There’s this idea called “preselection” that gets tossed around, the thrust of this idea being that women want a man that other women want. Kind of like how your 3-year-old doesn’t want the rest of his noodles until you try to eat them, or to play with that cool bulldozer toy until his brother starts playing with it.

If you show up at a trendy bar with a group of friends and all of the girls in your group are touching you and laughing at all of your jokes, it doesn’t matter if you’re not hot. The rest of the women in the room notice you. This isn’t some kind of calculated mercenary decision where they assume you must be rich or famous and want to profit or anything like that. Their minds literally see you as more attractive than you actually are simply because other women like you.

It’s crowd-sourced attraction. If other women think you are attractive, the socially acceptable position for women to take is that you are attractive. In fact, it may be socially unacceptable for them to act like you are unattractive unless they can garner support from some of the other women in the room and get them to agree to some kind of “who the heck does that guy think he is” version of the facts. If a big enough group of other women can agree that you are not attractive, it then becomes acceptable for these girls to think so.

This isn’t so different from a girl posting pictures of a new guy she’s dating on social media. That’s another form of crowd-sourced attraction. If none of her friends click the heart-shaped button next to that picture, they are indicating that it is not socially acceptable for her to think he is attractive.

All of this seems very shallow and petty to men. Us men tend to think “If you like him, what does it matter what anybody else thinks?” If you’re a woman, it matters a lot.

Men and women differ fundamentally in how we communicate, and why we communicate at all.

Men communicate to exchange information and determine truth. I tell you where the good hunting spots are so that the village has more meat and so that in the future you will tell me similar information. If you or other men disagree or have additional information, that information is shared, maybe we argue, maybe we fight, maybe we set out and confirm who is right. And in the end, through these exchanges of information, we have determined the truth. Maybe the men who were wrong get shamed or punished if they were especially annoying or intentionally deceitful.

Women communicate to establish social connections and determine consensus. Jane proposes to the sewing group the idea that John is cute, or that cross-stitching is better than sewing a straight line, or that letting the poor people that the neighboring village can’t support into town to work and make money shoveling dirt is a nice thing to do.

But John called Edna fat six months ago and his father is a known racist, so even though he’s objectively cute, the group consensus is that he is ugly. Half of the women don’t know how to cross-stitch, so the consensus is that sewing in lines is better. And all of the women agree that being poor is terrible and having cheaper dirt is good for everyone, so the consensus is that letting in poor outsiders is good.

By communicating with the group, Jane has learned the consensus ideas and can align with them if she wants to be part of the group, or find another group (or a sub-group of secret dissidents within the group) that have other ideas she likes.

And by communicating with each other, the group verifies the morally correct consensus ideas, which for women is the purpose of communication.

Neither men nor women are superior or inferior in this regard. They are simply using the tool of communication for two different purposes. Men to exchange information and determine facts — essentially what is true. Women to determine consensus, compromise, and the moral pecking order — essentially who is true.

So in this regard, “preselection” doesn’t just apply to a man who appears to be desired by other women. Preselection applies to everything. If you speak an idea to a woman, it is not being graded on its factual merit or its use of language. Not directly anyway. It’s being graded on how well it aligns with the consensus and moral pecking order.

This is why saying the wrong thing that you thought was a harmless opinion about the fat girl being mean, the shoddy seams in your shirt, or the neighboring village can make you suddenly blow it when you thought you were just making small talk.

What you say is also being graded on who you are. If you are known by consensus to be a non-preselected person, your ideas are also non-preselected ideas. Something is wrong simply because it was you who said it. And if what you said aligns with their accepted ideas, you are suspected of being manipulative. But if you are known by consensus to be a preselected person, your ideas are more likely to be preselected ideas.

This is why “don’t listen to him, he called Edna fat two weeks ago” is considered a relevant counterargument when you point out that the seams in your shirt keep coming undone and the poor people from the other village keep molesting your daughter.

So, my fellow Internet Men, when you show up at a gathering where you’d like to walk away with a hook-up partner or at least a phone number and a date for next weekend, it’s always a good idea to know the best and most popular women in the room, and be seen having their approval.

But when that’s not in the stars for you, it’s good to have the social acumen to feel out the room and know which women are highest in the consensus moral pecking order and what the consensus is. That way, you don’t accidentally call the wrong woman fat (but you can score points calling the one everyone hates fat!), and you don’t accidentally say the wrong thing about sewing or poor people.

Part of the game is pretending. You project that you are a confident, successful guy with interesting things to talk about who doesn’t care whether any of these women go home with him. Even though only some of that (or maybe even none of that) is actually true. At least not yet at your current age and place in life.

And you’re polite to Edna even though she’s mean and fat because the other girls like her. And you shut up about sewing and poor people at least until you know the group’s opinion about them. Not because you care about any of that, but because you like having sex.

Because for women, the goal of conversation is not the exchange of information, but the building of social relationships. The ideal conversation is when everyone walks away feeling good.

Keep it light, keep it fun, keep her feeling good.