Reasons women don’t approach.

Whenever I bring up the topic of meeting members of the opposite sex, the male commenters here inevitably strike up the “OMG WOMEN MAKE IT SO HARD I WON’T APPROACH ANY WOMAN WHO DOESN’T HAVE A GREEN LIGHT WITH MY NAME ON IT PASTED TO HER FOREHEAD” song and dance.  Their position is understandable, but women are instinctively programmed to put the man through the paces in order to get to her.  This is because (a) women know that men want the most bang for the least buck, and (b) women want to be worth more than a buck.  Women who make themselves extremely available to men have very little way of telling if the man liked them specifically, or if the man was merely taking advantage of convenience.  Making a man work for it is a way of differentiating the warm body seekers from the specifically me seekers.

This is the general reason that women don’t approach men.  Most of the other reasons are situational and personality-centric, as I discuss below:

• She’s shy. Some women are terrified of talking to anyone they don’t know.  Clearly this leads to glowing results when women who are petrified of strangers and men who are petrified of women mix.
• She’s intimidated. This is a little different from shyness.  Shyness is more of an inner timidity, whereas intimidation is externally based.  A woman who is not usually shy may become intimidated depending on the situation, such as:
  • She feels he’s out of her league. Contrary to what the majority of the manosphere thinks – that all women are entitled landbeasts who wear XXL “head bitch in charge” T-shirts over their industrial strength bras and blast men for not being able to “handle them” – many women will balk at initiating interaction with a man they feel is markedly superior to them in looks, popularity, intelligence, socioeconomic status, etc.  A woman will think to herself, “A man like that could have any woman he wants, so why me?” and as a result, either outright ignore the man or only give furtive little glances when she hopes he’s not looking.  (Exception:  women who attend fan conventions and pay for pictures with their objects of affection.  The exchange of money and experience of waiting in a line make it okay to approach, giggle, praise, and sometimes sneak a grope.)
  • He’s surrounded by bros. Much like men grouse that women can never be found alone, women also find men surrounded by a posse intimidating.  Little Susie Sweetheart, pounding heart in her dry throat, will be much less likely to approach Hal Hotness if Hal is surrounded by five bros who are all slapping each other on the back while grunting about the manliness of Tom Brady’s hair football.  Same goes for Susie approaching Tom Tron and his five engineering buddies who are discussing their latest Halo 3 strategies.  Too many bros, especially if one of the bros is a class clown type who is loud and attracts a lot of high-energy attraction, says to a woman that the man doesn’t want to be bothered.
  • He’s surrounded by attractive women. While some women will be motivated by preselection competition, most women are not self-confident enough to cold approach a man who is constantly surrounded by other women, especially if the other women are good-looking, or at least popular (the good-looking vs. popular Venn diagram doesn’t always have the greatest overlap), or THINNER.  Susie won’t want to deal with the competitive shunning by the women, and she will also ask herself why Cory Cubicle would talk to her when he’s already got his hands full with some nice stuff.
  • He has never shown any previous signs of acknowledging her existence. A hurried “thanks for holding the door” at the elevator at work, followed by pushing the button and zero conversation, doesn’t count.  Non-communicative inertia just begets more non-communicative inertia.  There’s little more humiliating than attempting conversation with someone six months after seeing the person every day, and having that person look at you like they’ve never seen you before.
• She’s a creature of habit. Some women (and men, too, for that matter) settle into a rut of existence and find it immensely difficult to break out of the daily grind.  I don’t know if it’s that they find it too energetically taxing to vary their routines, or what, but there are just some people who habitually refuse to stray from the path every once in a while, even if it’s at the cost of meeting new people.  This means that if you’re not currently on the schedule, you might never be.
• She’s not interested. Yes, sometimes this is the reason women don’t initiate contact.  It usually means that the man hasn’t done anything to make himself stand out as someone to consider.  He hasn’t demonstrated any personality, any leadership or expertise, any sense of humor, any smidgen of fashion sense, any physical fitness, any special talents.  If you are the definition of drab, you’re stacking the deck against yourself.

I’d say that intimidation and interest are the most easily solvable issues.  So if you’re a man and you’re frustrated that women aren’t cold approaching you, understand that just as, if not more, difficult for women to do than men, and then check and see if you’re doing things that make it even harder.

EverydayDHV: keep a clean and organized home.

I know the subject line sounds a little like Adult Life Skills 101, but nothing can kill (or at least severely maim) interest like a messy, dirty house.  Whether you rent a bedroom in a house, live in an apartment or condo, or inhabit a mansion, the physical state of your abode is an irrefutable outward reflection of your inner character.  Despite our living in a world where we are constantly told not to judge people by, well, anything about them that seems obvious to the naked eye, nobody actually does this.  Everyone judges everyone else by their appearance and the appearance of anything they’re associated with.  And if someone walks into your disaster of a house, it’s likely that they will take a moment to recoil, at least on the inside if they’re polite.

The home is a reflection of the mind.  It is the physical manifestation of your inner being.  Dirty, messy houses belong to people who don’t care.  They belong to people who don’t know how to allocate their time, or aren’t capable of allocating their time, or are too lazy to allocate their time to basic upkeep, none of which are positive traits.  While there are always some exceptions to the rule (cue this blog’s chorus of INLTs), it’s unusual to find a person who is organized and in control in their daily life who also lives in a sty.

Because people enjoy being in clean, organized spaces, one of the easiest ways to DHV is to keep a clean, organized home.  I’m sure everyone has had the pleasure of walking in to a clean, organized home.  It is a refreshment to the senses and immediately calming (unless it’s one of those places that has so much expensive, untouchable stuff that it’s nerve-wracking to be around it for fear of ruining something).  If you’re looking for someone to spend the rest of your life with, having a clean, organized house is a very fast way of assuring someone that you’re in control, organized, not lazy, and you pay attention to details.

Just a note:  neat is not synonymous with clean.  You can have a very neat bookshelf that has never been dusted.  You can have a very organized bathroom with a toilet that only gets scrubbed once every six months.  You can have a nicely decorated bedroom whose carpet never is vacuumed.  Just because you don’t leave a trail of your belongings everywhere doesn’t mean you’re clean.  A lot of people can be neat, but it’s rarer to find cleanliness with neatness.  If you can do both, your stock will skyrocket.

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As a side note, I am going out of town for Thanksgiving.  This will most likely be my last blog post until next week.  May everyone have a thanks-filled weekend.

 

Movie: Megamind.

I saw Megamind tonight and enjoyed it a lot.  I even really enjoyed the 3D, and I have not been a 3D supporter at all.  (Converted movies look like absolute junk – I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D a few years ago; it looked awful.  Up wasn’t impressive enough in 3D for me to want to fork over the extra cash.  I skipped Toy Story 3 in 3D for this reason, but now I am questioning that decision, especially since the preview for Disney’s upcoming Tangled looked superb in 3D.)

For game aficionados, Megamind is notable for its portrayal of a super omega named Hal, voiced by Jonah Hill.  I find Jonah Hill pretty revolting to look at these days (due to my fat bigotry), but his voice was very well-suited to the character and he turned in a great voice performance.  If you’re not sure how to act around women, just make sure you don’t find yourself emulating Hal in any way.  He was that oh-so-adorable mix of hapless and creepy.  Eesh.

Spoilers may abound in the comments.

Male IOIs.

Happy Election Day, Americans.  (At least I hope it ends happily for me, which, living where I live, is an iffy proposition. We few, we happy few…. But I soldier on, pen in hand, mighty as the sword, or at least a plastic butter knife…)

I have some thoughts percolating about “fat bigotry” in light of the recent Marie Claire ~scandal~, but until I get them organized, I thought a post about male IOIs might be a good pasttime.  I suppose this will end up being a discussion appealing mainly to the ladies here, since persons of one sex find their sex’s IOIs extremely obvious.  For example, I can always tell when a woman is trying to attract a man’s attention, but quite often the man may as well be wearing a bag over his head.  (Then the man goes home and complains that no women like him.)

These are the IOIs I usually recognize from men:

• Staring
• Prolonged eye contact
• Attempts to isolate
• Attempts to monopolize time/attention
• Standing too close
• Overly earnest compliments about my appearance
• Overly earnest questions about myself
• Upper arm touching
• Seeking me out

Feel free to add/subtract/correct me if I’m wrong.  I think a lot of confusion arises for a woman when she feels she is receiving IOIs but they don’t translate into dates.  Then she is stuck with the dilemma of whether the man is just being friendly* – does he treat all women this way? – or whether there is something wrong with her that he won’t make a move.  For a woman, context is key, so if she doesn’t feel she is getting a clear read on the situation, she will spend too much a lot of time, usually with girlfriends, analyzing each situation for clues to the man’s mental state.  This is why He’s Just Not That Into You was such a watershed moment for a lot of women.  It gave women the freedom not to waste time and emotional energy analyzing men’s motives.  It’s a great relief to have a more or less bright line test for men’s interest:  if he asks for a date, he’s interested; if he doesn’t ask, he’s not interested (or at least not sufficiently interested).  Not that asking for a date means that he thinks he is developing feelings – he could just be trying to get sex – but it’s a much more concrete move, at least.

* How to know a man is not attracted to you at all and considers you well beneath his standards of attractiveness for even association:  he will act like you do not exist.  This means never making eye contact, never saying hello, never making small talk.  This is why reasonably attractive men who are also genuinely kind and friendly have so many women nursing crushes on them.  Even the smallest amount of attention is manna from heaven.

Man as a mirror.

I wasn’t going to write about Karen Owen and her, uh, list, figuring I’d have nothing new to add to the conversation, but I had an experience over the weekend that changed my mind.

I had arrived at Borders to meet some female friends for our weekly Bible study.  While two friends went and got coffee, I held down the table.  Having just awakened from an out-cold nap just about 30 minutes prior, I was still feeling a little groggy and trying to snap out of it.  I tried to telepathically will my friends to hurry back to the table so that I could order my own overpriced cup of coffee.  Tragically, my telepathy failed.

A large, hairy, possibly somewhat Armenian-looking guy with cornrows dressed in the drab guy uniform of knee-length shorts and an enormous T-shirt sat in the armchair to my right with his beat-up MacBook and headphones.  I didn’t really notice him until he got up and went to unplug his power cord near my table.  As he passed behind me, I heard him talking out loud.  I think he was trying to be lighthearted and jovial and attract my attention that way, but I was still groggy and didn’t care what a large, hairy, badly dressed man wanted to say to me if he wasn’t going to engage me directly.

I guess he also figured out that his indirect approach wasn’t working, so when he sat back down, he spoke to me directly, using my shoes as an opener.  He asked if they were Burberry.  I said no, they were $14 from Payless.  He said they looked like Burberry because of the plaid pattern.  I said that the plaid was the reason I liked the shoes.  He then asked if I was there for a Bible study.  (He must have seen my Bible with its gilded page edges.)  I answered affirmatively, and he went on to ramble about how he think it’s good to read the Bible, even if you don’t believe, because there’s good stuff in there with good morals and Jesus had a lot of good things to say, etc. etc.  I nodded a couple of times and agreed with him but didn’t encourage the conversation to continue, all the while trying to decide if this guy was legit or weird and wondering if I was being a bad Christian for not asking him where he thought he would spend eternity if he died tonight or doing other Christian Outreach Moves especially when he clearly had a positive attitude about Christianity and my goodness I REALLY needed some designer coffee or food so I would be more pleasant and awake.  Finally he concluded and decided to leave, and we bid adieu.

Later on that night, I thought about what had happened and concluded that I would have snapped to far greater attention had the guy who approached me better-looking, better-dressed, more articulate, or wittier.  I would have acted more interested and possibly even thrown out some charm if he had been more in line with the type of man I find attractive.

Then I thought about Karen Owen and how her List only featured athletes and how most people believe she was only discriminating in reporting her adventures, not in having such adventures in general.

I’ve read before that men consider the looks of their wives/girlfriends to be a reflection of their own quality as men; that men do think of women as arm candy, and the better-looking the woman, the higher-status he must be.  In a way, a woman is a mirror back to the man of the type of man he is.  I think the inverse is true for women as well, that the status of the man or men they’re associated with is a mirror validating their beauty and worth as women, the logic being that high-status men choose high-status women, therefore if a high-status man chooses me, I must be a high-status (read: beautiful, sexy, alluring) woman.  For someone like Karen Owen, an attractive but not pretty girl, the drive to secure a mirror that reflected what she wanted to see was pretty all-consuming.  That she apparently picked and chose who made it onto the List supports this theory, since a girl who gets the best must be one of the best herself.  A lesser man’s inclusion on the List would only have lowered her value in her own eyes, and in the eyes of her friends.  If men typically go only for what they think they can get, then it’s pretty depressing if the only men who are coming after you are unimpressive, because that means you must be unimpressive, too.

So to bring it back around to my experience with Big Borders Guy, on the one hand I tried to feel flattered that this guy was doing a daygame cold approach – and I am not approached very often, much less cold, so I should have felt extra flattered – but on the other hand, he was not the reflection of myself that I wanted to see at all, and I think it would take a toll on my ego if BBG-types were the only ones who approached me.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Or, perhaps more accurately, the spirit is reluctant, and the flesh is weak.

(Also, let this be encouragement to men to dress better.  If you look like you just rolled out of your parents’ basement and you try to approach women with minimal game, it’s probably not going to go in your favor.)

Game on film: “The Body Politic” edition.

Even though most Hollywood players consider themselves socially progressive, meaning they support, inter alia, same-sex marriage, women’s rights, the Prius, your taxes paying for everyone else’s health care, the idea of minorities, and Christian/Christianity-bashing, they can often be downright Paleolithic when it comes to depicting romance onscreen.  It’s astounding to me how often biological truth trickles through the ideology.  Yes, there are still people trying and failing to make The Michael Cera into a romantic trope, but for the most part, when the writers of a film or television show are trying to put two characters together, they’re going to incorporate elements of Game, especially if the protagonist is a woman.  Despite all of the social inculcating from kindergarten on that “boys and girls are equal,” NO ONE, not even Progressive Hollywood, truly believes that a woman is capable of falling in love with a submissive man.  This is why you will see a lot of sitcoms with doofus, no-Game husbands and smart wives – but you won’t ever see a show about how a smart woman falls in love with a doofus, no-Game man.  (If one manages to make it to the air, it will not last long.)  If the marriage is already established, it is taken for granted that at some point in the past, the man had enough Game to get the woman to marry him, and it is equally taken for granted that he then deteriorated into a hapless beta schlub.

But when a show is trying to get two characters together, you can be sure that elements of Game will weave their way into the storyline.  If the show has a “will they/won’t they” premise, the writers will give an alpha male character some super beta moments to prevent it from being utterly ridiculous that the female character hasn’t jumped him yet.  (See:  Bones.)  If the male character is a beta underdog that we’re supposed to root for, he will be given occasional alpha moments to prick the female into alertness, then re-beta-ize him to make the female character forget her attraction.  (See:  Ross and Rachel on Friends.)  Conversely, an alpha female will almost always show vulnerability to the male character before they get together.  She will be TOUGH TOUGH TOUGH – and then share a feeling and/or cry in front of the male.  A beta female, on the other hand, will become more sexy and beautiful and the male character will suddenly see her in a new light.  (This is usually accomplished by sending the characters to a dance, wedding, or other fancy outing.)

So what kind of Game tricks does Hollywood pull out when they need a male character to alpha up?  Well, the easiest, most obvious way is through looks:  the heroine usually ends up with the best-looking guy.  Granted, in Hollywood productions, everyone is attractive, even the unattractive people.  Someone who is supposed to be average-looking in a TV show is still better-looking than an average-looking regular person.  So looks aren’t usually so much a factor, unless the show is pitting a Hollywood average guy against a Hollywood handsome guy.

But even Hollywood average guys can get the girl with Game, and no greater tool can a Hollywood average guy wield than the Neg.  Shorter than the rival?  Doesn’t matter.  Not as built?  Doesn’t matter.  Not as handsome?  Doesn’t matter.  A Hollywood average guy with masterful negging powers is pretty much guaranteed to get the girl at some point down the road, which brings me to my example.

The Body Politic was a twentysomething political drama pilot made for The CW for the 2009/10 television season – a sort of CW-ized West Wing for the TXT-generation.  Featuring a very attractive cast of young actors (The CW’s specialty), it got positive reviews from just about every outlet that sampled it.  Alas, it did not go to series, but a series of clips from the pilot did make it onto YouTube.  I then tracked down the leaked presentation (the 30-minute version of the pilot; if the show had been picked up, the remaining scenes would have been produced).

In addition to establishing who all the characters were, the show spent quite a bit of time setting up a love triangle between Minka Kelly’s newbie Senatorial intern Frankie, Jason Dohring’s ambitious reporter Charlie, and Jay Hernandez’s war hero/staffer Ben.  I usually find love triangles hit or miss because of the tendency to make them very lopsided, with the eventual victor so obviously a superior choice that the whole thing is a waste of time.  This set-up, however, seemed kind of interesting because of the guys.  Dohring and Hernandez provide a very good example of Hollywood average guy vs. Hollywood handsome guy.  Hernandez, while a bit shorter than Dohring, has a stronger jawline, squarer face, and more athletic build.  Introduced in military dress, he’s clearly supposed to be the alpha.  Dohring, on the other hand, doesn’t look athletic at all, lacks a lantern jaw, and isn’t handsome.  Physically beta.  Yet I though it was pretty obvious that Frankie would eventually end up with Charlie (though not without a detour with Ben first), and all because Charlie drops some perfectly delivered negs on her in the first clip we see.  And Frankie shit tests Charlie five times in a row.  And is giving him the eyes.  Check it out for yourself.  Also worth noting is the AMOG battle between Charlie and Ben.

It would have been interesting to see how the show handled the progression of this love triangle.  My guess is that Frankie would have followed her hypergamous impulses and fallen into Ben’s alpha arms, only to feel she had a stronger emotional connection to Charlie.  But that’s all in the ether now, isn’t it?

Mike, Molly, and missed signals of attraction.

Last night the new Chuck Lorre sitcom Mike and Molly premiered.  In the episode, Mike, a cop, and Molly, a fourth grade teacher, individually attend an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.  Molly is charmed by Mike’s sense of humor and introduces herself to Mike after the meeting ends.  What happens next is right out of the Matt Savage playbook of missing signals (I kid with love, Matt):

Molly tells Mike that she’s a fourth grade teacher and would love to have a police officer come and speak to her class, HINT HINT HINT.

Mike responds that she should contact the police department and they’ll send someone over.  (Level of obliviousness:  10.)

Molly’s face immediately falls at his not taking the bait.  (Her inner monologue:  OH NO HE DOESN’T LIKE ME I WANT THE EARTH TO SWALLOW ME WHAT DO I SAY NOW????)

Fortunately for Molly (and for the premise of the sitcom), Mike’s cop friend suggests that Molly give Mike her number and Mike can talk to her class himself.

Molly happily gives Mike her number and tells him to call her.  Mike says he will.  Molly lingers, hoping that Mike will ask her out.  He doesn’t.

Molly leaves with her sister, and Mike’s friend chastises him for not making a move.  Mike defends himself, saying he didn’t want to look desperate.

Scene ends on a button.

Watch it here:

Sometimes art really does imitate life!

No text conversation should last more than 10 messages.

Roissy – the real Roissy, not one of the A-plus-for-effort/F-minus-for-execution ghostwriters who have been plaguing the site recently – did another post on text game, where he reprints text conversations with women that his readers have submitted and then analyzes what the readers have done right and wrong.  The bad ones are cringe-inducing at best, and TL;DR at worst.  The latter make my eyes glaze over and make me wonder what kind of chump sits there and pounds his thumbs on a tiny keypad for an extended period of time that does not result in actually speaking to or being in the physical presence of the woman.

It’s impossible to run good text game when you forget the original point of texting:  brevity.  The more you drag out texting, the less effective it is.  If you can’t get your point across in one screen of text, maybe you should be sending an email instead or even…gasp…picking up the phone.  If you’re consistently sending a flurry of messages back and forth with a girl you like, maybe you should be talking on the phone or meeting in person.  Text game should be short, sassy, and always have an implied period at the end of every sentence (or, more likely, fragment).  You should not have an ongoing, day-long conversation via text where you have 200 new messages in your inbox at the end of the day.  That’s only romantic in indie movies about hapless betas.

Roissy is right that the longer you text a woman, the more the power balance swings in her favor.  (I can’t find the post where he said this, but I know I read it somewhere on the blog.)  The longer you sit there and type with your Thumbs of Thunder ([TM] Newsboys), the greater the chance that she is mentally putting you on the “entertainment” shelf or the “safe” shelf, both of which are LJBF territory.  Conversely, if she does actually like you, she will start to grow frustrated that you’re not making a move to ask her out.  She’ll start to feel like you’re just using her for entertainment.  (“I’m good enough to text ad nauseum, but not to be seen with in public?  What’s wrong with this loser?”)

This all brings me back to my subject line:  keep text conversations to a total of 10 texts between the two of you.  That’s plenty of time, text-wise, to say hello, dash off some flirtatious banter, and set up a date.  Beyond that, you start entering the land of diminishing returns and increasing the chance that you will sound arrogant, try-hard, needy, or lame.

Here’s an example of good texting that I had with my brother recently:

ME:  [attaching photo] Show mom- it’s my new comforter cover from ikea

BRO:  [an hour later] Are you 50 years old???? Hahaha

ME:  No it looks awesome in real life

And that was it.  Fun, funny, got the message across, didn’t wear out its welcome.  Sibling love strong.

What a woman thinks when a man doesn’t respond to her signal of attraction.

Matt Savage wrote a recent post on men missing signals of attraction from women.  He related a story where he was talking to an attractive young woman at a bar, and he mentioned that he liked the show True Blood.  The girl responded that she LOVED the show but, alas, had no television and did not like watching the show on her tiny computer screen.  The conversation continued and eventually petered out.

Savage then says that it took him three days to figure out that the girl had given him a huge opening to invite her back to his apartment or at least set up a future date.  Oops.

Men (in general, not Savage) like to complain about women not being straightforward and men having the onerous task of deciphering all of the cryptic messages that women send.  I guess in a man’s “perfect” world, courtship would go something like this:

MAN:  Yo, you’re hot.  Wanna do it?

WOMAN:  Okay.  By the way, it’s only easy for you to get me, ergo I am not a slut.

MAN:  *beats chest proudly*

The reason women tend to be roundabout in the ways they advertise interest, though, is that they want men to pursue them.  If a woman has to spell it out for the man, then she doesn’t feel like she is being pursued; she feels like she is the pursuer.  She will also feel like her feminine charms alone are not enough to incite action by the man, which is humiliating.  Worse, if you do end up going on a date, she will doubt your attraction to her, so expect more shit tests.  In addition, by being very straightforward, she will risk being labeled desperate and try-hard by other women and possibly other men, too.  (Everyone knows a boy-crazy girl who throws herself at every available man she meets.  No woman respects a desperate peer.)

As a result, the only option a woman has is to drop hints and hope the man responds.  If a woman suggests that you should do something together or hang out sometime, you’ve hit the motherlode.  She will not suggest hanging out to a man she has no interest in.  If she says something sounds like fun, that’s also an invitation to invite her to join in.  If she asks when the next time you’re doing X activity is, she wants you to invite her to go along.  If she asks if you need help with something, that’s also an opportunity.  If she eagerly expresses interest in something you’ve just expressed interest in (as in Savage’s anecdote above), you can make a move with confidence.

Given all of the above, when a man doesn’t act on a woman’s hints, the woman usually concludes that the man is not interested in her and has a list of 99 things he’d rather be doing.  Men complain that women want them to shoulder all of the risk, but for a woman, showing interest and dropping hints IS a risk.  Take the following scenario:

MAN:  Some friends and I are helping our buddy move this weekend.

WOMAN WHO IS INTERESTED:  Really?  That sounds like fun.  What day and time?  Do you need help?

Here is what a man with a clue would say:

MAN WITH A CLUE:  Really, you want to help?  That would be awesome.  Let me have your number so I can text you the address and time.

WOMAN WHO IS INTERESTED:  *SWOON*

HER INTERNAL DIALOGUE:  EEEE THIS GUY IS AMAZING I MUST TELL MY GIRLFRIENDS RIGHT AWAY

Here is what a man without a clue would say:

CLUELESS WONDER:  Nah, we got it.  Basically we’re just gonna be throwing some stuff in a truck and then go shoot some hoops.

CRESTFALLEN WOMAN WHO IS HATING HERSELF FOR BEING INTERESTED:  …oh.

HER INTERNAL DIALOGUE:  THIS LOSER WOULD RATHER HANG OUT WITH SWEATY, SMELLY GUYS THAN ME.  I MUST BE UGLY.  HE HAS BEEN TALKING TO ME OUT OF PITY.

Or, if she’s read He’s Just Not That Into You a bunch of times:

IRRITATED WOMAN’S INTERNAL DIALOGUE:  He doesn’t know fabulous when he sees it!  Has he looked into the mirror lately?  YOU ARE NOT ALL THAT, NIMROD.  You should be more grateful.

The signs are there if you look for them.  Just understand that the less you read them, the more frustrated a woman is going to become with you.

Spectacular church alpha DLV.

This just in:  even a natural alpha is not immune to crippling DLV.

On Sunday two of my friends and I attended our church’s monthly after-service luncheon.  I think the luncheons are intended to be “a time of fellowship,” which generally means that people who already know each other table up together and share gossip what’s going on in their lives.  In other words, if you’re single, you’ve got about a 20% change of meeting the person who will one day become your spouse.

On this particular occasion, however, my friends and I had the good fortune of coming into contact with Wilhelmina, one of the church’s dowagers, who had zoned in on two male visitors and invited us to join them at their table so they would “feel welcome.”  Ha.  (Of course, now being schooled in Game, I took it as an indirect compliment that my looks are still viable.  Well, either that, or it was a pity invite, but my hamster will not allow that line of thought to dominate.)

The two male visitors were Vlad and Pushka, whom I immediately recognized as the two guys who had sat behind me and my friends in the service and talked the whole time in another language.  It turned out that they were Armenian Persians who were doing some church cruising.  Vlad was fat, dark-haired, and had a unibrow that would make Bert from Sesame Street envious.  He seemed nice but was not super-talkative, probably because his English was so-so.  Pushka, on the other hand, was the most alpha single guy I’d come across at a church in a long time.  He had a shock of unruly thick, red hair and the physique of a guy who enjoys weights, and he was very sociable.  Even better, he had an interesting backstory that added to the contrast of his being able to claim Iranian citizenship while sporting very red hair.  Before moving to the U.S., he spent ten years living in Spain – which allowed him to speak Spanish with my Spanish-speaking friends.  Nice move!

I was starting to think that this guy had incredible, natural game – he even had the presence of mind to act surprised and insist we looked much younger when he found out how old we were – when he mentioned his Canadian “almost-fiancee.”  When my friends pressed, he said that he wanted to propose to her soon, and that he had met her online through video games.

I’m pretty sure you could hear the crash of a boulder falling from a 70-story building when he dropped that knowledge.

While online dating has grown in acceptability, in church circles that’s more or less limited to eHarmony.  Among Christians, I’ve never heard of a couple being matched through any other service.  In addition, video games are pretty much the fastest way for a man to kill any desirability he may possess.  Even though gaming is a huge industry, video gamers – at least white, male gamers – are consistently considered bottom-of-the-barrel mate material.  And guys who use online gaming to meet chicks?  That they want to marry?? Forget it.

Here’s a clip from How I Met Your Mother that nicely sums up people’s feelings about those who gets their dates this way:

Pushka said that he and Vlad would come back to our church next week.  I wish him all the best.  And I hope he doesn’t talk as much during the service.