Attraction is a game of blind man’s poker.
Let’s put 50 men and 50 women in a sealed hotel conference room. What happens next?
Team formation will begin.
But how do these groups form? What is the basis for men’s team, women’s team, mixed team and home alone?
The groups we form or join are based on our perceived social value by others. It’s like having a mystery number on your forehead. The goal is to pair up with the highest ranked (or most attractive) person you can.
Immediately, any Nine and Ten are surrounded by a large crowd trying to talk to them.
So how do you know your number?
If people are rushing you, you know your card number must be too high. If strangers run away when you approach them or turn their attention away from you – well, you’re on the low end of the social hierarchy.
Here’s how we learn about our value.
If we reject or ignore, we lower our beliefs about our self-worth, and thus our expectations, of what we deserve friend-wise and love-wise.
The more rejection we experience, the more we lower expectations and look for less valuable people.
If people accept us and always ask for our opinion, we raise our beliefs about our self-worth, and thus our expectations.
If every single boy wants to be your friend and every single girl wants to marry you, you probably won’t settle for a woman ten years younger.
So the indication of your attractiveness is how needy people act around you.
Real life is much more complicated, but the point is, if someone is desperate to be with you, they value you more than themselves. It’s just their opinion and they could be completely wrong.
If someone avoids you, they believe they can do better than you. Again, they may be wrong, but regardless, we interpret their behavior toward us as a response to our own social standing (value) and attractiveness.
The only way to guess the number stuck on your forehead is by the feedback you get.
Every single person is affected by the reactions of others, which is why everyone preaches about self-confidence and why being needy is bad. Being needy sends the following social pitch: “You’re so much better than me, so please, for the love of God, accept me.”
This is why celebrities accept nude photos and stalkers. Because people who do such things believe that a celebrity, a common man with social status is worth more than them, even if they don’t contribute anything to society.
We seek things that we perceive to be of high value and lose attraction to things that we perceive to be of low value. This is why need is abhorrent and why we recognize it as a bad signal. It’s like the fear of snakes—a primal instinct for our social and mating advantage, even if we don’t fully understand why.
In surveys of hundreds of thousands of women across all cultures, ethnicities, age groups and socioeconomic statuses, there is one universal quality in men that all women find desirable. 1
this felt social status
The extent of a woman’s social status or influence varies from culture to culture, age group to age, and individual to individual. The bottom line is, women want men who are more More successful, popular and powerful than them.
What most research indicates, and what men believe builds social status, is one’s wealth and possessions. 2 From a practical scientific point of view, this makes sense. It is easy to measure and verifies it Belief transmission game and stereotypes of what women are attracted to.
But if it were easy for women to want, women would ask men for their net worth statements, tax returns, and a list of all their car payments. However, I did not have such a conversation. Instead women ask me about my passions, childhood fears of monsters under my bed and what makes me tick.
Not to mention there are plenty of rich men who can’t land a date to save their lives. Many of them are willing to pay $30,000 dollars for a dating coach 3 Spend a weekend with them to help them learn the “skill” of attraction.
The psychology of status and wealth is a bit of a puzzle when it comes to being an indicator of attractiveness.
Whether you’re a man, a woman, or a dog, your genetic code motivates you to solve two problems: live long enough to reproduce and pass your genes into the future through reproduction. This is why castrated dogs still try to mate.
Children of living parents tend to be living and procreative themselves. What our parents, grandparents or our ancient ancestors did solved these two problems. The genetic chain goes link-to-link until the moment it shows up in your world.
Evolutionary science says that whenever something solves an animal’s survival and reproduction problem, that trait is passed on to the next generation. It was not a conscious decision where our ancestors sat down and made a deliberate decision. Hence why we have cancer and other horrible things.
For example, let’s say you were a deer in the past. You are a deer, and you are the first lucky one to grow antlers. Maybe some of your buck friends made fun of you for being different. But you and I both know that bucks fight fiercely for women. Other bucks have strange mutations like two heads or one leg, but they don’t help survival or reproduction, so they lose the battle and slowly disappear from the gene pool. Being Mr. Buck Antler is like fighting with a knife. You win! And so will your future sons.
It may not have been your choice or your conscious decision to grow horns, but because you had an advantage, you passed your genes on to other bucks. So do your sons. Millions of years later, you are daddy’s buck for all modern times in the world.
This basic example is fairly easy to understand. The mind-blowing fact is that a portion of our thoughts, desires, emotions, and behaviors are also passed down to us through the genetic line.
Our modern-day mating psychology is no different from that of cave-dwellers. This is why wealth and status are a problem from an evolutionary perspective. Men in their cave-man days didn’t have gold watches, Porsches or swimming pools to show off their fertility. In their prime, all they had was a little more meat or food than the next guy. That’s not much to go off of for women.
Not to mention, anthropological studies show that for the majority of human history, men and women were relatively equal in wealth and social status. Material wealth is a rather modern intervention. Therefore, we must hypothesize that females judged males’ condition and reproductive fitness differently.
If material possessions made men more attractive, any guy would be flashing his James Bond Rolex at the bar – but trust me, he’s not. Rather, women judge social status and attractiveness by our behavior, because behavior is what our caveman ancestors had to do. This is the basis by which we judge social status today.
Research backs this up. 4 Studies show that women are equally attracted to young men who they trust possible They become extremely successful as already successful men. It explains why a starving artist has no problem finding a girlfriend to support him or why a Superbowl athlete can date supermodels even though he’s been bankrupt four times.
As a man, you don’t actually have to be rich and famous. You just need to show a lot of potential to become rich and famous.
Social status and attractiveness are thus determined by how you behave around other people, how other people behave around you, and how you treat yourself. It’s the number superglued to your forehead.
But social status is not some consistent number. It always changes with two things – the environment and the people in that environment.
For example, wearing a custom tailored suit and flashing your Rolex watch might get a lot of eye rolls in a high-end lounge in New York City, but in a small, impoverished village in Brazil, that’s all you need. In a developing third world country the lure of wealth sends a statement about your status, while in the US it comes across as insecurity to most women.
The other problem with the classical view of status and wealth is the perception that social status is not dependent on a woman’s value and belief system. Each woman has her own unique value and belief system that filters her view of attractiveness. The point is that social status is not fixed. It is contextually relative.
Social status is about perceptions, not reality, and perceptions in the social world are imperfect. Therefore, social status is determined by your behavior, not your wealth.
Yes, genetics and resources matter, but more important than anything else in attractiveness is our behavior. Therefore, to understand what makes each of us attractive, we must first look at what drives our behavior—our beliefs about ourselves (read: our identity)
