Social Commentary

Note from Chase: this is the first article by Varoon Rajah, who runs our podcast series. Varoon’s launching this book review series, where he aims to review a new book each month related to dating, attraction, relationships, or psychology. Here’s Varoon...

Why Him? Why Her? is a book by Helen Fisher which ultimately suggests who you fall in love with (for GC readers – who men and women are attracted to) is powerfully influenced by who you are. Or, in other words, your personality is influenced from a very young age by your inherent temperament in addition to developed character traits. While it is commonly thought that your experiences in life shape who you are, what is not as clear to many is how a person’s inherent biology ultimately shapes them, as well as guides their choices and decisions well through their life – including the domain of relationships, love, and romance.

Helen briefly discusses this distinction – personality based on experiences and character versus personality based on biology and temperament – early on in her book:

“Your character traits stem from you experiences. Your childhood games; your parents’ interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as polite, dangerous or exciting; how they worship; what they sing; when they laugh; what they do to make a living and relax – these and innumerable other cultural forces combine to build your unique set of character traits.

The balance of your personality is your temperament, all of the biological based tendencies you have inherited, traits that emerge early childhood to produce your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving… Temperament is the “I am,” the foundation of who you are. Curiosity; creativity; novelty seeking; compassion; cautiousness; competitiveness: to some degree, you inherit these and many other aspects of your disposition.”

Fisher, Helen. (2009). Why Him? Why Her?: finding real love by understanding your personality type (pp. 3-4). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

And thus, we all have an inherent disposition and behavior that shows up to others. You might imagine where and how this is useful with your woman life – knowing the nature of that cute girl you’re about to approach or just approached, that cute girl you just met at 2 AM in a nightclub, that cute girl you’re about to go on a date with, and maybe even that cute girl you’re already dating or in a long term relationship with – has absolutely massive implications as to how you show up to her, how she shows up to you, and how elements that you present to each other serve or don’t serve to bring you two into getting together.

And knowing this – knowing your target and who she is – can enable the seeking of girls most suitable to partner with you, as well as cater your own experience with her to manage her needs, attractions, and repulsions.

And with that, we dive into this exploration of where experience meets biology.

In Mao Zedong’s communist China, in the late 1940s, a new approach to encourage ‘right-thinking’ emerged, termed xǐ năo, which means “wash brain”. This washing of the brain was designed to scrub out bad thoughts and ideas, freeing the now-cleansed brain to think about things ‘correctly’.

The term ‘brainwash’ entered the English vernacular in the early 1950s and became a dreaded boogeyman during the Cold War era. 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate made brainwashing the subject of a popular film, and in 1974 the United States’ own mind control program, dubbed MKUltra, came partly to light (though only after the CIA destroyed most of the project’s records a year earlier).

Chinese brainwashing and American reprogrammed assassins are interesting examples, but they’re just new takes on an age-old principle, one that’s been a central tenet of states, religions, rites of passage, and social groups of all shapes, colors, and sizes, since time immemorial.

That principle is at work in everything you see, read, listen to, or debate.

It’s even at work right now as you read this page.

That principle, of course, is that every message you let into your eyes or ears informs your worldview and alters your mental model ever so slightly... or sometimes so much.

And if you’re not careful about whom you let play switchboard operator in your brain, you may end up with a set of beliefs about the world that lead you all kinds of places you’d rather not go.

I recently was privy to a conversation between a handful of women in their early- to mid-thirties. They were for the most part quite attractive and confident, and their careers were solid and their paychecks healthy. The conversation went something like this:

Girl 1: I’m someone who thought she’d always be single her entire life and never get married. But I had to take care of my aging mother when my father was in the hospital, and I realized someday that will be me and it might really be nice to have someone around to look after me when I’m like that.

Girl 2: I never thought I’d want to get married either. I’m still not sure if marriage is what I want, but as I get older I think more and more it’d be nice to have a companion.

Girl 1: Exactly. But I’d never settle! I’d only get married if someone was truly the right match for me.

Girl 3: You should never accept someone who isn’t the right match for you. The right person will come along sooner or later; you just have to have the patience to wait for him.

Girl 2: That’s a beautiful way to put it.

Girl 1: Totally right.

You may hear something like this and think, “For a group of smart, educated, professionally successful women, they sure don’t seem to be able to think or communicate about love in any way that doesn’t rely on romcom tropes and tired clichés.”

And, you’d be right.

However, before you judge these gals silly for the naïveté of their talking points, I’d caution you to be aware that this is a common trap people fall into in societies that abandon educating their youths on life history... and men fall into it every bit as much as women.

2015’s most popular humorous way to suggest a girl coming over to your place to hook up has been the phrase ‘Netflix and chill’, mostly used to joke about hooking up online, like so:

So, as we’re concerned on this site with what actually works, two questions then:

1. Should you ever use ‘Netflix and chill’, or any other trendy line like this?

2. How good are humorous/trendy lines at getting girls back to your place?

This post will answer both.

In my article “Tactics Tuesdays: Calling Her When Texts Don’t Pan Out”, commenter AnonDude asked the following:

“I found that interesting and it would be great if you could write a post on different styles and goals of seduction, pros and cons of each, combinations of different styles and stuff like that.”

I thought this’d make for a fun article, so decided to write this one next.

Now, this might not necessarily be as practical an article, since, as you’ll see, you are what you are and you like what you like and you don’t have much, if any, conscious control over that.

Nevertheless, this may still be useful for you: we’ll be looking at what you want, why you do what you do, and what things you ought to be focused on (and what things not).

Let’s talk about what the 3 sorts of lady-killer are... and figure out which one you are.

I had snorted two grams of cocaine in thirty seconds. Twenty minutes later I collapsed in the middle of the theme park.

My body convulsed as first responders rushed me to the infirmary. My heart was beating over 170 beats a minute. I only weighed 107 pounds and I had not slept in over forty-eight hours.

All this just to impress a girl.

I have been sober for years now, but I have lots of experiences with both drugs and women.

I have seen many guys try various drugs to try and get with girls – from selling pot to meet girls, to taking Molly at a rave with hopes of meeting a girl at the end of the night.

So here is my tell-all about the world of drugs and women.

When I was seventeen I overdosed on cocaine. I weighed 107 pounds and was 5'9" - needless to say, I was skinny. It's been eight years since that event and I now weigh 165 pounds and am around 7-8% body fat. I have been asked to be a fitness model and to competitively powerlift. My journey from being a skinny kid to a muscular bro was motivated almost entirely by my goal of bedding more women.

And although putting on a lot of muscle didn't give me the results I had fantasized about, the journey helped transform my character and turned me into a guy who does in fact bed a lot of women. I'm writing this post because there are a lot of misconceptions about how being muscular helps you with women, so here is the truth about how being muscular will help you get laid.