yeah that makes sense!". Of course we prioritise youth and beauty. But I experience a cognitive dissonance to some extent when I read about what women prioritise with sexual attraction - because I don't FEEL the same way they do about dominance, humor, confidence & competence. These things don't turn me on at a gut level.

So I'm fighting the part of me that feels women prioritise - looks, height,muscles at low body fat or popularity. Dating apps (I'm not on it) but of men who are on it are competing with the only factor that's assessed on it -looks. So when I hear a female friend say I matched with a 6ft4 guy who is into martial arts he sounds like fun - it irritates me because I'm like well 'I'm pretty sure they value these other traits more' but they match a good looking guy or very tall guy and they are excited to meet him.

I want to be attractive enough so that women feel this same way more instantly. I've had good success by improving fundamentals and bedding women. The difference is it takes me longer to flip attraction triggers. I want it happening quicker and more passively.
I've come to realise is women have various attraction triggers and it's more complex than men.
- A tall man can trigger their attraction switch - which then can be built on
- A popular guy who is preselected can trigger their attraction switch (has happened to me several times)
- Dominance, humour, competence and confidence etc all can trigger it.

What I've come to realise is that men need a BUY-IN. So an average looking guy at average height needs to have excellence in SOME form that women value: showing competence at something they value fitness/sport/music/art or dominance/humour/popularity - whatever it is

Following your article on Tao of Steve I've focused on becoming excellent fitness/physique wise which has led to more attention from women: more stares, smiles,comments which is all positive. While working on fundamentals across the board.

Back to my original question.

I know these things are true. Even objectively I see women with men similar to themselves but less physically attractive.

Yet I'm struggling to overcome this part of me that's obsessed with thinking women's no.1 priority is this. All it takes is a face value comment from a woman saying they like tall guys, or that guy is easy on the eyes/amazing body. Yet I don't hear comments about that guy is so funny he turns me on. Or that guy is sexy (while also not referring to a handsome/tall/ripped guy).

How do I overcome this insecurity/cognitive dissonance?
How am I able to understand or FEEL what women feel at a gut level about attraction without PROJECTING my own feelings?

I really like the concept of talking about understanding female attraction at a gut level.

However, Jason H. brings up another point here, which I think is more important to address FIRST:

Namely, how people work to present an image of themselves as successful by playing up how awesome their dates and lovers are… and how if you aren’t careful you can get totally suckered by it!

Everybody does this… but girls do it more. Girls are the masters at it. Girls will tell you constantly how picky they are, how excellent their ex-boyfriends were, how refined their taste is. And the illusion will hold! … right up until you actually meet the guys these girls are going with (and say to yourself “Huh?!”).

So before we talk about understanding female attraction at an intuitive, gut level (which I still would like to talk about), FIRST let’s make sure we understand this equally important concept, that the way women describe their standards and the men in their lives and the way those men actually are tend to be two very different things.

 

The Great Image Projector

If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve doubtless noticed how carefully people cultivate images for themselves online. These images represent only a slice of their lives – often the best slice, but sometimes the worst (if they are going for sympathy/victim points) – yet if you know them in real life they are much less exciting OR much less tragic.

The first thought you might have there is, “Wow, the Internet really lets people decide how they want to portray themselves.” But the truth is people always decide how they want to portray themselves.

Talk to the average single guy about his sex life. He’ll try to play it up like he does all right. He may not be some super stud, he’ll tell you, but he gets some play sometimes. The truth is most average single guys are laying one new girl per year or less… the ‘play’ he is getting is rare indeed. But most guys you talk to will be “doing all right.”

Talk to the average single girl about her love life. She, too, will be “doing all right.” She has a small crowd of promising suitors, each of whom would probably give his right leg to date her. The reality is these suitors are all lacking in some way or other (often in multiple ways), OR they are not nearly as interested or committed as the girl would like… because otherwise, she’d be with them.

This is an important thing to understand about people in general: they aim to present themselves in favorable lights, generally (unless going the victim route, in which case they do the opposite and try to play up how tragic they are).

The better you understand this tendency to ‘image project’ that everybody has, the easier everything else about human preferences gets to understand.

 

Girls’ Image Projections

Girls and guys image project in similar ways. They both want to show that they are desired. They both want to play up how desirable those who desire them are.

Guys will tell you, “Man, I laid this total hottie last weekend.” Then you see a picture of the girl and she is just… not what you would call hot, personally. You might even think to yourself that you’d be embarrassed to have laid that girl; you certainly wouldn’t brag!

However, girls have this reputation maintenance perfected.

Girls will tell you things like what Jason H.’s female friend told him: “I matched with a 6’4” martial artist. He sounds fun!” But what they don’t tell you is the guy is tall but lanky and awkward, sweats profusely, tells lots of really dumb jokes, works a very basic middle class job, and looks like a horse.

When I got my first corporate job, I worked for a prestigious company and thought I’d look really good telling girls I worked for it. I tried that and it didn’t work. They did not care. Later, when I picked up a side job writing the newsletter for a seduction company, I started telling girls who asked what I did that I was “a writer,” and they’d swoon. Then I started taking acting lessons and had a few lines in an independent film that showed a handful of times on the silver screen at a single theater and told girls I was “an actor.” I had friends of girls I was seeing approach me and ask, “Are you the actor Marjorie has been seeing?”

It's clear girls I was hooking up with were telling anyone who would listen that they were dating “a writer” (who spent a grand total of 2 hours a week doing paid writing work at that point) or “an actor” (who had never once had a paid acting gig). I’m sure guy friends of those girls who heard it felt let down or intimidated that their female friends were dating such a high status writer or actor. The truth is I was probably working the same kinds of jobs those guys were – they may even have been making more money than me, owned their own homes, etc.

Like many guys, I worried about what my competition was early on. I would hear girls talk about these great guys they were dating and feel intimidated. A girl would list off one or two or three great qualities some guy supposedly had, and I’d picture an Über Chad in my head.

However, unlike many guys, I like to test my assumptions. So I would always make it a point to find out what said Über Chads were like in-person. Almost never have I met a guy a girl I knew was dating and come away actually impressed, rather than let down.

Every time I’ve had girls talking up some guy they were dating, or are dating, or an ex, if I get the chance to meet the guy I ALWAYS discover he has at least a few of these things going for him:

• Funny or ugly looking
• Crappy haircut or male pattern baldness
• Overweight OR underweight (too skinny)
• Weird speaking voice or sounds shy
• Trouble maintaining eye contact
• Excessively loud / comes across like he’s trying too hard to be intimidating
• Short and stocky or tall and gangly
• Terrible fashion sense / poor clothes
• Uncomfortable in a group of new people
• Way too eager to be my friend to feel like he has allies / ingratiating himself

I always used to picture some really cool, impressive dude, based on how much a girl was talking the guy up. Then I’d meet him and mentally be like, “THIS is the guy? WTF!”

Instant mental downgrade for that girl in my head. When a girl you thought was hot and cool tells you she is dating impressive guys… and then you meet those guys and they are geeks, or lame, or blockheads, or anything other than perfect Kens, you are going to tend to be disappointed. “Man, I thought she had better taste than THAT!” you’ll think.

I had a girlfriend I broke up, but later started seeing again. At the time I started seeing her again, she already had a new beau, whom she did not mention. I learned about this guy later on, after we broke things off again, then resumed a third time. She confessed this guy “knew everything!” about me; apparently she just dumped all over this poor sop about how awful I was or whatever it was she was telling him. He was doing the typical nice guy thing of hanging around to listen about her awful ex (me) in order to get some pussy. He had a good job, liked to work out and was in really great shape, got up early and went for a run every morning, etc. I pictured some super stud raking in the dough and living this great healthy lifestyle, who was also very warm and understanding as she cried on his shoulder about me. (didn’t really bother me… at this point I had plenty of abundance with women; but that was the image I had of this guy from her description)

Well, one day while I was still seeing her during stretch #3 we exited a cinema and ran smack into this guy and two of his friends. The guy looked like a total goof. As in, his face was just goofy looking… messed up teeth… male pattern baldness to top it off. He was in decent shape (fairly jacked) and somewhat tall. But even though he was bigger than me and had two of his buddies right there with him he got really, really nervous as soon as we were eye-to-eye. His voice was quivered and shook. I do not know what she told him about me but apparently it was enough to frighten him. His voice itself was an unattractive one. He was just a goofy nice guy who worked out and went running and had a regular middle class job and was there for my ex when she was a mess after we broke up.

And man, I will tell you… after meeting this guy, me being unimpressed by a woman’s man for the umpteenth time, and this one a girl I knew really well and THOUGHT had great taste, it was impossible to hold that girlfriend in as high esteem. She dates guys like THAT? I wondered. I thought she was really picky! She told me all these things about how picky she is!

That was the last straw for me believing women on “how great” their guys are forevermore.

Now whenever I hear a gal talking about how hot her date is or how great the guy she’s been seeing is, I just think, “Yeah, uh-huh. What’s the REAL him like?”

Ever since, whenever I’ve encountered girls’ dates, or boyfriends, or ex-boyfriends, or whatever it is, the pattern has held: the guys are just never as impressive as the way girls describe them.

These days, when I meet the guy some girl I know is seeing, who she has described as excellent, yet he turns out to be average, I am no longer surprised.

It’s simply par for the course.

 

The Fact Is Most People Are Average

Most people are totally ordinary people. The rest are people who have some exceptional quality or qualities… typically offset by other qualities that make them less desirable or more difficult to be around. The old hotter but higher maintenance conundrum made flesh.

Even if a girl is hot and has a few other things going for her, the guys she dates will tend to be mostly average guys with perhaps a few redeeming qualities.

For example:

• A guy might be tall… with otherwise average looks, average fundamentals, average finances, an average personality, etc. Lots of tall guys are gangly and awkward.

• He might be handsome, but boring and with a rather low-end job.

• He might be charismatic, but unreliable and with some nasty tendencies.

• He might be financially successful, but impossible to be around due to a demanding personality.

I have yet to discover a man who is all of tall, good-looking, rich, funny, cool, smart, personable, and easy for a woman to be in a relationship with, who doesn’t also have deep-seated psychological issues. Generally speaking, the better someone looks on the outside and the more ‘perfect’ someone appears, the more issues that person has. Normal people just don’t work that hard to be perfect. They don’t have the kinds of demons driving them you need to perfect yourself to that extent.

The general rule is, people are average… and the few people who aren’t (i.e., who have an exceptional quality or two) have compensatory disadvantages in another category.

The hotter = higher maintenance formula does not extend only to women, by the way. I’ve worked on myself to make myself a pretty attractive guy in a number of ways (due, no doubt, to a few demons of my own). Every girlfriend I’ve had has claimed that I am a very difficult/frustrating man to be in a relationship with. Women get plenty of highs with me (lots of laughter, good emotions, and orgasms) but they also get plenty of struggle. Multiple girlfriends have told me I was both the best and worst experience of their lives. There’s a Brother’s Grimm story where a widower faced with the prospect of remarrying states that “marriage is a blessing and a torment” and that seems to basically be how women in LTRs regard me.

As another example… there are multiple studies finding that men are less likely to be faithful as they become more socially dominant, as their voices get lower (a sign of all of testosterone levels, social dominance, and age), as their testosterone goes up, when they are the breadwinner, when they hold more power in the relationship, and as they grow older (and presumably more successful / higher social status).

As guys get better and more attractive, their downsides as relationship partners also get worse. In the off chance you see a gal with a really outwardly exceptional-looking guy, just keep that in mind. She’s probably busting her butt in that relationship.

I was recently replaying Daggerfall, my favorite computer game of all time. They just finalized the Unity version, which (combined with a copy of the GOG edition) makes it free to play and native to Windows, Mac, and Linux. Awesome. Anyway, when you set up a new character in Daggerfall, you get the chance to give yourself some nice advantages (like immunity to fire or frost, or the ability to absorb magic attacks)… but to balance those out, you also need to take some disadvantages (like critical weakness to poison or paralysis, or the inability to regenerate magic in daylight).

Real life is a lot like Daggerfall: you can get some advantages, but the tradeoff is you end up with disadvantages, too. Or, you can just be average and normal, with no standout qualities in either direction; no big advantage, no big drawbacks. But nobody is perfect across the board.

Just like you need to accept tradeoffs in your choice of a woman to have a long-term relationship with, women are taking tradeoffs in the men they choose to go out with and enter relationships with.

She wants a tall guy? He’s going to be gangly, or not that handsome, or not that good of an earner, or not very charismatic or a bit socially awkward. Or, if he happens to be a rare tall, good-looking, high-earning man, he’s either going to be very difficult to be in a relationship with (and possibly prone to infidelity/divorce) OR he’s going to be a nice-guy try-hard pushover she’ll get bored with and cheat on (study: women who wear the pants in the relationship are much more likely to cheat), and everyone is going to act so shocked that she could ever cheat on such an amazing guy as that.

That’s just the reality we live in: there are no perfect people, and everyone’s taking tradeoffs in who he or she dates.

 

Let Your Imagination Run Wild… But Verify

So here’s the thing: when you get a girl talking up her latest beau, you can go buck wild and let your imagination paint him as an Adonis-like high-earning go-go-go Ultra Chad if you want to. Go ahead.

But also do this: find an opportunity to meet the guy and see what he’s actually like. I guarantee – guarantee – you will discover he is nowhere near as dazzling as you pictured him to be based off her giddy description of the guy.

So, okay: maybe girls value [X quality of his she likes] SO much that they will overlook anything else! And you don’t have X quality! You’re out in the cold!

But that’s not how the Great Image Projector works.

The Great Image Projector works like this:

• Girl gets a date with a goofy, gangly tall guy? Everybody hears how she’s going out with a guy who’s 6’4”.

• Girl gets a date with a short, broke guy who did some hand modeling in his teenage years? Everybody hears how she’s going out with a model.

• Girl gets a date with a guy who’s a credit card millionaire, living fast and loose as he piles up credit card debt he’ll struggle to pay off? Everybody hears how her new beau wines and dines her at all the fanciest restaurants in town as he whisks her about in his Ferrari.

• Girl gets a date with a guy who acted a bit part in a small indie film? Everybody hears about how she’s been going out with a guy who’s a big shot actor who’s going places.

I mean what… you want her to lead with the bad stuff? She wants people to think well of her! She wants them to think she’s got options! She wants people to feel like she is desired by desirable men – because if they do, they’ll desire her even more!

So whatever cool trait a guy she’s going out with happens to have, that is what she is going to be telling people he has. She has to leave out the parts about him that make him sound less-than-perfect. No one will think as well of her if she admits he has bad teeth or gets awkward in group situations.

Of course, there’s more to understand about what women actually go for and why they go for it – as well as being able to grasp it at an intuitive level.

So, for now, we’ll leave it at ‘to be continued’ in our quest to really grasp, at a gut level, why women are attracted to the things they’re attracted to.

But at least until we reach Part II, we will be a little bit less intimidated by girls claiming they are going out with Mr. Perfect – because more likely than not, their guy is about as far from perfection as you, me, or anybody else is.

Chase Amante