Why It's Harder for Guys with Good Jobs to Get Girls

We had a discussion on the Skilled Seducer forum recently where we talked about how a successful career intersects with a man's ability to succeed with women.

I shared my experience, as both a guy with a good corporate job, then as a guy with various artistic jobs, finally as a guy who was unemployed, and then again later as an entrepreneur, and how I found women reacted to that.

Basically: good corporate job or successful entrepreneur are the hardest things to present yourself as if you want to pick up girls. You are much better off being an artist or unemployed.

I figured this out pretty early on and presented myself as an artist even when I had a well-paying corporate job at a prestigious company. I simply avoided telling women about this... well, if I had any kind of sexual or romantic designs on them.

Why should this be so, though? Why would women be more attractive to an artist, or even an unemployed guy, than one who's holding down a solid, stable 9-to-5 at a respectable, well-known company, or forging his own path as an entrepreneur?

 

This Is a Reliable Pattern

I will add, before I go into it -- it's not just me who's experienced this.

When I still coached students to pick up girls in the field, the guys who struggled most were the corporate guys. Guys with good jobs at good companies with nice bank accounts who owned their own homes.

The guys who excelled were the artists, the 'losers' (guys who had dead-end jobs or couldn't even hold down a job), plus a few business owners whose business ownership either directly translated into seduction success (running a hostel, for instance) or who concealed their business ownership -- all these guys did better. Often much better.

One student of mine was a cool guy who did well with girls, but was very circumspect about what he did. I didn't find out until I'd known him for months that he actually ran a pretty generic parts distribution company, which he'd started himself... I thought he was a spy or something! He probably wouldn't have seemed nearly as cool had I found out early on he ran a parts distributor. The mystery of who this guy was and what he did to put food on the table made him more intriguing.

Over the years we have had numerous guys on the forum talk about how it had gotten much harder with girls once their job prospects improved and they discovered they had a lot more money.

I have coached numerous wealthy coaching clients who were struggling to get girls, some of whom were settling for some not-so-great quality women because those girls were the best they thought they could get.

There are plenty of good reasons to want to have a good career and a comfortable bank account.

"So I can do better with girls" is not usually going to be one of them, though.

But why?

 

It's Not Just Attainability

The first culprit you might think to finger is attainability.

When a girl meets you and you have your big impressive corporate job, you just aren't attainable to her.

There certainly is some of this. When I was new to my corporate job and still a novice seducer, and I wanted to test out telling women about my big-name corporate position, I watched a lot of girls who were clerks, secretaries, dancers, and other kinds of lower-end jobs sink into auto-rejection as soon as I told them.

I'd thought at first I would be impressive by mentioning my company name (which was a big, very well known, highly respected company). Instead I was blowing myself out.

Nor did it help me any with girls from the corporate world. I'd say my company, they'd say their company, and it was like... trading business cards. Okay, cool, we both work for corporate America. So what? So does everybody else she's around on a daily basis. It doesn't win you any points with her.

The next thing I tried was dropping my company name entirely and just describing what I do:

"I help companies plan out their supply chains and logistics, which is just making sure the right stuff ends up at the right places."

That worked a lot better; at least it stopped making women auto-reject.

However, it didn't help paint me as anything especially interesting.

See, your job is a big part of your identity. What you do often gets construed with who you are.

If your job sounds boring or uninspiring to her, it is going to be an uphill to make the case that you are not also boring and uninspiring. Because why would an exciting and inspiring man occupy his time with the boring and uninspiring?

It wasn't until I decided to try something even more different that I realized that aside from attainability, there was also expectation.

 

Becoming an Artist

In 2007, I think it was, I took up writing the newsletter for a now-defunct seduction company.

It was a nice side gig and brought in an extra thousand bucks a month for me, which was swell. Write two emails a week, times four weeks, and make bank. It was the first time people on the Internet were reading my writing as me, Chase Amante, rather than an anonymous forum handle on a seduction forum.

I'd heard multiple times that women were attracted to artists much more than corporate types. So, seeing as I was now gainfully employed as a writer, in addition to working at a corporation, I decided to give that a spin.

When girls asked what I did, I started telling them I was a writer.

And right away, I knew it was different.

Their eyes would light up. "Really?" they'd ask. They were impressed.

They'd start telling me how they always wanted to be a writer, or how they loved to write.

They'd talk about how cool it was I was a writer.

At first I worried women would be skeptical; that they'd ask me how much I made or wonder if I could really make a living doing that.

But, no, it never came up. I've told I don't know how many thousands of people I'm a writer, and the only ones who ever ask about the financials are men (and even then, not all that often). Women just want to talk about the dream and the artistry of it.

Some girls ask what you write or if you're published anywhere. A few will ask if they can read your writing ("Sure, give me your number and your email, I'll send you a sample" I'd say -- then I'd set a date up with them without sending a sample, and they'd come out on the date and never ask to see my writing).

After a year I also started acting class. I did that for a year, then landed a few bit roles in very bit films, and when girls asked what I did I figured I'd try answering with 'actor'.

This got another big attraction boost; to my eyes it was bigger than writer. 'Writer' might be romantic, but 'actor' has status attached to it.

The fact of the matter is, if you walk into a party, and are pointed out three men, and someone tells you, "He's a writer... he's an actor... and he works for a big-name corporation," how would you rank those men in order of who you think it'll be most interesting and advantageous to know, not knowing anything else about them?

A lot of people are going to rank the corporate guy dead-last... possibly because there are a lot of corporate guys, and most of them aren't especially interesting, or especially powerful.

Like with 'writer', I worried women would drill into me on 'actor', asking if I had any paying gigs, how much I was really making, if I was in actually anything significant, but they didn't. Sometimes they'd ask if they could see anything I was in, and I'd tell them "just independent films without a wide release" and that was enough (one of the films I was in is on IMdb... I was supposed to get a credit on there, but the director never added the rest of the cast's names beyond the top three billed. I was disappointed, but life goes on. The lead actress proceeded to land a role in a really bad Pamela Anderson movie, but not much else).

Once I met the friends of one girl I was seeing, and they addressed me as "that actor she's been seeing." I was like, lol, I told her I have a day job. But nobody cared. They didn't want to hear about my day job. They wanted me to be an actor.

A few years later, I found myself unemployed, and decided to see how that went.

"Either women will hate me or they'll love me," I figured. As it turned out, they loved me.

Girls started jumping into bed with me easier than ever. I was getting much faster one-night stands, that required a lot less framing of things by me; my longstanding problem of "trying to not be such excellent boyfriend material" evaporated; and all of a sudden women just wanted sex.

Of course, I ran into an issue with girlfriends now... they still found me irresistible, but they really did not see as much long-term potential in me. They would take to asking me if I was going to get another job. They were hoping I would, so they could start to see me as more stable and less of an uncertain bet.

Then I started founding my own companies. Rather than a business consultant, a writer, an actor, or unemployed, I decided to start telling women I was a business owner or an entrepreneur and see how that went.

It went terrible.

Girls didn't care and they weren't impressed. If I talked about managing large teams of people (at one point with Girls Chase I had around 40 direct reports), they didn't care. If I talked about various successes, hinted at being financially free, and so on, they didn't care.

Instead, I was just 'boring, generic entrepreneur guy' and I had this wall to climb over to frame myself as interesting again, just like back in the day when I used to tell girls about my corporate job.

So, I went back to being a writer (which I think is a fair job description, considering how much I write -- even if I am also an entrepreneur, among other things), and girls were again intrigued.

 

The Creativity Bonus

There's some interesting research on creativity and mating.

A study titled "Peacocks, Picasso, and parental investment" found that when you 'activate' a short- or long-term mating goal in men (i.e., you trigger men to think they're either going to get laid or get a girlfriend or wife), they begin to put on more creative displays.

Another study found that (to quote one of the study authors) "Creative guys with less attractive faces were almost identical in attractiveness to really good looking guys who were not as creative."

A third study -- the nail in the coffin for 'stable corporate job' over 'artistic vagabond' -- found that horny women prefer creative men over wealthy men. When women are on the prowl for short-term mating (i.e., quick flings and hookups), they both rate creative men as more attractive than wealthy men and will choose creative men over wealthy men when forced to choose only one or the other.

So our findings from these three studies:

• Men instinctively behave more creative when they want to get laid

• Women overall rate creativity equally as attractive as good looks

• Women who are horny or ovulating (i.e., trying to get pregnant) choose creative men over wealthy men

Are you starting to get the picture here why 'writer' or 'actor' performed better for me than 'consultant' or 'business owner'?

'Entrepreneur' is creative too, of course -- but not necessarily. There are plenty of 'entrepreneurs' who are just providing financing, or who have teamed up with a guy who really IS creative.

The only one that doesn't fit in here is what I discovered as 'unemployed' -- but I suspect it was the mystery element at play here, since I did not dress, talk, or act like a vagabond when I presented myself as unemployed.

Regardless, at least for short-term mating, creative men are the most attractive... and when you're out to pick up girls and move fast to bed with them, you are practicing short-term mating.

We can see why painters, sculptors, writers, illustrators, actors, and so on are more attractive than guys working professional jobs -- they just flip that seriously attractive creativity switch inside every woman's head, that all women have, and that men instinctively when they want to mate try to hit -- but artistic men just naturally hit all the time.

 

Your Occupation Strongly Influences Women's Perceptions of You

Why does profession have such a big impact though?

Profession is strongly tied to your identity. It is what you do all day. What you have chosen to do.

If you do something boring, you are probably boring. At least that is how it will look to most people.

Really interesting, dynamic, vivacious guy... who is trapped all day in a gray cubicle jamming formulas into spreadsheets? Unlikely. Or, if you started out interesting, dynamic, and vivacious, I doubt you will be after a few years in.

Here's the truth: your occupation WILL shape you.

When I left my corporate job after four years, I spent the better part of a year rebuilding myself. My job was soulless and draining. Sitting in cubicles, going to pointless meetings, never any work to do. I tried finding other tasks to do; tried to spearhead new projects; but I kept running into hierarchies where bosses told me it couldn't be done and colleagues told me not to go so fast, that I needed to learn to keep an even pace with my work (the implication being that there was only so much work, and it was better to stretch it out over time to look busy).

I didn't want to sit around 'looking' busy. I wanted to DO stuff!

But after four years of it, I was spent. Trying to motivate myself to be active or even to care all that much was hard.

(even still, in my final month, I ratcheted it up one last time, taking on four separate projects simultaneously from home, working around the clock, on meetings at all hours of the day... I was on calls throughout the day, submitting proposals and research documents throughout the day, the right-hand man in two of the four projects... at one point one of my managers asked me "When do you sleep?" -- I logged 538 hours that month, almost 18 hours a day, third most hours in a 500+ person division [don't ask me what the other two people working more than 18 hours a day were doing, because I don't know], got a number of raving reviews from managers -- and then they laid me off, which was great... severance pay + now I get to be on travel full-time)

Thing is, when you're working a regular job, you're not a free man. You report to somebody. You're a cog in a system. You're not creative; you're just doing what the boss or the client wants you to do.

Even if you started off free, it bleeds into you, and it comes out when you socialize.

I can see it, when I interact with corporate types. They're muted; they wear a harness -- the same one I used to.

It took me a year to get that harness off, but when you do you have a freedom of persona the corporate types don't have.

Women figure this out too, and they know a corporate job means a man on a leash.

That doesn't mean he's a weak man... but he is domesticated, to greater or lesser extent.

There are guys who buck the trend. One of our old forum members, and sometime contributor to Girls Chase, J.J. Jones (NarrowJ on the forum) held down a 9-to-5 while tearing up the Midwest sleeping with bevvies of beauties. It's just hard in general to have that same killer instinct in game when you are in 'cog in the machine' mode all day at work.

(when I held down a corporate job, I often felt like I was having to switch into a completely different guy when going out to game... from 'conscientious guy trying to look respectable and stay within his lane' to 'free-thinking bad boy who speaks his mind, acts assertive, and confidently goes for what he wants'... whereas post-corporate job going out to socialize just feels like taking who I am all the time now and simply ramping it up)

Artists are attractive because women know how they are: they're creative, irreverent, instinctual. They aren't repressed the way white collar workers are (the 'salaryman' of Japan). They're passionate. A woman knows that with an artist, she's in for something that's anything other than 'boring'.

It's the same way with athletes, surfing instructors, bouncers, or guys who are unemployed. No one is telling these men what to do and they are not much or at all repressed.

Sure, the athlete has his coach, the surfing instructor his boss, the bouncer his; but they're in charge of other people, largely autonomous in their work, and doing physical stuff (and conquering/intimidating other men, in the cases of the athlete and bouncer). The nature of what they're doing requires them to be free to listen to their instincts, too.

These impressions your job gives of you are sticky. They're very hard to shake off.

• You can say you're an artist but you're a perfect gentleman and you always follow the rules and she won't believe you. She will still assume you are a colorful, instinct-driven, creative Romeo

• Likewise you can say you're an office worker but you're a bad boy rule breaker instinctive animal but she won't believer that either. She will still assume you are a dutiful, obedient, reliable cog in a large, impersonal system based on the suppression of the individual will to the collective corporate mission

And here's the thing:

She'll be right. (probably)

Thus why it is HARD to shake the impression your profession gives, and why it so strongly defines you.

 

Framing Your Occupation

So what can you tell girls you do?

Well, if you have an artistic pursuit you put any halfway decent amount of time into, tell women you're that.

You work a 9-to-5 at Home Depot, but you spend time sculpting on the weekends? Great, you're a sculptor. Perhaps you're not a financially successful sculptor, or a world renowned sculptor, but that doesn't mean you're not a sculptor.

You spend time sculpting on the weekends. You're a sculptor.

If she wants to drill down, don't lie. It's fine to say you work a 9-to-5 to put food on the table. Most women won't care and won't dig; when she asks you what you do, she is really asking you how you see yourself.

What's the difference between these two men?

1. One man is a grocery store checkout clerk. In his spare time, he also sculpts.

2. Another man is a sculptor. To make ends meet, he picks up shifts at the grocery store checkout.

Superficially they're the same. Both work a 9-to-5 checking out groceries. Both sculpt in their spare time.

But to most people, these two men are COMPLETELY different.

One defines himself as a sculptor. That is who and what he is. His day job is only what he does to stay alive.

The other defines himself as a checkout clerk. That is who and what he is. His sculpting is just a side thing.

That might look like a small difference. But it's not -- it's huge.

The first time I framed myself as a writer, I felt like a bit of a fraud. I was a business consultant. That was who and what I was. Writing was just a side project I was engaged in. Even though I'd been writing a long time before I ever became a consultant -- heck, I'd completed two novels before then!

But the more I framed myself as a writer, the more it began to feel like, "Yes, that is what I really am. I am not a business consultant... business consultant is just how I pay the bills. What I am is a writer."

Maybe writing wasn't paying all my bills just yet then. Nevertheless, I was writing, I saw myself as a writer, so that's what I was.

That's all identity is, anyway -- just what you see yourself as being.

 

What If You Have Zero Cool Things in Your Identity?

You're not a rock climber, cave diver, oil painter, screenwriter, rugby player, or karate sensei.

You're just a regular old dude working a boring job who whiles away his hours at uninspiring hobbies.

Well, first off, what are those hobbies? Do you make stuff in your shop at home? If yes, there you go -- carpenter or metalsmith. That's better than construction worker or import/export manager.

Second off, is there some artistic element to your work? If you're a chef, and you cook great food, and add little flourishes to your dishes, then you, my friend, are a culinary artist.

Or if you have no hobbies that are interesting at all... if you're the most typical of typical dudes... if you go to your typical job, then come back to your typical home, play some typical video games, read some typical books, then the best thing I can recommend is minimize talk of your job.

There are two ways to do it: either describe it, rather than name it, to reduce her ability to identify you with something boring... for instance, let's say you're an accountant:

Her: What do you do?

You: I balance the checkbooks for people wealthier than I am.

See how much more intriguing that is than "I'm an accountant"?

Before she can ask you exactly what that means, just move the conversation on, asking her something about herself. You will have answered her question; she may not have totally grasped it, but she will have gotten the general gist.

But not only will you have avoided making yourself sound boring; you will have answered a boring question in an interesting, creative way -- and we all know how women like creativity.

 

Wrap Up

In the forum thread, I mentioned how one exception I believe there is to the 'successful job curse' with women is that of lawyers. I know several lawyers with hot trophy wives; indeed, many of the women who go into law are quite good-looking... the lawyers I have known have married very attractive lady lawyers. At least one of our former contributors (though I'm sworn not to name who) has even since passed the bar and become a lawyer, in fact.

If there's any white collar career that allows you to still do women, it's probably law, since lawyers:

• Are extremely verbal (something quite helpful for pickup)

• Have much more autonomy (especially once they make partner)

• Generally are advising, lecturing, and telling clients what to do (i.e., they're accustomed to being in a position of authority and to asking for and getting compliance)

You cannot say the same for most white collar workers, where verbosity and autonomy are lower, and they tend to not be leading clueless clients and telling them what to do, but rather working for internal stakeholders or external large clients with clear demands and specific things they want done.

Don't underestimate the power of the identity you receive from the way you spend your time.

Consider carefully the expectations tied to anything you claim as your identity -- and ask yourself whether it is giving you a leg up with women, or getting in your way with them.

If it's in your way, take a little time to consider how you might get it out of your way... or add some new interest to your life you can use to assume a newer, more seductive identity instead.

Chase

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READ MORE: “How to Answer “What Do You Do?”, No Matter What You Do”