“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”- Socrates

 

If you want an abundant dating life full of exciting experiences with women of the highest quality, the first essential step is something you probably wouldn’t have guessed. Develop intellectual humility.

 

Seriously?

 

Seriously. We all have beliefs about ourselves, women, and society that we have developed and reinforced over the course of years of development. Many of these beliefs are flat out wrong and are preventing you from getting what you want.

 

If you’re not prepared to change your beliefs about yourself and about what women respond to, you will find yourself swimming against the current because more than anything, it’s our beliefs that prevent us from getting the success with women we want.

 

Imagine that you believe that you aren’t attractive to women because you’re not in particularly good shape. Regardless, you’ve decided to read some dating advice content because you found it interesting and you’re willing to do anything to get a girlfriend.

 

Okay, you’ve read some dating advice and feel inspired to take some action. Let’s say you approach five women a day for two weeks.

 

Your interactions for these two weeks don’t really go anywhere. For the most part you have polite conversations with girls that last a few minutes; you don’t get any girls’ numbers and you certainly don’t sleep with any attractive women.

 

This is to be expected because you’re new to this. Unfortunately, because you’re convinced that physical fitness is what attracts women, you filter your results through this belief. You tell yourself that if you were ripped you wouldn’t have gotten ‘rejected’ by all the women you approached. You tell yourself that you’re wasting your time approaching a bunch of women while out of shape, and that you need to focus on getting your fitness handled before you approach more women.

 

What you don’t know is that your brain is extremely clever and it will do anything it can to help you avoid painful experiences. Going out and approaching women is anxiety provoking and uncomfortable for you at this point, especially because you don’t have any results to show for the effort you’ve expended. Your brain doesn’t want you to go through this pain anymore.

 

So, your brain convinces you that you need to be ripped before you do more approaches. This rationalization allows you to avoid the painful experience of approaching women while still allowing you to feel like you’re making progress by going to the gym.

 

When dissected from a third person perspective, it’s easy to see that this kind of thinking is delusional, but it’s not so easy to do the same with your own delusional beliefs. We all have delusions about ourselves and about human psychology. It’s inevitable that we pick up some misguided beliefs over the years, it would be arrogant to think you have a perfectly accurate view of reality.

 

Because of our vulnerability to delusion the key to self-improvement is to be open-minded to the possibility that your beliefs are inaccurate and to be prepared to let go of any of your current beliefs.

 

Why Our Beliefs About Women Are So Inaccurate

 

In the first world (and especially in America), we live in a narcissistic culture. This is neither good nor bad, but being raised in such a culture will inevitably affect the filter through which you view reality.

 

In this narcissistic culture, we give extreme value to appearances. We associate beauty and wealth with success and happiness. You’ve been taught throughout your life that women want men with money, status, and good looks.

 

To a degree, this is true, (especially in a culture where women are taught they should want these things) money, status, and good looks are all attractive. But, it’s not all women respond to.

 

Even if you aren’t good looking or wealthy, with enough confidence you can attract plenty of beautiful women. The problem is that it can be difficult to believe this is possible when you’ve been through a lifetime of conditioning that has taught you to focus on external factors like money or looks.

 

Yes, being good looking helps grease the wheel, but self-confidence is more viscerally powerful than any individual external factor.

 

Furthermore, good looking people tend to be more self-confident than their less attractive counterparts. We assume good looking people get more results with women because of their looks, but what if it’s actually because of the self-confidence that is associated with those qualities?

 

Think about it. It’s easier to feel entitled to attractive women if you’ve been told that you’re good looking your whole life. We instinctively assume it’s the good looks that leads to success, but maybe it’s mostly the entitlement good-looking people have from years of positive reinforcement. Good looking guys expect women to like them so they aren’t afraid to ask the hot girls out or make bold moves. Maybe this is why it’s easy for them to get the results they want. (Obviously, this isn’t black and white, there are a lot of good looking guys who aren’t confident and who don’t get results with women.)

 

This isn’t to say that good looks don’t help, but that our perception of how attraction works is based on a lot of assumptions. Some may be accurate, some may be flat out wrong. But if you don’t question and challenge these assumptions, they can hold you back forever.

 

If you tie an animal in captivity to a rope for its entire life, it will become accustomed to the boundaries the rope limits it to. If, after years of captivity, you take off the rope, but leave the animal in the same physical space, the animal won’t leave the area that the rope used to constrain it to.

 

Our beliefs about women and sexual attraction work similarly to that rope. They act as an invisible prison that keeps us from taking the risks that we believe are pointless to take. We learn that we are not attractive enough for the highest quality women by some societal standard so we stay in ‘our lane’ and avoid asking those high-quality women out. For the most part, we don’t even consider that it might be our limiting beliefs that are preventing us from dating those high-quality women.

 

Don’t assume that I’m right in saying that confidence is more powerful than looks or money (and that you can build confidence through approaching women), but don’t assume that I’m wrong either.

 

If you want to improve your dating life, you must adopt an attitude of optimistic skepticism. Doubt everything you read and everything you think you already know, and with an optimistic attitude, try new things: challenge your beliefs through real life experiences.

 

For example, if you think women just don’t find you sexually attractive, you could challenge this belief by approaching many women and asking them on dates. Through risking rejection again and again, you will get an experience-based idea as to how attractive women consider you to be.

 

You will also learn what causes women to respond to you in different ways. You’ll notice how your emotional state affects interactions, you’ll notice what you do that makes women uncomfortable and what makes women respond positively. As you learn more and more from experience, you will focus more on things that are under control. You will learn to focus on getting into a positive emotional state when interacting with women, on taking risks, on offering value, on creating sexual tension, etc.

 

The beliefs you’ve picked up through years of secondhand (cultural) learning will matter less and less because you will have more visceral, experience-based knowledge to work with. You will start to understand what women respond to on a gut level instead of on a purely intellectual level. Baron de Montesquieu said, “A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.”

 

Is Pickup Weird?

 

Approaching tons of women to improve your dating life is not a societally acceptable pattern of behavior, in fact, it’s a bit contemptable.

 

There’s a certain resistance we all have to cold approach because it’s not a normal thing to do. No one wants to develop a reputation as a creepy guy who spends his days trying to pick up chicks.

 

It’s normal to feel some resistance to diving into cold approach because it’s ‘weird’. However, if you think about it logically, what’s weird about it? Nothing.

 

What’s weirder, approaching women you find attractive or swiping right on pictures and messaging people you don’t know in an attempt to bang them? Ten years ago, the ladder would have been weirder. Online dating used to have a strong taboo, but recently, it’s become so popular that it’s considered totally normal to swipe for sex. Cold approach will never be popular enough that it will lose its taboo, but that taboo is just as arbitrary as the one soceity used to have against online dating.

 

Importantly, you won’t develop a bad reputation by approaching women regularly unless you are exceedingly aggressive. I’ve approached thousands of women in a relatively small college town and did so with no social repercussions (to my surprise).

 

As it turns out, people don’t care what you do unless it’s extremely peculiar, and even then, they don’t care nearly as much as you might expect.

 

Any resistance you feel towards doing cold approach pickup is based on beliefs you have about what constitutes normal, acceptable behavior.

 

You won’t be able to get the dating life you want unless you learn to determine your beliefs through your own experiences and let go of the societal baggage that has taught you misguided lessons about what women want and what you should and shouldn’t do.

 

For more of my writing, check out: https://redpilltheory.com/