Mindsets

You may have noticed, but a LOT of couples look really similar to each other, facially. Is there an element of attraction related to facial similarity?

Send this article to anyone you know who thinks "You can't get a good-looking woman unless you're genetically blessed with natural good looks yourself!" to really blow his mind.

There's an interesting phenomenon I've paid some attention to over the years: the phenomenon of romantic couples looking facially quite similar to one another.

I first started paying attention to it when I noticed how different different people's assessments are of what is attractive. There's a thread on our forum where guys post pictures of their dream lays... any man who goes through that list is going to see some women he agrees with, and some women he says, "What? That's your dream shag?!"

Seriously, you should scroll through that list... you'll be surprised. Here's just a sample of what different men from the Boards rate as their dream girls to go to bed with:

The dream lays of various different guys. Which ones are your dream lays?

What I began to notice over the years was oftentimes when a guy told me some girl was really hot, and I looked at her and thought, "Whoa... that girl is not really attractive at all," I could take a look at the girl, then take a look at the guy, and I'd discover they actually had a great deal of facial similarity. Similar eyes, similar nose, similar mouth, similar jawline.

And it would click: "Ahhhh... that's why he likes her. She looks like him."

When I'd look at celebrities, and scratch my head over why a wealthy, famous guy with his pick of nearly any woman he wants would choose as his wife some of the total dogs a lot of male celebrities seem to pick (in my tastes), I'd realize those dogs were, in fact, very facially similar to the male partner himself.

At the same time, from time to time, I'll notice couples whose faces are almost total opposites. This intrigued me too. I see it a lot less than the "dead similar" couples, but I do see it.

And as I saw all this, I started to formulate a theory, that gave me a better understanding of human mate choice matching.

This theory made me even more confident (as if I was confident enough) in my own pickups as well... because it helped me realize a few things about what kinds of girls were likely to be most receptive to me, and what kinds of girls I was likely to get on with best myself.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of Heaven and Earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”
    —Martin Luther King Jr.

Learning how to be good with women is not a small achievement. I’d say it’s one of the greatest achievements a man can accomplish.

Most men will never know what it’s like to sleep with a beautiful woman (without paying for it). Perhaps a few will get “lucky” when a girl they know falls in their lap through a social circle or work. But most guys? They settle for the best they think they can get.

These men are fine with mediocre.

Personally, I am not fine with mediocre. At least not when it comes to the women I date long term.

I don’t want to date ignorant, boring, plain, or obese women. I want to be with charming, confident, attractive, fit, intelligent, interesting women. So I’ve spent a large part of my life transforming myself into someone these sorts of women will find attractive.

Of course, nobody’s perfect. We all have our valleys and plateaus. You don’t need to be excellent in every area of your life, but you should strive for it in as many areas as possible.

When some guys start cold-approaching girls, they go through a stage of “girls just blow me off.” Let’s explore why that’s happening and the brain hacks needed to fix it.

On the Girls Chase forums, a user posted about his struggles with day game, a common issue for newbies. I’ll break it down into chunks so that you can learn the art of day game along with him.

So, if women are blowing you off before you even have a chance to get anywhere, thank Merchant's-Kin for bringing up the topic!

Here's the first part of Merchant's-Kin's post:

“Been struggling quite a bit with street game, because I can’t even stop a girl consistently while keeping without my heart racing, etc. (that’s where I’m at). There isn’t even an opportunity to test openers because I can’t stop girls consistently. They just blow me off.”

This is the beginning stage of learning cold approach: overcoming approach anxiety. It’s also the point where most men quit, right at the starting line.

Men of today have lost their motivation to build, fight, work, or get women. What's behind their lethargy, and how can you overcome this in yourself?

We live in a distinctly unmotivated time.

During the settling of the American continent, European settlers burst through with boundless energy. They founded towns, warred with the natives, pushed into hostile and unfamiliar lands, and carved paths through a frontier in search of unknown fortunes.

In the American West, frontier towns brimmed with ambitious men who eschewed the comforts of civilized life, like fine clothes, fine food, or women -- some towns at some points had male-female ratios as stark as 754-to-1. Before the Gold Rush of 1849, California's population was 90% male.

Yet, this bothered the men little, for they were there to find wealth, greatness, or just to build or find something new.

Men of this age didn't need help with women. They found wives readily enough (when they returned to civilization -- or imported them from back home), and those wives didn't divorce them (and only infrequently ran off with other men).

Men of this age didn't lose themselves into aimless pastimes, comfort, and luxury the way men of later ages did either. Most led hard lives, with simple food, simple living, hard work, and simple pleasures.

Yet travel 150 years into the future, and their inheritors are an opposite picture.

American men today sit about all day, riding around in automobiles, their faces glued to screens, their testosterone levels crashed (17% down just from 1987 to 2004 alone), over 50% of the American population non-working (population: 329,227,746 citizens + ~12,000,000+ legal and illegal aliens; jobs: 137,802,000; total U.S. employment: <40.4%). Compare that to the Pioneer Age, when women and children worked all day (on the farm, on the ranch, at the market, making textiles, or in various other occupations)! Many Americans are disinterested in the work available (I have seen numerous men in trades talk about offering jobs or apprenticeships to unemployed younger men and having those younger men turn them down), while many have little thought to the future (1 in 6 older people plan to spend all their children's inheritance).

This apathy extends to all kinds of things, and is on the rise. When I got into the seduction space, most guys weren't that interested in pickup because they occasionally got laid or found girlfriends from their social circles (and that was enough for them).

Today, even fewer men are interested in seduction, yet for different reasons. Rather than it being because they got laid in other ways, a lot of men aren't having sex at all, and are completely apathetic about doing anything to change that situation.

The percentage of men not having sex is shooting skyward.

There's less interest in pickup.

Interest in getting women is down to about 40% of what it was when I founded Girls Chase.

There's less interest in nightlife.

It's been worsening yearly. As of a few years ago, each month only 334 bars opened while 609 bars closed (source).

Men are dating in their social circles much less, and every man is on Tinder, where most women aren't.

Tinder: the ultimate sausage fest. Worse than any nightclub! Source: Statista

More and more men aren't working, more and more men aren't getting laid, more and more men aren't doing anything other than to sit around with their time, watching their jobs disappear, their women walk by, and their histories vanish, and instead of doing anything to change any of that, more and more men just hang around, observe, and complain.

What's happened to men in the 21st Century, and how did they become so dull?

It’s hard to find the motivation to go out and get rejected, but that’s what it takes to be successful in dating. These tools will give you a more positive outlook.

It’s so obvious, it’s cliché, but to find success with women, to develop skill with cold-approach pickup, you need to interact with a lot of women.

I don’t mean going to happy hour once a week, opening once and going home. To even land a coffee date with an above-average-looking girl means interacting with dozens of them. Perhaps up to a hundred, if you really suck at it.

For a newbie, this can be like someone who’s never done a chin-up being told you have to free-climb Mount Everest in nothing but a Batman cape.

For the intermediate guy, it may feel like you’ve been climbing this mountain forever. Whenever the top feels close, you gaze up to an eternal stretch of snow and rock. You’ve been trying forever. When will you finally arrive?

Do you seek approval? Is your behavior tentative or uncertain… or is it clear to women that you are confident – that you just KNOW what you are and what your value is?

Sometime back, I wrote an article on giving girls oral sex (i.e., cunnilingus).

In it, I gave a tip of maintaining eye contact through the session if you want to ratchet up the intensity.

A reader writing in the comment section commented that his girl "hates it, finds it incredibly feminine." He adds that women in pornography "stare up at the guy while giving him a blow job, seeking approval." Then says that his woman doesn't want that.

It took me a moment to wrap my head around where this guy was coming from at first. Yet, then, I realized where that was.

With almost anything you can do, there are different ways of framing a thing, both internally (in your head) and externally (the way you present it).

In this case, here was me framing a thing one way. Then this reader came along and framed it another way.

This difference in framing gets picked up on by the woman herself.

Women love men who step boldly forward in the face of uncertainty. An ‘active’ man can dig deeper into her truth, getting her to reveal more than she does to most men.

Back when I was struggling with women, I had a moment of crisis. I asked myself, “What am I even doing?” I broke down, ready to quit.

I was getting ready to head out one night, and the weight of everything hit me all at once. I had to grit my teeth and face the fact that what I was trying to accomplish might not be possible. I was an ordinary guy, and even ordinary guys have an absolute limit that my goals seemed to be beyond. Thoughts repeated in my head that it was impossible, unrealistic, and hurting me for no reason.

I was shaken, but I finished getting ready, strapped on my belt, tossed on my jacket, stepped into the wind outside, and traveled to the nightlife. I stoically persisted, with no reasoning, no decision, no plan, just one thing (or is it two?): a habit and a deep resolve forged from facing those struggles.