I've been seeing a lot of posts about how you've just got to have a perfect body, great job, approach a million women, become confident, tell jokes but don't be a funny guy, escalate, no not like that, utterly transform your life so that women will like you but don't look like to are doing anything to empress women, approach women in line at the grocer, on the bus, outside public toilets, in their home... it's really a bit much. Let's take a moment to breathe. Okay. Here's my pointers of things I've learned over the years.

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  1. ​

Women don't have a base ten ranking system for men. As far as women are concerned, you are either attractive enough to consider or you aren't. Where the line goes will vary by individual but you don't need to be an overachiever here and sometimes being too attractive can hurt your chances if she perceives you as out of her league.

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2.

You don't need a great job. Having any kind of regular income and at least some aspirations will get you over most women's minimum. Unless you want to date a gold digger, you don't need a five figure income. If you have a car that runs and a roof over your head that you are paying for then you've passed the adult test.

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3.

Ranking women by hotness isn't doing anything except hurting your confidence. If you are approaching somebody you think is a ten you're already putting her on a pedestal she didn't ask for. What is more functional is to ask two simple questions. Is she hot enough for a ONS? Is she hot enough to date? That's it. Decide what you want from her and if her looks meet your minimum criteria for that then approach her.

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4.

There is plenty of theory to learn for refining your approach but you can't refine anything if you aren't approaching anybody. The most valuable thing you can learn is to become comfortable with failing. Go start a boring conversation about the weather with somebody and don't even try to close. Just let the conversation go wherever it goes and then say goodbye. After the interaction is over, think about what worked and what didn't work. Observe that you are still alive and approaching a stranger didn't cause you to die. Take a breath and approach somebody else. Search for opportunities in each interaction to apply what you learned from the previous one. Approach anybody at any time and just practice your small talk. Don't like small talk? Too bad. Get good at it and learn how to get to the big talk.

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5.

Once you know what talking to strangers is like and have a few theories of your own for what seems to work, then you can start looking at what has worked for other people. There's also a whole lot of science on this topic. Type "attraction" into Google Scholar and you will find literally thousands of peer reviewed academic articles on stuff that has been legitimately proven to work. This isn't the nineties. This research is mainstream now and readily available for anybody who cares to look. At the bottom of this post I'll list some articles that I found in a five minute search as a starter. There are plenty more available for anybody who cares to look. If you can read even one article per day you'll at the very least start developing a bit of depth of knowledge and even if you don't apply any of it, you'll at least have something to talk about that isn't your job.

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6.

Charisma is a skill. Some people are born gifted, and like most child prodigies they peak early and never learn to push through difficulties and plateau in their teens to never achieving anything meaningful with their gift. If you want to be a high charisma individual you have to actually work on it. If you want to be confident in something, practice it until you know you can do it easily. Charisma is no different. Charisma on Command is a great resource with hundreds of videos now as well as a paid option of Charisma University. YouTube tutorials will only get you so far though. Ideally, you want to find somebody who has actually worked on improving their charisma to be a mentor for you. Somebody who has worked on this will usually be happy to help somebody they see trying to follow the same path. In person, they'll be able to identify the areas you are struggling in and provide suggestions on how you can improve.

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7.

Apply what you learn. Reflect on your application of learning and learn some more. It isn't enough to approach a lot of times, you actually need to be identifying something you can improve on every time and then working on that in subsequent interactions.

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8.

Don't only do cold approaches. They are fine for practicing the skills you are working on but if you are following step five you'll quickly be aware that proximity, regular interactions and shared social groups are going to bump your success rate dramatically. So join some social groups that have women in them. Group fitness classes are an obvious one but poetry clubs and ball room dancing classes are also great opportunities to add a bit of depth to yourself and meet women. Here's a great trick: try making friends with the women you meet in these spaces and enlisting their help in the form of inviting you to parties or setting you up on blind dates with their single friends. You don't need to be making sexual advances on every woman you encounter. Meet people, expand your social networks and create situations where you are a person who can be easily vetted by a broader social network.

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9.

Invest as much or as little of yourself into this as you like, but whatever you are doing, make sure it is meaningful and directly relates to your own life goals. There is more to life than having a girlfriend who other guys think is hot. Get clear about what you really want for yourself and then start taking steps toward that goal. There will always be an element of luck involved, but fortune favors the prepared mind.

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Theories of Friendship: The author outlines some classic attraction models and provides the data used to confirm them.

The Role of Humor in Mate Selection: Can you imagine a more humorless title? Anyway, apparently girls prefer funny guys for long term relationships.

Interpersonal Attraction: Here, have an entire text book dedicated to the topic of attraction from a scientific perspective.

Similarity and Attraction.pdf): Why do we tend to be attracted to people we find similar to ourselves? And also why it is important to self disclose information to find common ground and similarities when talking to somebody new.

Peer Influence in Female Mate Selection: AKA, why you need to win over her friends.

Mate Selection: What women and men are really looking for in a long term partner

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Edit: formatting