Summary:
This is almost indisputably the best dating book I've ever read, and it came from an extremely unlikely source.
Tucker Max is the progenitor of the "frat-ire" literary genre, which is basically what it sounds like: His books are all about getting drunk and hooking up with lots of different girls. However, that was years ago. He doesn't write in the fratire genre anymore - he's a well-respected book publisher now - because it's just not who he is any longer.
What I like about him though is that he doesn't disown much of anything that he's done in the past (and I'm making those early books sound much worse than they are - they're in fact some of my favorite books, and they're really, really funny), but rather, he's grown older and wiser, he's settled down with his family, he's gained plenty of perspective, and now he's returned in order to teach young men what he had to learn the hard way. And the fun way. But mostly the hard way.
For this one, he joined up with evolutionary psychology professor Geoffrey Miller Ph.D., and they cover pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about why women choose the men they choose.
Seriously, there's so much here that men just aren't being taught anywhere else, and really, that's one of the reasons why dating can be so frustrating for women. Men just aren't being taught these crucially important skills!
Listen: Women have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to desire a certain type of man or certain types of men. It's not random. There are specific reasons why women are turned off by some men, sexually repulsed by others, and why they end up with who they end up with. If it seems confusing, it's because you don't know the psychology behind it, the evolutionary considerations that women have to make before they decide, "This guy's the one."
Women should read this book too, but for men, it will give them a distinct advantage over almost every single other guy. Because most guys are clueless. They do not know these things, and they are not doing the kinds of things that will get them noticed by women.
It's not just dating either. It turns out that leading a healthy, productive, successful life is directly correlated with how attractive certain men are to women. This is an important book not only because it will help you be more successful with women, but because it can relieve a lot of the animosity, suspicions, and everything else that too often separates men and women instead of bringing them closer together.
Key Ideas:
#1: "We cannot emphasize this enough: Mating success requires cross-sex insight. You need to understand how women evaluate your qualities and how they perceive the status, danger, opportunities, and threats you could present. The better you learn to see these things from women's point of view, the less unattractive you will be to them and the less confused, resentful, and frustrated you will be by how they respond to you."
#2: In order to separate yourself from the rest of the men who are trying to get women's attention, you have to take an entirely different approach. Focus on what you can give to them, instead of what you can take from them.
Become the kind of man that women have evolved to want, instead of looking for ways to "trick them" into going out with you.
#3: Maintain excellent dating ethics. There's nothing wrong with pursuing short-term flings, but you have to be honest with yourself and every woman with whom you interact. You could probably sleep with a lot of girls by trying to manipulate them, but the cost to your dignity and respectability is simply too high.
#4: Try to subjectify women, instead of objectifying them. There's nothing wrong with being attracted to a woman's body, but when you're talking to a woman, assume that there's at least one exceptionally interesting thing about her or her life, and be determined to figure out what that is.
#5: When you're developing confidence with women, what you need to do is develop competence. This comes from gaining experience talking to more women, of course. But it also comes from learning how to be a productive, responsible, desirable adult male. Competence comes with developing desirable traits, which will then transfer into increased confidence.
#6: “Effectiveness is sexually attractive to most women most of the time, but ineffectiveness is sexually disgusting to ALL women ALL of the time. No woman in any culture is erotically attracted to ineffectiveness, whether it's powerlessness or joblessness or sexual impotence or getting flustered by crises or failing to protect a baby. Thus, apart from cultivating signs of effectiveness, it can be even more important to stop showing signs of ineffectiveness."
#7: "You could have the highest mate value and the most amazing traits in the world, but if you don't send out any signals or proofs of your traits, you're the Invisible Man." This means that you need to let women know how desirable you are. But...and this is important...you don't do this by just telling them straight up how great you are.
Rather, you focus on developing "honest signals" that show women that you possess value that a lower-status man could never succeed in showing. For example, having a great physique is an "honest signal" because it can't be faked. You can't just say "Yea, I've got an amazing body," when she can just reach out and feel that that's not true.
And remember, everything you do, say, and have is a clue about your underlying traits. You can't avoid signaling; you can just do it poorly or well.
#8: The Platinum Rule: “Treat a woman as she wants to be treated.”
Book Notes:
You simply have to become the kind of man that women have evolved to want.
Women evolved to be more complicated than you can understand, so they could protect themselves from being seduced, manipulated, and exploited.
If you make yourself attractive to women, an amazing life tends to be a natural byproduct.
To build real confidence, you must build real competence.
The only effective strategy for gaining real confidence is to develop skills and demonstrate the performance of those skills.
“Build it and she will come (hopefully more than once).”
“If you’ve had no sex with any women in the last year, you're less likely to attract women - even if you have attractive traits - because you are more likely to put off an asexual loser vibe. Women can see your late-night Google search history in your eyes. Conversely, if you've had sex with ten women in the last month, despite having serious weaknesses as a mate, you're likely to give off some mysterious sex confidence that attracts even more women."
“It’s like a customer seeing that a product is the top seller on Amazon.”
Over the course of her life, the biggest threats to women are going to come from men she knows. You have to be aware of this and invest some time proving to them that you are not one of those men.
Subjectify women instead of objectifying them!
Women are judging you, and that’s ok, as long as you understand how and why.
Some of the same male traits that frighten women are the same ones that they are also attracted to.
"We cannot emphasize this enough: Mating success requires cross-sex insight. You need to understand how women evaluate your qualities and how they perceive the status, danger, opportunities, and threats you could present. The better you learn to see these things from women's point of view, the less unattractive you will be to them and the less confused, resentful, and frustrated you will be by how they respond to you."
“Think about how weird that whole situation is: to be sexually attracted to beings that could so easily do irreparable physical harm to you. Think about the anxiety that internal contradiction could create on a daily basis."
“A woman can tell how well your life is going from how you look, in about two seconds.”
“Women spend a big proportion of their time in the mating market avoiding the small percentage of guys who are the most intrusive, obnoxious, or insane. Psychopaths are sexually predatory, uninhibited, and confident, so although they're only 4 percent of the American male population, they might account for 40 percent of the men who have hit on any given woman."
“Her experience is that the worst guys come straight at her while the best guys are nowhere to be seen.”
“Only a tiny percentage of guys inspire immediate lust in women.”
“Just talk to her like you already understand that (a) she's beautiful, and you both know it, (b) she's felt ambivalent about her beauty for years, and (c) she'd like to be appreciated for things she's achieved in her life through her own efforts, not through winning the genetic lottery of physical attractiveness."
“A promiscuous rival is a woman’s biggest threat to keeping a good boyfriend.”
Women have to be able to tell themselves and their friends a good story about why they slept with you or why they’re dating you, and it’s up to you to help them create one.
Her friends will judge her on how well you treat her.
“Women get pregnant, men don’t. Most of the sex differences in human mating strategies emerge, directly or indirectly, from that basic fact.”
“Women naturally fall for guys they’ve had several orgasms with.”
Women often use sex to get love, and men often use love to get sex.
Developing a clear sense of ethics when it comes to dating will allow you to sleep at night, with whoever you want, without feeling guilty. Plus, the genuine self-confidence that comes from having those ethics in place will make you better with women as well.
Your family, carrying your genes, has been getting laid for millions of years and you are the end result of that streak.
Females throughout nature favor effective males.
“The relationship between fitness and survival creates a deep asymmetry in nature. It's why, for women, it's even more important to be sexually disgusted by ineffectiveness than to be sexually attracted to effectiveness."
You need to be as effective as possible in as many domains as possible so that more women will find you attractive.
“Effectiveness is sexually attractive to most women most of the time, but ineffectiveness is sexually disgusting to ALL women ALL of the time. No woman in any culture is erotically attracted to ineffectiveness, whether it's powerlessness or joblessness or sexual impotence or getting flustered by crises or failing to protect a baby. Thus, apart from cultivating signs of effectiveness, it can be even more important to stop showing signs of ineffectiveness."
A lot of female choice is very risk-averse, as the downside of hooking up with the wrong guy far outweigh the advantages of hooking up with a good guy.
“Remember: this woman’s female ancestors did not pass along their genes by giving random blowjobs to strangers.”
Women are here because their ancestors generally picked the best guys to have sex with.
“For women, the ultimate evolutionary fantasy is finding a new male lover who has awesome traits that testify to his great genetic quality, who is from a strange new tribe that offers genetic innovations unavailable domestically, and who is worth getting pregnant with tonight even if he gets killed in battle tomorrow. (There, you now understand 90 percent of women's sexual fantasies and romance novels.)"
“Her body will respond better if her brain's convinced that you're worth sleeping with more than just once. That's how women's sexual circuitry works."
“If you make yourself into an attractive potential boyfriend, then your sexual options become unlimited.”
Three Things That Women See:
1. Good Genes
2. Partner Potential
3. Fatherhood Potential
“Attraction is an emotional, unconscious reaction to the suite of traits men present to women; it is NOT a conscious decision that they deliberate about."
The fact that women care about many different things is actually great news for you.
“Your behavior is never just your behavior. It’s always a clue to your underlying traits.”
Oscar Wilde: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
Your physical health is the executive summary of your genetic fitness.
“Wearing nice clothes that fit well on a good body is one of the most potent ways to attract women.”
Albert Camus: "But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"
Mental health is the ability of your brain to perform its adaptive function. I would argue then, that mental illness is insanely widespread, as people follow these ridiculous notions of what will 'get them ahead,' or other stupid shit. None of it is getting anyone laid, or making anyone happier; it's just killing them from stress and frustration. That's mental illness.
“These traits - happiness, sense of humor, openness, emotional resilience, playfulness - are honest signals of sanity."
“Don’t miss the enjoyment trees for the success forest.”
Certain things that women look for in men, such as openness, resilience, and happiness, are sought because they are reliable indicators of mental health.
“A recent BBC study of 120,000 people across fifty-three countries showed that the most attractive traits in a long-term mate were, in descending order of importance: (1) intelligence, (2) humor (which is a form of intelligence), (3) honesty, (4) kindness, (5) physical attractiveness, (6) moral values, (7) communication skills (another form of intelligence), and (8) dependability. Three of the top eight traits are related to intelligence."
“The logic of female mate choice works like this: a guy's clever courtship reveals his general intelligence, which reveals his general brain function, which reveals his general genetic quality, which predicts how well his kids will survive and reproduce in turn."
“The authors of this book have six degrees between them, three of those being advanced degrees. And all of them will tell you that most of what they learned, they learned outside a classroom."
Women can judge your intelligence quite accurately from just a few minutes of conversation.
Most universities are better at proving how smart you had to be to get accepted than actually teaching you things once you get there.
“If you are applying to colleges now, go to the most selective, most famous school you can get into. Not because it'll teach you more things, but because the name on the degree is most of the value you're going to get from it."
“Smart people are too busy being smart to talk much about how smart they are.”
“Willpower is the drive, resilience, and perseverance to pursue your long-term goals and honor your core values despite short-term temptations, distractions, and emotional impulses. That's it."
“One of the easiest but most effective ways to boost your willpower is to simply practice feeling more empathy toward your own future self: 'What would I do today if I really cared about the self that I'll be a year from now?'"
Willpower is the main tool you need to fix everything else in your life.
When you frame willpower as a battle between the right and wrong things to do, you end up in a situation where half of you always loses. Instead, frame it as compassion for your future self, and a willing sacrifice on your way to becoming the man you want to be.
“Willpower is really just being as kind as you can to the man you want to become.”
“That’s the irony of improving willpower by setting goals and accomplishing them using good habits: the better the habits are that you build, the more willpower you develop, and the less you actually have to use willpower!"
A lot of small accomplishments strung together are more rewarding and motivating than one big accomplishment.
All romance novels feature a “tender defender” as the hero.
“If you can wrap your head around the attractiveness of this tender-defender combination, you can easily become more attractive than 90 percent of the guys out there."
“Prisons ‘reform’ young felons mostly by just locking them up until their executive self-control and empathy systems mature.”
Having attractive traits is not the same as displaying attractive traits.
“What proof of your value can you show to a woman that a man with lower value could never succeed in showing?"
"You could have the highest mate value and the most amazing traits in the world, but if you don't send out any signals or proofs of your traits, you're the Invisible Man."
“You can’t escape signaling; you can only do it badly or do it well.”
"Yes, what's on the inside is very important, but we can judge each other's deepest traits only by what we can observe and verify. EVERYONE judges EVERYONE else by what's 'on the outside.' We do it because we're wired by evolution to show off our inner traits through our surface behavior and to expect everyone else to do the same."
"Females evolved to be skeptical about males pretending to be amazing. So there's a signaling arms race between signalers (males) and receivers (females). The signalers try to influence the receivers in the signaler's interests, as when males try to seduce females. And the receivers try to distinguish the genuinely useful information in the signals from the deception and manipulation, like women on dates, trying to figure out if this guy is for real or just all talk."
Conspicuous consumption is to prove that you have money to burn, a costly signal; it’s not actually designed to bring pleasure to the wealthy, at least not directly.
“Social proof is not superficial. For hypersocial animals like us, it's about as deep a signal of personal value as anything gets."
Sharing food with people is way better for forming bonds between them than just getting together for drinks.
“Every hour you spend alone is an hour that you’re failing to build your social skills, your social network, and your social proof.”
“The easiest way to get more comfortable talking with women you WANT to sleep with is to spend a lot of time talking with female friends you DON'T want to sleep with."
“Women care less about money itself than about what it represents about the guy who made it.”
Most women wouldn’t care so much about a BMW per se, as about the signals it sends about a man’s underlying traits.
“Your possessions are not ‘superficial’ status symbols - they are material proof that you have the positive traits needed to care for a woman, raise kids, and recover from losses.”
“Put yourself in a woman's shoes for a second and play a little game of 'Who'd You Rather?' Imagine two guys hitting on you. One is worth $75 million because he happened to win the Powerball jackpot when he was an unemployed school bus driver. The other is worth $7.5 million because he built his own company from the ground up and now has ten employees and thousands of customers. Who would you rather go out with?"
“Almost all women would rather have an interesting, fun, kind husband with a solid middle-class income than a dull, disconnected, workaholic millionaire."
“This is not to say that wealth doesn't predict happiness - it does - but only indirectly, mostly through the social and sexual signaling benefits of attracting better friends and mates. In fact, materialism per se makes you less happy, nastier, and more socially isolated."
There’s a big difference between wealth and material proof of attractive traits.
Money has only been around for a few thousand years, so women couldn’t possibly have evolved to want it explicitly.
“Awesome male style isn’t just a new gay thing; it’s a very ancient straight thing.”
“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at women and persuade themselves they have a better idea.”
Your natural scent is a pretty informative signal of your overall health.
“A guest sees more in an hour than a host sees in a year.”
“For women, there’s a very short leap from emotional intimacy to physical intimacy.”
“A 7 in Milwaukee is not a 7 in Manhattan.”
Measure yourself against the men who are available in a particular place and aim to be the most attractive man there.
“Women aren’t measuring you against all the men on earth; they’re measuring you against all the other men they have access to.”
“There are virtually no cultures in history that expected their young people to find mates by throwing them randomly together into dark, noisy, threatening environments, with no structured activities or reasons for interacting, and hoping they'd sort themselves out into viable pairs."
Your dating life should simply be an extension of your social life.
“If you can’t talk to women, they’re not going to have sex with you. If you can't sustain good conversations, they won't want to be your girlfriend. If you can't resolve arguments constructively and respectfully, they won't want to marry you."
“Safety is a deep and unconscious need of hers - ignore it at your own sexless peril.”
Assume that there is something extremely interesting about the woman you’re speaking to, and become determined to find out what that is.
“When talking to women, make your only goal to have entertaining and fun conversations with them, and nothing else."
Sex is the subtext for any conversation you ever have with an attractive woman.
The Platinum Rule: “Treat a woman as she wants to be treated.”
“Your sexual desire is in many ways the core of your masculinity; the heart of your ambition, and the highest expression of nature's evolutionary quest for excellence. It drove most of human evolution, exploration, invention, and creativity; and, when harnessed correctly, it has produced the most glorious expressions of human culture and genius."
“Basically, men accomplish things so women will like them and want to have sex with them.”
“Lust + Hero (having attractive traits) + Romantic Context = The Best Thing Ever."
Your only goal is to meet new women and have as much fun with them as possible no matter what happens. Then, regardless of the outcome, you've both won.
Action Steps:
So you've finished reading the book. What do you do now?
#1: Set a mating goal.
Decide whether you want a casual hookup, something a little longer-term but still not serious, or whether you want to get married. Be honest with yourself, and don't feel bad about your choice. It's your life.
#2: Set your dating standards, and establish your ethical standards.
Decide what type of woman you want to date (which qualities or attributes she has) and also resolve to never lower your ethical standards. Never lie to women, never lead them on, and never treat them other than how they want to be treated.
#3: Choose one area of your life that you can improve, and where you can make yourself more attractive to women.
Whether that means moving out of your parent's house, getting in shape, developing your social circle, or anything else, evaluate where you are now and what you'd have to do in order to improve in this area. Then make a plan and stick to it!
#4: Evaluate your current prospects.
You've read the book, you know exactly what kinds of things women are looking for, so...do you have them? Which ones do you have? Which are lacking? Are they easy areas of your life to fix?
#5: Think of a great quality you already have, and decide how you can show it off to greater effect.
But remember, it's more "show" than "tell." Telling women that you make lots of money or that you're really smart will kill their attraction to you. Rather, figure out how you can show these things without telling women explicitly. This is both easier and harder than it sounds. It seems so easy to just tell her about your sports car, but this is a terrible move. Just pick her up in it and don't mention it before she sees it. Or after, really, unless she brings it up. And even then, play it down.
#6: Make friends with more women.
Women will tell you things that guys either won't, or that guys don't know in the first place. Having a female perspective is extremely valuable in increasing your mate value.
#7: Talk to a woman just because she could be interesting, rather than because you're attracted to her.
This is an excellent way for shy guys to gain more confidence. It removes any expectation that you have to be charming and witty and desirable and just lets two people talk for the sheer enjoyment of talking. Even if you're not shy around women, learn how to separate sex from intriguing conversation.
#8: Look for bad examples.
You won't have to look far! Most men are terrible with women, and if you look closely (or, really, not even that close in most cases) you'll see men making disastrous mistakes with women that you can learn from. Working as a nightclub bouncer I saw so much cringe-worthy shit that taught me what not to do. Once you see - in person - the kinds of actions and behaviors that are repulsive to women, you’ll know what not to do as well.
#9: Read a romance novel.
Seriously, romance novels are full of great info. The popular ones - the ones that most women are reading - contain everything that women are attracted to, and you can learn an incredible amount from reading them. They're truly an untapped resource in understanding the female mind.
About the Authors:
Tucker Max (above right) is the co-founder of Scribe Media, a company that helps authors write, publish, and market their books. He's written four New York Times Best Sellers (three that hit #1), which have sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide.
Geoffrey Miller (above left) is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books The Mating Mind (2001), Mating Intelligence (2008), Spent (2009), and Mate (2015). He has a B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University and is a tenured associate professor at University of New Mexico.
Additional Resources:
This Book on Amazon:
What Women Want, by Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller
If You Liked This Book:
The Art of Seduction, by Robert Greene
