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For over a decade, David Tian, Ph.D. — a uniquely qualified therapist, life coach, and former university professor — has coached tens of thousands of people from over 87 countries to achieve happiness and success in their relationships, dating, psychology, and lifestyle.

Dr. Tian has been featured in international media, as well as co-hosting a radio show on national radio and a weekly dating advice column in a national newspaper in Singapore.

The show, “Man Up: Masculinity for the Intelligent Man” (https://www.davidtianphd.com/blog/), is David’s way of helping as many people as possible enjoy empowering and fulfilling lives, while contributing to the global understanding of masculinity in modern times. In the show, he takes your questions posed in the Man Up private Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/manupcommunity/) and answers based on his experience coaching tens of thousands of students around the world for over a decade.

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Dating Advice Attraction

• David Tian Ph.D. clarifies one of the biggest misconceptions, not understanding the difference between love and attraction

• David Tian Ph.D. defines love and attraction through science – evolutionary psychology, as well as neuropsychology and sexology.

• David Tian Ph.D. explains attraction, codependent neediness, and parasitic neediness.

• Knowing your life purpose is crucial. David Tian Ph.D. expounds on the reason why this is related to love and attraction.

• In this talk, David Tian Ph.D. emphasizes the importance of having social skills and social intelligence as well.

David Tian: Okay, welcome. I’m David Tian, Ph.D. as you guys all know in this room. And I have a special class on the difference between love and attraction, and it’s going to go into a lot more than that, but that’s the overall theme. And the reason why I’m going over this is because there are a lot of guys in the Man Up Facebook group, which if you haven’t joined, you should join. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years, coaching tens of thousands of people around the world in over 87 countries about this.

And I’ve discovered that one of the biggest misconceptions is not understanding the difference between love and attraction. That’s what this presentation is going to be about. I noticed in the video it might be pretty bright, this slide deck, but I will provide the downloadable link to the slides somewhere below this video. Follow along as you watch this video.

Have you ever experienced a case where a girl that you like, or maybe your girlfriend at the time, said she loves you – she might even be ‘in love’ with you, but she’s hot for some other guy. Or have you ever noticed that she’s hot for other guys when she’s ‘in love’ with you? And a lot of – not just young guys, but guys in their 40s even, and 50s and 60s actually, don’t understand how that can be. “How can it be that she could love me but not be hot for me?”

And there’s a lot of misconceptions around what ‘love’ actually is and what attraction is, and that’s what’s causing that difficulty. A lot of relationships will fail. In fact, almost all relationships in the 21st century will fail because of a fundamental misunderstanding about the difference between love and attraction. If you don’t understand this, you’re going to get married, possibly, and it will fail. Or maybe you’ll never get married because you won’t last that long in a relationship.

Unless you figure this out, you’re not going to be able to sustain it and grow that relationship. And unless you understand this, you probably won’t be able to hook up very well, if you don’t understand attraction. And for a lot of guys who are looking for a woman to love them and a woman to love, who don’t understand the difference between attraction and love, they’re either going to get cheated on or end up in a relationship of quiet desperation – where both sides are missing the passion that maybe they once felt, but they all want no matter what.

I know this because these were the same things that I, and all of mankind, has experienced; the honeymoon stage of when you first meet a girl, and it’s all butterflies in the stomach, and everything’s wonderful. And then actually having to reach that point, the 18th month mark, or three-year mark, where it actually then becomes, to a certain degree, work. You have to put some intentionality into the relationship. You have to commit to it and take extra effort to grow the relationship. It doesn’t just grow on its own for most people because most people don’t know the difference between attraction and love.

And it made a lot of sense to me back then when I learned it, “Oh, so that’s why. That’s why that relationship failed” or “That’s why the passion fizzled away” or “That’s why those feelings disappeared; it’s because of this difference.” Hopefully I’ve gotten your attention now on why it’s so important. In this presentation, I’ll be going over the science of it, always starting and ending with the science. I’m going to touch on some clinical psychology, the co-dependent, neediness, parasitic neediness, and I’ll give you the antidote. So, I’m going to be sort of talking to this camera and sort of talking to you guys.

And I’m going to throw in there a very actionable – or something that’s very relevant – practical, I should say, to most guys, which is how to know whether she likes you. Let’s just dive in with what the science tells us about attraction. We’ll be drawing here in this presentation on evolutionary psychology, as well as neuropsychology and sexology, it’s a newer research. In fact, I think we’re going to put up another presentation on the internet, a video where I go into more detail about the neuropsychology and the sexology.

So, a couple of the slides will be in common because they are more foundational slides. But in that presentation, I’m going to go into a lot more detail on the sexual aspect of it, more of the sexual attraction. But here, it’s more of the attraction and love dichotomy. And the science also gives us lots of practical implications and applications. Let’s just get into it here; passionate versus companionate.

This diagram is taken from Jonathan Haidt’s book Happiness Hypothesis, and this is a very common graph that you’ll see in evolutionary psychology, or just in psychology in general, especially around couples counseling. And here, there’s two different kinds of attraction. He uses the word attraction to denote both of them, but I think different terms could be better. Basically, it’s companionate and passionate. You see here, time is the X-axis and intensity is the Y-axis. The intensity of passion.

The more time elapses, the less passion is felt. You see the passion goes down in intensity, the passionate love. But companionate love is something that grows over time, and it takes quite a lot of time relative to passion to grow. You see that they intersect somewhere around the three to five year mark, roughly, and the companionate attraction grows over time, and passion just dips and doesn’t recover. This is the reason why a lot of love relationships fail, because they are just focusing on the feeling of love.

And of course, the feelings of romantic love, the butterflies in the stomach, can go along with commitment at the beginning. It’s easy. You have the feelings of lust and connection, and it’s easy to have that relationship at that time. Over time, however, the lust goes away necessarily, it’s just part of how we’re hard-wired. And there are all kinds of evolutionary psychology explanations for it, about adaptations and so on, but it just makes sense that at the three to five year mark, passionate lust will peter out and it would have to be replaced by a more abiding commitment, which can then trigger and recreate.

This is an inaccurate graph in the sense of – there is passion later in the relationship, but it’s something that you have to do. You have to create it. It doesn’t just happen naturally for 99% of the people. There are certain things that you need to do, to be present in the relationship, to maintain the polarity, the sexual polarity, and the feminine/masculine polarity in the relationship to cause it to grow. In fact, there’s a whole other video course in the Man Up Primer, which you can get for free by joining the private Facebook group, the Man Up private Facebook group.

In that, I go over how to make a relationship passionate over the long term, and what all the research tells us. Actually in that video, you also would’ve seen this graph. So there’s this companionate-passionate shift, and part of the reason for that is global life expectancy. There’s this red line for pretty much all of human history until the 1900s, and then it shoots way up, and now it’s going exponentially higher. But for most of human history, for most of homo sapiens history, life expectancy, which is different from span – if you include infant mortality or early childhood deaths, then it is around 20 to 25.

But if you make it past the – I think it’s the fifth year of your life, your expectancy shoots up to 30 or 35 for most of homo sapiens life. But generally speaking, we’re adapted evolutionarily to live less than 40 years. If there’s a homo sapiens whose mutant powers don’t kick in until he’s 50, that guy won’t be able to procreate very much because most people don’t make it that far. Most of our adaptations are for that 40-year span or less. You see that in this graph.

That explains why we are hardwired to want the passionate love, which is telling us “Go mate and spread your genes, and look for good genetic matches, just have lots of sex and procreate” versus what’s actually good for you in a hundred-year lifespan; how to have a pairing that will last you that 100 years. It’s not something that we ever needed as homo sapiens because we didn’t generally live that long or even close to it.

But now, we’re actually in that. Many countries have a life expectancy of over 80-85, and probably if you guys are in your 20s, by the time you get to my age, the life expectancy might be over 100, the rate we’re going. Hopefully, you see that there’s this thing called passion and there’s a way to think about it in terms of attraction. Passionate attraction. I haven’t even gotten to lust per se yet. But why is it so easy to confuse love and attraction? One is, we never really had to make that distinction as we pointed out in the evolutionary history between the lust and that connection. We generally didn’t last that much longer.

But also, for psychological reasons now, I’m looking at it as a preview on my computer. Normally, I would read it off of that, but then you would be looking at the back of my head, so I’m going to try to read these small letters here. This is a great encapsulation of that view, and it’s also taken from that same book, The Happiness Hypothesis. And it says,

“The troubadours did give us a particular myth of ‘true’ love – the idea that real love burns brightly and passionately, and then it just keeps on burning until death, and then it just keeps on burning after death as the lovers are reunited in heaven. This myths seems to have grown and diffused in modern times into a set of interrelated ideas about love and marriage. As I see it,” the author says, “the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades. If you are in true love, you should marry that person. If love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love in the first place. And if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever.”

“You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than 30, but many young people in the Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it. And it’s not just Hollywood that perpetrates the myth, Bollywood, the Indian film industry,” and pretty much the whole world, “is even more romanticized. But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible.”

Okay, what are we after here? What are we trying to do? This girl who says “I’m in love with you but that guy is hot and I just cheated on you with him.” So how do we explain this? Let’s get to the point. Attraction is an emotion, the way that word ought to be used. You’re attracted to stuff, that’s an emotion, it’s a feeling, and feelings are fickle. Feelings are not entirely within your control. You might have heard David D’Angelo 15 years ago. He wrote an e-book where he said, “Attraction is not a choice.” It’s a great way of putting the point that when we’re feeling lust towards something, when your dick gets hard or when her down there gets wet, that’s not something that she arrived at through rational calculation.

She didn’t say, “Okay, his hip-to-waist ratio is exactly this much and he’s wearing this. His body fat percentage is this therefore, okay, I’ll allow it now. Lick it, let’s get wet now.” That’s not how it happens. It’s just an immediate feeling and that’s how lust works, this is how attraction works. Now, when you’re confused that some girl falls out of lust with you, falls out of attraction for you, that’s really stupid because people’s feelings change all the time. You guys know how fickle you are and you’re on the porn sites, you keep switching channels like you’re never satisfied.

Now, we have those free ones like Pornhub and shit like that, where there’s a million channels at your disposal. And that can only have happened if guys keep flipping around, and that must be the case, right? You’re that way too. Your erection is quite fickle as well, why would hers be any different? Now you’re like, “But it’s different! It’s love!” Alright, let’s talk about love. Hopefully, attraction as a feeling and as an emotion, where an emotion is a little bit more complicated than a feeling – but basically, neither of them are entirely – especially when we first feel them – within our control.

What’s in our control is what we do as a result, what our behavior or actions are, or what decisions we make as a result. But that initial feeling, very few people can actually do anything about those. Those are usually based on preconceptions or presuppositions that were already pre-existing. That’s clear: Attraction is a feeling, it’s an emotion. What about love? “Love is a feeling, love is an emotion.” And this is the problem.

This is where people, young people especially, confuse it just because they’re both feelings. They talk about love as a pure feeling, and that’s a problem. Let’s get a little bit more sophisticated about love. Love is an English word, it’s a funny English word because it’s one of those very capacious English words. It’s very ambiguous. There are many meanings for love. You notice that when you use an important word, when you look it up in the dictionary, like the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll see many definitions, some of them are very different, mutually contradictory sometimes.

And when it comes to love, you can write entire books and volumes about the ‘meaning’ of love. There are many ways of dividing this, analyzing it, what does it mean? I have on my arm up here the word “Ai” in Chinese, and that is supposed to mean love. But the semantic range of Ai is quite different from the semantic range of the English word love. Let’s get to one way of breaking down the English word love.

And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the Greco-Roman tradition, there are definitely dominantly three words that were used that were later translated into English as love. One is eros, and this is usually a lustful love. And in that lustful love, there’s also romanticism, the romantic love. It’s like that Song of Solomon kind of love. There’s a lot of sex but it’s loving sex, it’s not like the kind of hate sex that you guys do in gay– oh, just kidding.

It’s like that loving sex, like the sex between a loving couple. And then there’s philia, and that’s the love between brothers, brotherly love, or really good friends, your best friend. And then there’s agape, and that’s a special term in the Christian tradition, and that is a self-sacrificial love; the love that God has for human beings, and He gave His son to die, and that’s agape; self-sacrificial love. And in a less grand way, that’s the love of a mother, a self-sacrificial love of a mother for her child. She sacrificed her own life to save her child. That’s the sort of agape that you will get there.

And storge is one that was less prominent, but that C.S. Lewis has written quite a bit about and reinserted back into the Christian tradition, so to speak. Not just him, but it was always there. And storge is like affection. That’s different from all of those things. Affection might be you have a really cute puppy that has been with you – or I guess a dog, it’s been with you for most of your life, and you have this affection for the dog. It’s not like the dog needs to earn your love or anything, you give it and you’re affectionate with the dog. Of course, there’s no clear division or boundaries between each of these different kinds, and that’s part of the reason why romantic love is so confusing for people.

Romantic love includes all four types of love. There are opportunities for what we consider to be the love between a couple, a man and a woman, in a husband-wife type of relationship, to experience all four kinds of love within their relationship. Obviously, they’re feeling the lust, they’re feeling the eros. But then they’re also feeling like they are friends. You’ll end up in this situation where if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing but you just stay in this relationship, and the two of you just get used to it like a routine, and you get into it, in like 10, 15, 20 years down the road, you’re best friends now.

You’re so comfortable with each other. And because you are best friends, you are used to having this person in your bed, in your house, always there. It becomes like a friendship. Women describe it like, “He’s my brother and I want the best for him, I’m just not hot for him.” This is HSDD and all of that. I’ll cover that in a different presentation, but that’s there. That’s there. Being best friends, marrying your best friend, that’s a whole thing in Hollywood, right?

And then there’s agape, to sacrifice your own life for your beloved, obviously that’s there as well. And storge is there, affection. These are all different feelings, but they’re all in there, rolled-up together in this thing called romantic love. The thing that most guys when they come to me into the group, to the Man Up group or they get coaching, they are usually in this stage where the eros is gone. And she says, “I love you.” And he’s hearing, “I eros love you.” And he’s like, “If you eros love me, then why did you cheat on me?” But what she’s saying is, “I philia love you, I storge love you,” pat you on the head, nice little brother, you know.

“But eros? I haven’t felt that in years.” And this guy, this random sailor made me feel that, fantasizing about him. That’s the problem: confusion around the term ‘love’, and equating love to attraction. Here’s something that a lot of immature people don’t understand, which is that when you’re in a couple – I’ll put it to you guys, because it’s easier for you guys to understand this. If you see a hot ass girl naked, in front of you, bending over, you will still get hard. Hopefully, if you’re healthy.

But you love your wife, you’re holding her hand! That’s kind of a weird scenario, holding your wife’s hand and then this naked girl is bending over. But anyway, you’re not going to cheat on the wife you love, but your dick is going to react if this girl keeps sticking her naked ass in your face. You get that, right? You see how that comes apart, right? Eros and just straight up lust. You could say that you’re attracted sexually to this naked woman, but there’s no feelings beyond that. You get that.

Guess what? Women are the same way. They are human beings. They have evolved just like us. Yes, there are more penalties for them if they act slutty, nine months of penalties plus a lot more social outcast kind of stuff. But they still have those feelings. In fact, there are many evolutionary psychology theories for why women engage in short-term mating strategies. I’ll cover that in a different presentation. That’s a whole other can of worms.

Once you understand that – men and women are almost all alike in that sense. There are differences, but they account for maybe 5% of what is actually happening in life. Women too can get really horny and they can separate these different types of love. What’ll happen in a relationship is, if you don’t maintain that polarity of the masculine and feminine – what’ll happen is, you become those that you spend the most time with.

If you’re going to spend the most time of your life with your wife, you live with her, sleep with her, you raise kids together, and she’ll become more like you, you’ll become more like her, and the masculine will inevitably take on the feminine just because he’s around it. Same with the feminine, she’ll become more masculine in a sense. And the natural thing is to depolarize, and that’s why the lust goes away, the eros goes away. And you end up being best friends, affectionate brotherly love, philia and storge. She might sacrifice herself for you, but most modern people are quite self-centered and selfish, so probably not, and she’s going to miss the eros.

Unfortunately, if you are asking that question, if you’re coming for coaching, you’re in that one down position. The one-up, one-down dynamic is a whole other presentation, but it’s not that difficult to understand. It’s like a seesaw in a normal relationship, and over time the person who needs it more is going to be more needy, and he’ll be less attractive generally speaking. I’m going to get into that next. The guys who come to me are the ones who are in the one-down position, generally, almost always.

But plenty of women end up in the one-down position as well. It’s not a gendered thing. And the one in the one down always thinks, “How do I get that? She loves me. How come the electricity isn’t there?” And the answer is because the eros is gone, the passion is gone. And that happens naturally, as Jonathan Haidt’s quotation points out. So, love in the long-term requires a commitment. Throughout human history, we’ve needed to work at it if it goes past 40 years of our lives. We would have to work at it. We’d have to rekindle the passion. We’d have to relove our beloved every day, every moment, and continue to be present, and continue to build our own lives, and I’ll get into that. But that requires a commitment.

And guess what? If you have a view of love as being a feeling, then you’re not going to commit. Because if it’s pure feeling, well, why would you commit? That destroys the romantic aspect of it. If you have to try, then it must not be love. And then we go back to Jonathan Haidt’s – those four beliefs, right? If it was true love, then it should be easy. Love in the long-term requires a commitment.

Let’s move back to attraction because it all begins with attraction. A lot of the guys watching this video are in the first stage where they don’t even have a relationship. Let’s talk about that. Often, half the questions are about, “I’m single, and this girl friendzoned me.” Maybe they’re really good friends for all I know. Often, they’re not. “Friendzoned” for that guy means she doesn’t even notice him. Sometimes, it’s at the stage where she’s in philia love with him. She loves him like a brother. They end up trying to figure out, “How do I create the passion? How do I get her to be attracted to me?”

Let’s turn to what the science says about attraction. We have physical attractiveness. There are basically two traits that science has shown that universally are attractive to women in men. Everything else I’ve seen is historically contingent. The first is high testosterone, the second is a certain shoulder to hip ratio on a straight line measurement. I’ll give you some examples of the studies. There’s a study that had the subjects, dudes, wear a T-shirt, T-shirts, and weren’t allowed to take them off. And I think it was 48 hours. They weren’t allowed to take them off, and they had to wear them. As soon as that time is done, they take off the shirt, put it into this zip locked bag, and then the girls are given a blind smell test. They had to smell that shirt and then rate the guy’s physical attractiveness.

Another one is where a guy wears a cotton pad taped to his armpits for whatever it is, 48 hours, and then at the end of that time, same thing, takes the cotton thing out, puts it in an airtight bag. Girls get to smell that as a blind test, and they rate the guy’s level of attractiveness. And they take the guys’ testosterone readings before and after. What they found is that women, if you ask them how attractive he is, their attractiveness ratings track very highly, the men’s level of testosterone.

In fact, if she is ovulating at that time, it’s even more accurate, her nose, to be able to tell whether a guy is attractive to them, which means actually, scientifically, it’s high testosterone. There’s an epidemic of low testosterone in the world, and hopefully you know this by now, and in the 50s, the average testosterone levels were 750 something NG over MOL, whatever the unit is. And now, the average is understood to be around 375 or 400. Basically, the medical world just basically lowered the bar by half. Let’s not say everybody is suffering from low testosterone, let’s just lower the bar.

That’s literally what’s happened. And so, men around the world have just become less attractive physically. It’s not even like with your eyes that you see a difference. It’s the nose, through the olfactory nerves, able to detect. To them, that what they’re really reacting to is the testosterone. This has been repeated quite a lot, there’s been a lot of research on this. You can go look it up. And there are other people who are experts on this, but I’m just reporting the studies. And the other is shoulder to hip, of .6 ratio. So, if you take a photo, it’s a flat line, you just take a ruler, measure it, pretty straightforward, and that’s just a marker of strength, fitness, health, and so forth.

There’s actually a lot more research for the women’s side of the waist to hip ratio. I think for women, it’s .7 that men consider to be ideal and for many hundreds of years, thinkers, intellectuals have been trying to figure out what that perfect ratio is. But that’s the one that’s been studied for men. A lot more research exists for the testosterone than for the straight line measurements. Try to raise your testosterone, that will help.

Now I have a question here – all of these things, I’m going to blurt out. Like you can see here, a long list of things that women look for. Yes, if you were fit and if you have high testosterone, that helps a lot, but that’s not the only thing. So please, don’t get into your own insecurities and like, “Oh, but I don’t have that! Oh, I’m fucked!” You know obviously, right? So, like think about a girl, a woman, who has all of these things that are wonderful, and she’s missing a few. She’s still wonderful, right? This is what science tells us women would prefer that you had these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s game over if you’re missing one.

Everybody is missing one, or two, or 500 of them. This is what the science says, just so we’re clear on how to create attraction. Try to raise all of these as much as you can. Social dominance is the next one on this list. Obviously, evolutionary times, if you are dominant in your social hierarchy, it would be a better mating strategy for her to mate with you than to mate with the weak guy who is going to end up getting bullied, and killed, and everything’s going to be taken away from him. And she and her offspring might be killed. Instead, it would’ve been better to be one of the concubines of the powerful guy, and that for most of homo sapiens history has been the case. It would be better to have part of the billion dollars than all of 100,000.

So, social dominance; if you’re able to be dominant over other people. Social alliances is very important. So guys who are very social and make friends easily, it’ll trigger an unconscious attraction in a woman because it is a good mating strategy to get with a guy who can make alliances easily. Because then you’ll probably be stronger, and survive better. Those who have higher social intelligence will generally be a lot more attractive.

Emotional health – if you’re a sobbing wreck all the time, she can’t rely on you. Same with mental health. If you’re a psycho, that’s really bad. You can just kill her and all your kids. She’s looking for a guy who is emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, and especially the emotional-mental health will come into play as the most important determinant. Because emotional-mental health will largely determine how good you are at relating to other people, and so on. The social stuff relies on the emotional-mental, but of course the physical is an important part, as guys know. Dirty boys. Ask yourself the same question, man. If you saw a girl who wasn’t that physically fit and everything, can you still be attracted to her? I hope you’re mature enough to say yes, it’s just pretty obvious, right?

What has evolution led women to want? Beyond all of those things, and if you’ve read any of evolutionary psychology, that would all be obvious to you or old hat. This one is a little bit more interesting, and this comes from anthropology. There’s a really great book on this that I’ve picked up again recently, it’s called Sapiens. I can’t remember the author’s name, it’s like a three-word name. But anyways, just Google or Amazon Search Sapiens. It describes the history of the homo sapiens. The first part is most relevant here, and it’s the evolution and behavior link.

There’s a thing called evolutionary lag, where we are evolved. Mutations enter into the system. If the mutation is advantageous to survival and replication, it gets passed on. Think of X-Men. If this mutant power is very effective, it’s going to fuck a lot more, produce a lot more babies, and it spreads. But it takes quite a long time for it to spread. Generally, it takes 100,000 years. Things are going to get sped up a lot more I think, or maybe slow down, I forgot the theory. But we are the product of an adaptation that was ideal, optimized, for the environment of 75,000 to 100,000 years ago.

This was just before the big ice age. Back then, we don’t know a whole lot about homo sapiens, but we do know that it wasn’t easy to accumulate resources. If you kill the saber-toothed tiger or whatever, you couldn’t keep it for very long. The meat would go bad even with the stomachs back then. They could probably stomach more, but you wouldn’t be able to stockpile the way billionaires can stockpile wheat now and oil. Back then, you can stockpile maybe a couple tigers and then that shit would go bad in a week. You got to go out and continually hunt for it.

There’s a lot more gathering than hunting back then. You could gather a whole bunch of vegetables. There could be a disparity. But back then, the research shows that there were so few homo sapiens in the world that there was never really a lack of resources. Nowadays, you look around your apartment, if you’re in a city, where are you going to scavenge for roots and stuff? You got to go to McDonalds or whatever you feel like.

But back then, it’s lush ecology all around and lots more animals. There’s a lot more riches of food. So there wasn’t a big disparity between one guy and another guy. There wasn’t a huge difference. Nowadays, there’s a gigantic difference between the richest man and the poorest man. But back then, it was pretty close, and you wouldn’t stockpile them. Most of the time, they probably weren’t wearing clothing very much, or maybe some skin of an animal. But most of the time, it was very basic and it’s not like you could flash your car, or your watch, and they didn’t even have refrigerators back then.

You didn’t have a house, we have like a cave or something. So usually, what’ll happen is, you’ll have a band of 12 to 15, or maybe 20 homo sapiens. They’re not going to just keep doing incest with each other, so you got to go out and meet other bands. What’ll happen is while they’re out gathering, hunting, a male will meet another female and be like hoo-hoo, huh-huh-huh, right? How does the girl decide whether to give up nine months to that guy? Or how does the guy decide whether he’s going to be – actually, you can probably tell how a guy decides whether he’s going to spring on her. But how does she decide whether to let it happen?

They didn’t have the typical things that people now have. It’s hard back then to tell whether he has a lot of resources because there weren’t that many resources to stockpile anyway. And on his person, it’s not like he can just show her his bank account. How does she decide? The females that evolved the ability to tell whether a guy has the skills to have social alliances, social dominance, mental and emotional health, were the ones who won.

Of course, they are also sizing you up visually, and they are smelling you. That’s not changed as far as you can tell. But in terms of figuring out whether he has the resources, emotional health, mental health, and the dominance, and social savvy and all that, she had to detect that through behavior. We get to the evolution behavior link. The females who could detect through behavioral cues, whether he was healthy emotionally and mentally, and whether he was dominant and socially savvy, were the ones who succeeded. They had to choose pretty quickly.

That’s what they had to go on 100,000 years ago. And females are still like that. Now, they are getting all confused with certain signs of wealth and resources. But what they are actually evolved to do is not to look for the car, the fancy car. They are not evolved to look for the bank account, or when you’re swiping on Tinder, it would just be a screenshot of your bank account instead. They’re not evolved to do that. That’s much further down. That wouldn’t have happened until about 12,000 years ago. We’re looking at 100,000 years ago. And back then, we didn’t have agriculture or any of that.

We may not have even had jewelry back then, or very, very basic jewelry. What she is looking for is how socially savvy is he, how emotionally mentally healthy is he, how dominant is he. Of course, they are looking for his physical fitness as well. That is all going to be through the behavior and the visual for the physical part. What is it exactly that they are looking for in the behavior? Modern studies now show status, resources and health, but status and resources are secondary to the mental and emotional resources, and the social intelligence to get the status and resources.

Women generally don’t fantasize over a lottery winner. A lottery winner is just as rich as the guy who earned that money, but they’re not like, “Oh yeah, the lottery winner, oh.” There’s not that much Harlequin Romances about the lottery winner. That’s just a great example, and if he’s like a third-generation trust fund kid, she’s not going to be turned on because he didn’t earn it. He’ll attract a lot of gold diggers, but it’s not going to be attraction. It’ll just be a rational calculation.

How could she tell whether he is going to be able to accumulate resources for her and her family, and to be able to accrue the status, to gain the status, by observing his behavior? What exactly is she observing in his behavior? She is looking for emotional independence. Emotional independence displays a lack of deference towards others. So if he is a weak male homo sapiens who cannot hunt very well for himself, cannot gather very well for himself. He will be deferring to other homo sapiens who can.

And so, he will be used to the submission and just as you see this in the primate world. And then the king, the Conor McGregor kind of walk, the silverback walk, his chin is up and he’s confident. She’s looking for that in his behavior, not just in his body language, but also the way he interacts with other males, the way he interacts with her, with confidence. You see women all say they want confidence, and that’s largely true. They want a confident man because confidence comes from being that emotionally independent person.

He’s not approval-seeking and he’s not desperate and begging. Those are all things that they’re evolved to be attracted to. If you want to attract her more, don’t fucking beg friendzoned boy. A lot of these guys friendzoned are like, “But let me make an argument.” They’ll write a long letter with all of these reasons why they are a good match. Fuck reasons. Hopefully by this point, you will realize that attraction is a feeling and an emotion. It is not something that you arrive at through rational argumentation.

What is the thing that’s so repellent to them? It’s codependent neediness. Four years ago, I used to teach neediness and I just left it there baldly, like neediness, there’s neediness and non-neediness. I’ve since learned over the three or four years that there are human needs that are very legitimate. We have a need, everyone, for a certain degree of security, of unpredictability, of significance, of love, of connection, of growth. We all have these needs. These are fine needs to have. You never want to get to the point where you don’t need anything, because then you’re just lying to yourself. We all need. We all have needs.

But there’s a level of need where it becomes neurotic, and I’m adopting here the term codependent. It’s a lot more complex than that. There’s a lot more clinical psychology to bring in here, but I’m just simplifying it for this video, for this presentation, that it’s a kind of codependent neediness that turns women off. The biggest factor in whether a woman is attracted to a man is the man’s perceived level of codependent neediness, whether she sees him as being needy. You can be codependent needy towards one woman and not towards another. There’s many women that you’re not codependent needy towards, the random people on the subway or whatever.

But that girl that you’re with, if you go codependent needy on her, it will repel her, it’s inversely proportional. How do you make sure that you’re not codependently needy? How do you make sure that you’re independent? I’m just going to rattle these off because these are the titles of entire other two hour classes. There’s values and principles, which is, as a note within that, I mean moral values, but I also mean emotions; which emotions are most important for you to experience. And that’s a really deep one about your own self-awareness, about what it takes for you to be happy, fulfilled, and so on.

Another one is boundaries. You need to know where your boundaries are in your life, you need to set those, and you also have to be clear about what your responsibilities are with other people. That’s another deep thing. And then of course, purpose and passion, and self-esteem. I’m just going to point those out here, but I can’t go into detail on any of those in this presentation. That’s how you get that independence. I’m going to change that slide from non-neediness, which is an empty term to independence.

How independence or emotional independence is manifested. So again, attraction is not a choice. How she feels towards you doesn’t matter about what reasons you can give her. You might be able to argue for your case that you’re not codependent needy. But if you’re behaving as a codependent needy person, she unconsciously will just be repelled by it, because attraction is not a choice. If you want to trigger attraction, you have to go at the emotional level, the feelings level. Screw this rational argumentation stuff.

If you want to create attraction, then avoid the factual and logical. As soon as you go factual and logical, you’re turning her into your friend. You’re turning her into your brother, into a debating partner. There’s not going to be any eros there, there’s no lust or passion there. If you want lust and passion, you got to go with emotions and feelings, because that’s what those are; lust and passion are emotions and feelings. Attraction is a feeling, attraction is an emotion.

Most guys, even when they get together, or I should say especially when guys get together, they completely avoid talking about feelings and emotions. It makes most men uncomfortable, and that’s why they suck. And that’s why most men can’t grow, because they’re not even aware of their own feelings. They don’t even have the fucking vocabulary to talk about their feelings. Feminine women exist in the emotional, in the sensory. When you’re speaking with a woman, you need to practice accessing the emotional side of you, but also talking about things in terms of emotions.

I’ll give a very easy, trivial example, but of course it gets a lot deeper. An easy surface example is, when you’re talking about travel, instead of talking about what you saw in Paris, and what time of year you went, or what weather you had there or whatever like, “First you do this, and then you do that, and then you do this”, and then you start rattling off like a lonely planet tour guide. Instead, talk about how it felt to be there, how it felt to be standing in the Louvre after reading about it for so long; how it felt to be looking at the Mona Lisa; how it felt to be standing under the Eiffel Tower, or to go up the Eiffel Tower; how it felt to be walking down the Champs-Élysées in the middle of the evening or whatever with a glass of wine in your hand.

How it felt. How does it feel? Focus on the feelings. That will get her in the sensory mode. Talk about them in terms of the sensory feelings of those. What did it taste like? How did the wind feel on your skin? Talk about the colors you saw. Just focus on that. Hopefully, you understand it’s not just factual and logical in the sense of a boring list of dry facts. That will never work. The easiest thing to do is just focus on how you felt and how she feels. In fact, everybody is interested in feelings.

For instance, if I want to get you interested in the conversation, I can ask your friend, “How’d he feel about that?” pointing at you. And you’re going to be, “What? What’s going on here?” Because everybody is interested in themselves. So she’ll talk about herself, but she’ll only open up to you specifically if she’s attracted to you. You need to also share about yourself. Just keep it equal. Just share your feelings, ask her how she felt and so forth. Feelings over thoughts if you want to create attraction.

If you just want to be friends, be in the friend zone, go for thoughts; how to be in the friend zone course. Just do the opposite of everything I’m teaching here. The other thing is, is evolutionary psychology has done a lot of surveys like asking women, “What do you like in a man?” And they’ll say the cliché things of status, health, and fitness. There’s a certain truth to that, in the rational prefrontal cortex they will say those things. But what they are actually reacting to is your behavior, because they’re trying to detect your mental emotional health and your social dominance and alliances.

What she’s going to be looking for is, instead of you saying you have lots of money, and a fancy car, and a fancy condo, and whatever, she’s going to be looking for your behavior. So if you’re dangling your Maserati keys around or showing, “This is my Lamborghini”, it’s not very attractive. It’s sort of douche baggy. It’s not very classy. It shows you’re putting too much into it. If it’s really not a big deal, you wouldn’t even talk about it. It’d be like, “Oh yeah, I have these jeans on, yeah, big deal.”

It’s a lot cooler and a lot more attractive if, for example, she’s really into you because you have some fun conversation. You make her laugh, another feeling. Make a lot humor is great for getting into the feelings. Humor, and then she’s talking about her feelings, and then you walk out to the parking lot and there’s your car, the valet brings it up and it’s some fancy expensive car. And you’re like, “Yeah, get in.” It’s not a big deal. And then she will be like, “Whoa, okay.” That’s the behavior of a man who has the resources and doesn’t think a big deal of them because he has them.

Demonstration over verbalization, always more important in creating attraction. Also, dominance and frame control. If you can hold your frame, she will sense that you are somebody who is socially dominant. However, the only attractive way to do this is to do it unconsciously. In other words, if you’re thinking, “Okay, now I’ve got a frame control”, you’re already fucked. Just like the guy who is like, “Okay, now I’m going to show off my car.” You’re fucked. Have these things, develop them, cultivate them, train them in yourself so that you have them naturally. You don’t need to have frame control, for example, with somebody that is a flat-earther; with somebody who believes that the sun revolves around the Earth.

Hopefully, if you’ve gone through high school science, you’re not going to have your frame shaken by a guy like that. He’s like, “But look, it’s flat!” Hopefully you’re not like, “Oh shit, is it flat? Maybe it was a conspiracy.” Now, your frame isn’t going to get thrown off because you believe it’s true. Your frame is only thrown off when you doubt whether it’s true, so the best thing to do is to know who you are, know what you’re about, and know those things very well, like self-awareness and emotional awareness, and you don’t need to bother with frame control.

But a way to analyze what’s actually happening is frame control. Like okay, now she’s challenging his frame, he holds to it because he believes it’s the truth and she’s attracted. That’s frame control, that’s dominance. And of course, a sense of humor. A sense of humor is great for a lot of different reasons. One, intelligence. You notice that the less intelligent people generally are laughing at physical humor, and that as you get higher in intelligence, generally, the jokes and the humor becomes more layered, subtle, and complex.

One of the last things that will happen if you do classical studies, like classical Chinese, is to learn the humor in the [INAUDIBLE 00:49:02], for instance, or the humor in some ancient text. You really understand, get to the heart of their culture. And so, intelligence is one. The other is – he doesn’t take himself too seriously, so he doesn’t feel like he’s not desperate and begging for approval. He doesn’t need approval from others. Remember what that means: he’s emotionally independent. He’s not needy. That’s another one.

Humor also shows not just intelligence and not just emotional independence, but also being articulate and quick verbally, shows a different kind of intelligence. I guess that’s still intelligence. There you go. Humor is good to have. Oh right, sorry, emotions. So when you’re laughing, you let your guard down and it creates trust. You’re able to bridge that trust gap with a person because they’ll only really have a hearty laugh with you if they trust you and they let their guard down, and you’re able to incite that emotion. Those are four things, right? Humor, it’s just awesome.

Get some humor training, whether that means you’re taking some improv comedy classes, or stand-up comedy, or you just study it. It’s very important for attraction and to be an attractive person. And just to have fun in life. Don’t take yourself so seriously, there’s too many neuroses going around. Alright, a little bit deeper into parasitic neediness. Let’s go to a deeper level. We’re leaving the evolutionary stuff, the paleoanthropology stuff, and now we’re going into the clinical psychology of it, trying to understand that codependent neediness.

In this context, I want to call it parasitic because that’s the relationship here. Men who need women to complete them end up using these women for their own emotional needs, to fill an emotional void in himself. That’s why it’s called parasitic. This is so much deeper. In fact, there’s a whole other course that I’ve created, that’s a year long, a multi-year course, called Awakenings. Where every week, I hop on a live show and I do a live show coaching call with the guys. And then we go deep into the clinical psychology of many things. But among those many things is this.

But just at a very basic level here, he’s looking to fill that emotional void in himself. A good resource on this is Glover’s book No More Mr. Nice Guy, I know a lot of you guys in here have read that, and he has a great term ‘looking to plug’. A man who is looking to plug his umbilical cord into a woman. I used to do a radio show and it was 70% women over 40 years old who were listening to it. And a lot of the call-ins were complaining that that guy that they’re seeing treats her like his mother. This was a common thing. I didn’t realize how common it was until I was on that regular radio show.

A healthy relationship can only be had between two individuals who are complete and full in themselves, in terms of being independent, they can meet their own needs; they don’t need those outside themselves to meet those needs, their emotional needs. They can meet their own needs. Here’s a great example, what I call ‘the epitome of neediness’, the “You Complete Me” thing, and it comes from this excellent book, Daniel Bergner’s What do Women Want? Some of it is quite controversial, and some of it is sloppy journalism, but it does report some very interesting findings that have been happening in sexology.

I’m just going to quote this at length here. “The seeking of a lover to embody these words; the pining for a love that will be unconditional; the search for a union that is absolute; the sense that our partners should give us what we were given, or what we believe we should have been given, by our parents; the craving for reassurance. “Tell me I’m special. Tell me I’m beautiful. Tell me I’m smart. Tell me I’m successful. Tell me you love me. Tell me it’s forever, no matter what, till death do us part.””

“These were scarcely more than a child’s cries, yet most of us could not bear to give up on these longings. Most of us could not stand to relinquish the yearning for someone to be our fulfillment, our affirmation. Because to turn away from such hope would be to acknowledge that we are, inescapably, navigating our lives alone, supported by love if we are lucky, but finally on our own.” And that is the growing up that most people do not do, because they cling to this. If you were feeling these things, you need coaching. You need therapy. You need to commit to a long-term practice of self-examination and self-awareness, because you will grow if you go through this; new realizations and new breakthroughs are preceded by the pits.

You got to enter into the hard stuff to earn the good stuff. Most people get stuck – it’s sort of like a video game, level two, when they don’t realize there’s level 20 and higher in the game, and they keep getting frustrated at level two because they are still at these level two needs. These are childhood neurosis or neurosis that began in childhood, and you need to grow through these. Again, there’s a course, Awakenings, where I go into detail on these. You can find out more about Awakenings in the Man Up Facebook group. Join the private Facebook group.

Next slide. Guys who are learning this also have difficulty understanding the difference between a lover and a provider. I see this distinction or this lack of understanding of this dichotomy confusing a lot of guys around the world, so just briefly on this. Women slot men into different categories. Generally, if you think about it as a ladder, it’s very difficult for a man to move up the ladder, it’s very easy for him to move down the latter. What does this ladder consist in? At the very bottom – I guess the very bottom is almost like a killer, but near the bottom is ‘rapist’, let’s say. If you raped her, that’s pretty bad.

And then let’s say above that, there is a stranger. A total stranger. She doesn’t know anything about you, neutral. And between that, there’s a lot more – this creepy guy. Let’s say this is rapist, and then creepy guy. So if you started out as a rapist, it’s going to be hard for you to move up to a mere creepy guy. You see how that works? But if you’re a creepy guy, it’s pretty easy to become a rapist, right? So rapist, creepy guy. And then creepy guy to neutral guy, she doesn’t even think about you, you’re just a stranger in the train. Notice how if you start out creepy, it’s pretty hard to go up to neutral now.

But neutral, it’s pretty easy to become creepy. Okay, so getting it; rapist, creepy, neutral guy/stranger. And then from stranger to acquaintance, and then acquaintance to a friend, and then friend to – there’s many grades in between here, like best friends and so on, but let’s say a provider; a guy who she would get into a relationship where she allows him to provide for her. There are grades of that, there’s like sugar daddy, but then there’s a husband who provides for the family, or maybe a husband who supports the family so she becomes a housewife – financially, though many housewives do a lot of work, but you get the idea, so a provider.

And then above provider, and this is the part that most guys don’t know – those are more intuitive – is lover. This is where guys get tripped up, and this is part of the whole reason I’m making this video. They don’t understand how “I’m providing for her. I’ve sacrificed so much. I’ve given her everything, yet she still wants to fuck that guy” or whatever. A woman that you love, that you’ve loved for three, five, ten years, could’ve given you everything, you would really love her. But when you haven’t had sex in a long time and that porn’s right there, you just jerk.

That happens, you as a man understand that. I’m hoping to connect with you on that one. Women are the same way. It’s easy for a guy that she goes to fuck to become a provider, because all he’s got to do is add some money to it. And then actually above lover is the guy she pays, so she becomes sugar mama to him or supports him, and the only value he needs to provide is his dick. He provides sexual value purely, and she’ll pay for that. That’s a level above. And then there’s more, there’s pimp and so on. She’ll fuck other guys and give him all the money. Let’s not go there.

But there’s lover and provider. Now, it’s hard, like I said, to go up the ladder. It’s very easy to move down the ladder. So a lot of guys are coming in at provider zone. You see this from the non-Westerners in the Man Up group who are like, “How do I ask her to be my girlfriend?” It’s almost like proposing to her, and they haven’t even dated yet. Like he’s proposing to be the boyfriend. It’s crazy. And basically, what he’s doing, is he’s coming in at friend zone, trying to move up to provider, but hoping to be a lover because he wants the sex. That’s like a rapist trying to become a stranger. That’s how hard it is.

If you’re in damage control, you’re stuck in friend zone or whatever, there’s a whole course on that for you in the Man Up primer. Hope is not completely lost. There’s five strategies I’ve pointed out there, three primary ones, and you can get that in the Man Up primer which is free in the Man Up Facebook group. So, you got to join the Facebook group to get that free video course – but that’s in there. So you can get out of there, but you’re in damage control. The better thing would have been to, the best practice is to come in as a lover, and if you want to, be a provider. That’s how it works.

The passion and the lust is harder to create because it’s fickle. And for most people, they have no idea how it comes and goes. They have no clue. It’s like a ghost. Was that a good analogy? It’s like a spirit they don’t know where it comes from and how it goes. Whereas commitment is like – “Okay, it’s a rational decision I’m going to make.” But lust is not. Eros isn’t. Well, depending on what you mean by eros but lust and passion are not. Lust and passion come about through the unconscious. The unconscious mind through triggering certain emotions. Those are the emotions that are triggered; lust and passion.

And those, you got to aim for that. It’s easy then if you spend enough time with each other, and take her needs into account, and in a certain way, put them above yours, then you will be connected. You will have that love connection. The harder part is creating the passion when it wasn’t there to begin with. And how do you do that? I told you all of the scientific evidence and research for what women want or attracted to in men. The more of those you have, the easier it will be for you to attract the woman you want.

But also, if you come in and you provide sexual value from the get, from the beginning, then you can go down all you want. You probably don’t want to go too far down, but you can go down and you can incorporate lower rungs of the ladder. Just a point here, traits, take priority over tangible signs. I think I’ve covered that quite a bit in the issue about wealth. One interesting case to encapsulate this difference between the lover and the provider is the rich man versus the pool boy. It’s a great way to describe companionate versus sexual attraction.

The rich man, maybe at the beginning, who is very sexy and all of this – but if you are rich, you are working. Well, mostly. You have to work to create that amount of money to be rich. And if you did all of that, when you retire, you probably won’t sit on the beach and do nothing. If you’re the type of guy to create an empire, your mind is going to be restless. In other words, you’re going to be out of the house, making deals or doing work, or whatever. And if you just got a girl because she’s hot or she’s ‘intelligent’. Every guy wants an intelligent woman, but he actually is not attracted to her. The science shows that he’s intimidated by truly intelligent women.

On paper, he wants an intelligent woman, that’s why he never believed the paper shit, look at what they do, but whatever. He wants a girl who is just going to stay home. And then when he comes home, sucks his dick, right? That’s what he wants. He doesn’t really care what she does when he’s out of the house. So he comes home late at night, because he is working hard for a purpose, right? And she’s the bored housewife. Now, if she is ruled by emotion, then when the pool boy comes to clean the pool and he is topless, a young man, ripped abs, and his value is primarily sexual, there’s no resources value there, she might hook up with that guy because he provides sexual value, cheating on the rich man for it because the rich man provides the provider value.

Now, who is going to get hurt more in that situation? Is the pool boy going to be like, “Hey, fuck this man. You married that guy and you fucked me? I want everything.” No, he’s going to be like, “Hehehe, I got her. Look what I got away with.” How do I know this? Because I know a lot of guys who do that kind of shit. And the rich man, is he going to feel happy about this? He’d be like, “Oh good, then I don’t have to do the sex stuff. I’ll outsource it to that guy.” Hell no. He’s going to be like, “Fucking bitch, whore, I did all this, I sacrificed all this, I gave her everything and she cheated on me.” That’s a disparity. That’s why we say the lover is actually in a stronger position than the provider, even though he ain’t got that money per se in that situation.

Though you can also be the rich man who doesn’t provide, and there a lot of cases of that, the rich man who doesn’t pay for the mistress. In that case, if the rich man – pool boy is more stark because the pool boy doesn’t have those resources, but he gets what the rich man wants. The rich man gets slotted into provider, the pool boy is lover, and that’s a problem there.

Power, first impressions. So how she slots you in, a big part of it happens in the first impression. How quickly are first impressions created, guys? Something like three seconds or less, a split-second judgment, and there’s a lot of research on this. They’ve done research on presidential candidates, muting the sound, get a split-second decision who is going to win. They’ve done the same sort of thing with university professors teaching, a lot of things, and you as a man know when you’re scrolling through that nasty ass porn, you ain’t taking more than three seconds in the site whether you want to pause or press play on that shit.

You look and then bang, right? Women, too. They look and they judge whether you’re, “Uh, a creepy, weird guy. Let’s get away.” They don’t look and calculate, “Okay, it’s because…” They’re not Sherlock Holmes and like, “Okay, because of the nape of his…” It’s just an immediate reaction. That’s why the fundamentals are so important, the body language, the eye contact, the tonality, the fashion. But most of all, the behavior; the way you hold yourself; the way you interact with others. Human beings pick up on that and have been evolved – we as homo sapiens, have evolved the ability just for survival and replication to judge split-second whether somebody has the attractive character traits that we’re looking for.

Just to end off, give a little how-to kind of stuff for the guys who are… Maybe all of that stuff was too deep and heavy for you, but everybody likes them how-to. A question I get asked all the time, which is easy to dispatch here in this context, “How do I know whether she likes me?” Alright, there’s some very basic things to look for. I break it down into two categories: physical and verbal. I’m just going to rattle these off. There are all kinds of other behaviors she likes. If she gives her kidney to you, it’s probably a sign she loves you.

But there are other, less dramatic things. Physical; if she’s preening near you or especially if she’s preening while looking at you, which means it’s unconscious, which just means she’s making herself look pretty. That could just be stroking the hair, it could be straightening her dress, it could be whatever. And by the way, just as another caveat for people who don’t think very well, but this is for intelligent men. Obviously, these are not 100%. But the more of these signs that are present, the greater the chances that she’s attracted to you. That’s all that is, it’s probabilities. There are some girls who might just be fucking OCD and don’t like that fucking thing, and they’re dressed so they can straighten it out, right?

But many times, preening is a sign that she’s trying to make herself look pretty unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, doing her lipstick when you’re away, or near you, or whatever; straighten her up, making sure she looks pretty, that’s a sign. Proximity: if she’s near you and getting closer to you, that’s a good sign that she likes you. If she’s facing you, directionality. If she’s making eye contact with you, or in some more conservative societies like in Asia, if she’s looking down, which is a sign of submission; looking towards you or down.

If she’s looking away or up, or to the side, that’s generally not a good sign of eye contact. If she’s looking right in your eyes or looking down. If she’s touching you, if she’s touching herself, all good things. If she’s following you, following you around from place to place, good sign. And then of course, the scientific signs of arousal, which TV shows like Lie to Me and in like the FBI and CIA, they look for this stuff, because they are very hard to fake, which are: dilating pupils, increased heart rate. There are other kinds of signs, like if she’s wet down there.

“Hold on, are you attracted to me? Oh yeah.” But those are scientific markers, like in scientific studies, to know whether she is aroused. There are probably others, but generally to the naked eye, you’re not going to be able to see these things very easily, so just don’t worry about them too much. And then verbal; if she’s agreeing with you, that’s usually a good sign. Especially if she changes her mind in order to agree with you, like if he contradicts her and she says, “Oh yeah, actually, you’re right.” That’s usually a good sign.

If she’s reacting to you, that could be negative or positive reaction. It doesn’t really matter. Just the fact that she’s reacting to you at all is a good sign that she’s into you. So some mentally unstable women, maybe very passionate women, like to argue. And maybe they have a worthiness problem, so they like to lash out. That can be fine, that’s actually a sign that you’re getting under her skin. She’d only allow you to get under her skin if she liked you, and you would’ve learned this if you were good with women at seven years old.

Excitability, if she’s like, “Oh my god!” or giggly. That’s a good sign. If she gives you attention. If she doesn’t give you attention, that’s a very bad sign. But if she gives you attention, that’s a good sign. If she asks you questions, anybody who asks you questions is a good sign. However, don’t get on a question train when she asks you more than two questions in a row and you just answer. That will kill attraction simply because she ends up being the interrogator.

If she’s contributing to the conversation. Try to get her to talk as much as possible. Don’t interrupt her, as a general rule of thumb. That’ll be like kicking a puppy in the face. If you want to have a good conversation with a woman, you want her to contribute. You want her to open up and talk. So, let her do that as much as possible. And vulnerability, which means she opens up and tells you secrets or tells you things that are more personal than you’d expect when two people first meet.

Okay, I got one slide here on life purpose. I’m just going to read it out because this is already quite a long video here, but there’s a lot more to be said here. I’m leaving this to the end because I want to leave you with something about how to become more emotionally independent. I’ve gone over the repercussions of being codependent, then how do I get away from being codependent and become independent? Life purpose is a really important part of it.

Now, life purpose sounds really too big. The purpose of your life at this moment, at this time, which will change as your life evolves – but there’s a great book by David Deida called The Way of the Superior Man, and what he says there is very good. He’s got a lot of chapters on purpose. That’s just a starting point, by the way. It’s not the end all and be all, please. It’s just the first book. There are tons of books, tons of resources on life purpose, and it just continues, more and more getting published every year that are very, very good.

David Deida puts it quite well: “A man’s purpose will be his guiding light through the challenges of life and love.” And it should be a purpose that is besides women. So if you make women or finding that one your purpose, you’re not going to be an attractive male. You’re not going to be an emotionally independent male. You won’t be attractive to women, feminine women I should say. “Self-fulfillment rests in finding those things that bring you pleasure and excelling in them.” Actually, there’s a lot more to be said on this as well, self-esteem and all of this, but that’s a good way to start.

So if you understand what flow means, it’s a term from the 90s and it’s now a huge industry, you could say, or a huge field: the psychology of peak performance. And flow is one of the only voluntary activities we can do that will guarantee us happiness and fulfillment. So maximize flow experiences throughout the day. That will help you to be fulfilled. It’s basically like following your passion and doing that. Following your passion may not bring you money, though, so depending on how good you are at that passion.

Maybe you’ll have to do something else for your day job that at least you like, and then you have your passion on the weekends, or at night, or whatever. It’s important for you to be living a passionate life, and a life that has purpose beyond just yourself, beyond just meeting your animal needs of sex, food, sleep, and shitting. There’s something deeper to your life, there’s a greater purpose to it. If you do those things, you will be emotionally independent because you will be meeting your own needs.

To recap what I’ve covered in this video, in this presentation. What the science tells us about attraction versus love, and then I went into detail on that difference. I looked in detail on what evolutionary psychology tells us about attraction, female to male attraction. I went into codependent neediness and parasitic neediness. I went into the difference between the lover and the provider and the different categories, and then I went into life purpose and how to tell whether a girl likes you.

But I want to put out a caveat here. This is really good feel-good stuff, find flow, find happiness, find purpose. But if you don’t have social skills or if your social intelligence is bad, you’re still not going to have a wide variety or a lot of options when it comes to dating opportunities. You still need to bone up on these skills of how to talk to people. Once it’s less of emotional baggage, if you don’t bring in all of this emotional immaturity to it, and it’s purely a skillset that you just need to learn, then it’ll be much faster, much easier to do in developing social intelligence. It is something you can develop and it is something you can learn, that anybody can learn and get better at.

It’s conversational skills, calibration in conversation; those are skills that can be learned, and you need to learn them if you want to get good at flirting, and have more opportunities with women. But it’s important to lay that foundation of self-fulfillment first, and then emotional independence, because then the learning of the skills is a lot faster and easier. Share this video if you liked it and make sure that you join the private Facebook group for more free courses inside that group. I’ll see you inside the group. Until then, Man Up!