Hello, I recently joined the real world and I learned a great deal that helped me see the truth / reality more clearly. Please feel free to critique my understanding and disagree how you see fit. Alternatively, please tell me if there are parts you agree with.

MY STORY: I'm was mid-20s male that worked at one of the most prestigious banks on Wall Street, though not a household name like Goldman Sachs. Amongst males between age 20-25, I earned in the top 0.1% of the population and had a job that only 1/1,000 applicants could get (this is a much harder place to get job than Goldman). Surprisingly, I did extremely poor on Tinder and with dating in general (I did well, but adjusted for effort, I did relatively poorly). My ex-girlfriends that I met in person in college were 7s or 8s, but through Tinder in New York, I could only get 5s and 6s after a very high degree of effort. Generally, every person I met was extremely disappointing and did not come even close to meeting my standards. I was confused as to why this was happening, so I reflected on this result a great deal.

THEORETICAL DILEMMA: At first glance, my story appears to violate TRP theory. If it were true that income and job prestige straightforwardly increased SMV for men in the same way that attractiveness increased it for women, then I would have killed it in my years in NYC, when in reality I did just "OK". If it were a "fair" 1:1 exchange of wealth for attractiveness, then you might think that every 1 unit of wealth-rarity I had should buy me 1 unit of attractiveness-rarity in my partner. If this were true then, given that I am in the 99.9th percentile of income for my age, then I should get somewhere close to the top 99.9th percentile of looks in my partner. However, this theoretical prediction was false, which implies that the wealth-attractiveness sexual marketplace exchange theory needs to be refined. The reality was that I was only getting around average looks in partners I met for my initial years on Wall Street.

TRP THEORETICAL LESSON: They say "what you see is all there is" and much of the problem is that women simply cannot know you have wealth unless they see it in a way that is easy for them to understand. For this reason, you only get a fair exchange of money to attractiveness if you make your wealth readily observable either through (i) explicit / implicit displays of wealth or (ii) transmutations of wealth into other observable physical / non-physical attractiveness signals.

MY APPLICATION OF NEW THEORY: I took four avenues to transmute my professional success into SMV:

(A) Explicit displays of wealth: I experimented with making "soft" references to success on dates to see how it influenced my likelihood of a successful outcome as well as adding or removing references to these factors on my dating profiles. Generally, even the slightest reference to these things dramatically improved my conversions on dating apps. I am someone that was raised to show a great deal of humility and never mention these things, so I didn't want to do this at first. You have to be careful so you don't seem arrogant, but I mean basically this almost always works.

(B) Implicit displays of wealth: Even better than explicit displays of wealth are implicit ones. Any display of conspicuous consumption satisfies this, but it is preferred if these displays also require some manner of skill, taste or culture. Examples are: (i) pictures of you traveling (especially abroad or to exotic locations with a clear "sense of place"), (ii) pictures of you doing expensive but skillful things (e.g., like boating) and (iii) nice clothes (especially if they display "taste"). It is not really socially acceptable to say "look how rich I am" verbally, but it is socially acceptable to say the same thing through pictures and displays of conspicuous consumption. For this reason, this method is the best over the long term. Traveling is a bourgeoise hobby and frankly just a way of bragging about your wealth. Frankly, this annoys the hell out of me, but I went traveling and took a ton of pictures because it helped create a "story" that would help women understand that I am in fact very financially successful. Just remember: if there's no pictures, it didn't happen. Ideally, you take the pictures with a DSLR (for some reason, women all naturally realize this at a young age, but a lot of very successful men do not naturally make this realization even though they could be intelligent and good at many other areas of life).

(C) Transmuting wealth into physical attractiveness: Examples are a nice gym membership (e.g., a gym that makes you actually want to go to the gym because it's a nice place) or a personal trainer. Alternatively, it could mean any of various cosmetic treatments. Other examples are buying a DSLR to take better photos (or hiring a photographer for dating profile photos).

(D) Transmuting wealth into non-physical attractiveness: Essentially, this means spending money to learn cool things that are fun, but make you seem like a more attractive guy.

SUCCESSES FROM LESSONS LEARNED: Applying these new rules dramatically improved my dating life. Maybe I was just an idiot for not seeing this as obvious. Fine, maybe that's true. But I improved from getting 100 matches in New York every 3 months to getting 250 matches on Tinder within the last 1 month, which is a very material change. Moreover, I went from getting 1 phone number per 2 weeks from Tinder, to approximately 5-6 phone numbers per week. For some reason, my conversion rate of phone numbers to actual dates that show up decreased, but overall this is a material improvement.